#21st-century — Public Fediverse posts

🐦🤪 Ah, the quintessential 21st-century dilemma: wanting to read an article about #AI, but first, you must prove you're smarter than a toaster by allowing #cookies and JavaScript. Because nothing says cutting-edge tech like a good ol' #CAPTCHA challenge. 🔐🍪
https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/stochastic-parrots-frequently-unasked-questions-49c2e7d22d11 #Dilemma #TechChallenges #21stCentury #HackerNews #ngated

🙄 Wow, can you believe it? The Salt Lake Tribune finally realized that in the era of free content, nobody wants to pay for their news. 🎉 "Victory" declared: they've removed the paywall and are proudly joining the 21st century... only a few decades late. 🚀
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2026/05/12/just-days-tribune-reporting/ #SaltLakeTribune #PaywallRemoved #FreeContent #NewsIndustry #21stCentury #HackerNews #ngated

Book Review: Blank Space by W. David Marx

Author: W. David Marx
Title: Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
Narrator: Frits Zernike
Publication Info: Books on Tape, 2025
Summary/Review:

Living in a college town, I often find myself in crowds of students and noticing that they dress pretty much the same as when I was in college in the early 1990s. With some exceptions like the rise of athleisure making yoga pants casual wear, the everyday fashions of young adults was frozen 30 years ago.  Which is strange, because of you look at photos of young adults from the 1920s to 1990s, the fashions vary widely between decades and even within a decade.  Similarly, the 20th Century saw the emergence of new musical styles every few years but arguably no new genres have been born since the 1980s.  This is not to say there isn’t good music, and a lot of artists are doing interesting things across genres, but a lot of pop songs from 2025 sound like they could’ve been released in 2000 and vice versa.

I was hoping this book would give me some insight into this flattening of culture.  My experience is that this book is a good if sometimes exhausting litany of twenty-five years of pop culture, a litany of music, fashion, reality TV, and internet culture.  But I don’t find myself always agreeing with Marx’s analysis of what created this culture.  He does make a good point about artists being omnivores, thus the creative mashups and remixes of existing culture.  But he also calls 21st century culture a “monoculture” when I find that cultural touchpoints are actually more fractured than in the 20th century. His examples of monoculture include frequent references to things I’ve never even heard of, like the Bathing Apes clothing line.  I suppose though that it is harder for niche cultures to remain niche thus not allowing subcultures to persist.

The book is very depressing in its analysis, particularly charging the millennial generation with compromising with consumerism (a harsh analysis in my view).  He frequently cites the philosophical battle of poptomism versus rockism.  Now I previously understood poptomism as appreciating that popular music, even silly love songs, can still be good art while rockism insisted only white dudes with guitars were worth listening.  But according to Marx, rockists are artists with ____ values who don’t sell out, while poptomism is assigning value to pop cultural artifacts solely based on their financial success.  Marx also chronicles how right wing politics evolved within this cultural milieu.  Conservatives when from “stuffed shirts” to selling themselves as cool and transgressive, an unfortunately successful counter-counter-culture in some sectors of society.

Overall, I think there’s a lot of interesting details in this book that can provoke further discussion even if I’m not always on the same page as Marx. In the introduction, Marx admits that his observations are limited to the United States and the fields of his specialties.  But even within that framework, there’s a lot more to be said about 21st century culture than can fit in a single narrative.

Recommended books:

• Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh
• How Music Works by David Byrne
• Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida

Rating: ***

🚀 Wow, Lone Lisp now has generators! Because delimited continuations were just *too mainstream* 🙄. The language finally joins the 21st century, boasting its own "specialized coroutines" that sound like they were named by a group of sleep-deprived grad students. Who knew Lisp could be so... cutting-edge? 😂
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/generators-in-lone-lisp #LoneLisp #Generators #Coroutines #21stCentury #CuttingEdge #HackerNews #ngated

I'm trapped in the #21stcentury. I've been here long enough to get used to things, though. In fact, I just want to learn about 21st century #ai. That includes #llms, other forms of #generativeai, and related topics.

I obviously have zero background in the subject matter beyond reading blog posts. Artificial intelligence intrudes in my life a lot. I'd like to understand as much as possible about those changes, despite my limitations.

On my website (https://cathymarkova.com), I'm sharing how my perspective changes. I'm also exploring the #vtuber concept, but I'm unsure about compatibility. I really enjoy #midcentury aesthetics, of course. From the 2020s, I enjoy #lofi, #kpop and #kdrama, #vibecoding, writing #fanfic at times.