#maxread — Public Fediverse posts

So many good ideas in this conversation between John Ganz and Max Read about libertarian ideas, Italian futurism, cosmopolitanism, urbanism and politics. Genial, witty, recommended commentary on Peter Thiel, who was interviewed by Ross Douthat, and Zohran Mamdani who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York.
#JohnGanz #MaxRead #Thiel #steelmaning #ZohranMamdani #urbanism
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnganz/p/talking-thiel-and-zohran-with-max?r=ct3l&utm_medium=ios

"'Dead Internet' is not an inevitable outcome of the various technologies in question--generative A.I. among them--but a condition brought about by the particular arrangement of money and business models." #MaxRead https://maxread.substack.com/p/were-in-our-slop-era

“the real reason I pony up is for a quality beyond straightforward ‘utility,’ a quality I usually refer to as ‘Doesn’t Make Me Wish I Was Dead.’” #MaxRead https://maxread.substack.com/p/why-would-anyone-subscribe-to-a-social

I'm late to this, but a very good round-up on l'affaire SVB by @maxbsawicky https://maxread.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-silicon-valley-bank

EDIT: OMG did I get this wrong! This is not by @maxbsawicky but by a person named Max Read (which I think used to be the name of Max Sawicky's blog!)

I so apologize to the real Max Read! #MaxRead

"Ultimately, the targeted use of disinformation as a political tactic will be to destroy public trust at scale, as voters are confronted again and again with campaigns refracted through social media platforms awash with sketchy news sources and fake accounts (and a legacy media apparatus unfortunately beholden to those same platforms)."

- #MaxRead, 2019

"The story ... follows an election for the hospital board in the central-California town of Tulare ... To ensure Kumar’s victory, Benzeevi engaged Psy-Group, a private intelligence company based out of Tel Aviv, staffed by ex-Mossad agents, and specializing in 'covertly spreading messages to influence what people believed and how they behaved'."

- #MaxRead, 2019

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/what-and-who-should-we-be-afraid-of-on-social-media.html

#SocialMedia #PsyGroup

Pick one Max, it can't be both.

"Platforms can be powerful democratizing tools, but the processes by which decisions are (or aren’t) made are on every level intentionally opaque."

- #MaxRead, 2018

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/why-pewdiepies-anti-semitic-youtube-jokes-dont-hurt-him.html

#SocialMedia

"An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number ... of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up."

- #MaxRead, 2018

"If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a 'click farm': hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app."

- #MaxRead, 2018

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

#ClickFarm #TheInversion #Inversion