computers-R-stupid

youth culture: login required

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Simon Reynolds: "Boiler Room has launched a new platform - 4:3 - dedicated to a wide range of underground film, video art, documentary, and found footage, connected by themes of 'performance, identity, youth culture and anti-establishment.'" Don your hoodie and login with Facebook, or create an account, because they, like, need your data before you can experience, like, youth culture, and be all anti-establishment and shit.

boilerroom4-3egalitarian

Update: Reader SG sent instructions on how to remove the "annoying login overlay" in Firefox and view the page normally. As SG points out, "Of course, it's hardly worth it, since all you get out of it is access to a youtube playlist.* And clicking on one of the videos will open a new page with the overlay you have to turn off again." SG also notes -- commenting on Simon Reynolds' statement that "Boiler Room has launched a new platform":

Remember when Platform launched Boiler Room? I mean, Boiler Room used to be part of a British site called Platform. [Link to web archive page from 2010]

Thanks, SG.

*with mini-commentaries from Simon Reynolds that require additional clicks or taps to expand --tm

kobo's infernal bargain

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For the small minority who like reading books on e-ink readers and don't want to use Kindle, options are shrinking.
"Why buy ebooks?" a smug millennial asks. To support the authors, of course. A pittance from a publisher is more than they'll get from a torrent.
Kobo, the Canadian e-book company, has been the Kindle-alternative-of-choice for the past couple of years. They manufacture the e-reader hardware and also offer a selection of books in epub format. (Adobe DRM'd, but that can be, um, dealt with; also DRM-free, which they sell but stopped flagging in search a few years ago.)
Apparently Kobo has been struggling, though. First they merged with a Japanese company, Rakuten, and now Rakuten Kobo is "partnering" with Walmart, the Bezos of the Arkansas hills. Simply pathetic.

about those social media purges (2)

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Counterpunch's Jeffrey St. Clair writes: "The lesson the Left should take from the Jones Affair is that if you’re organizing on Social Media platforms you’re building movement on a trapdoor that will open beneath your feet the moment you become a threat."

Counterpunch has a Twitter page and uses Facebook for comments (uggh) but continues to be hosted and funded independently of those platforms, so St. Clair isn't being entirely hypocritical here. Quitting Facebook ahead of being kicked off would be a nice gesture, though.

about those social media purges

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Selective banning of voices that are "too far left" or "too far right" on Twitter, Facebook, etc wouldn't matter at all, except the citizenry has allowed these social platforms to grow so large they've become synonymous with culture and politics.
Ecosystems need biological diversity and the same is true of publishing.
An infrastructure of independent web hosting, self-publishing, even search still exists outside the Google/Facebook/Apple/Amazon borg.
Use it! That is all.