— And here is the trailer for “SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” Questlove’s documentary film about Sly Stone.
Posts from January 2025
Wednesday, 29 January 2025
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
— This mashup of SNL musical guests, that acts as the intro to Questlove’s upcoming documentary, is brilliant. Can’t wait to watch the whole thing now.
— Stimulation Clicker is a fun new app by digital artist Neal Agarwal. This one grabs your attention and magically sucks you in. You keep playing the game, clicking the button, engaging with everything presented to you. The more attention you pay, the more useless features the app will add until it becomes a completely pointless mess of videos, sound, and things flying around. And before you know it, you’ve spent thirty minutes on the site and accomplished absolutely nothing. Just like most websites today.
Sunday, 26 January 2025
Are We Demonising Data Collection, or Data Exploitation?
— Towards the end of The Gutenberg Parenthesis—in which Jeff Jarvis argues that the internet is too new a medium for us to understand its long-term social impact—he writes:
I worry that we demonize data and regulate its collection more that its exploitation, we might cut ourselves off from the knowledge that can result.
People don’t oppose data collection per se. They oppose data collection as a means to further the agenda of tech-oligarch owned businesses. As such we need to differentiate what data is being collected and more importantly why it is collected.
Is the data collected to build comprehensive psychograms of every user, what they read and for how long, what links they click, and what they share; with goal of extending their stay within walled-garden websites and to sell more advertising and thus to make more money for stake holders? Is the data collected to train AI models to eventually replace salaried humans in creative vocations with to make more money for stake holders? Or is this data collected to study human behaviour, to archive the current cultural, political or technological discourse, so humanity can learn from it now and in future generations.
When we’re discussing intrusive data collection and how to reign it in, we’re not talking about a bunch of scientists trying to understand current and historic events mediated through social media similar to how climatologists drill ice cores into the antarctic shelf to understand the composition the atmosphere throughout history. We’re talking about greedy and morally bankrupt business owners who collect data to manipulate, to deceive, and frankly steal, just to make a buck.
Herein lies the difference.
We don’t live in medieval Florence where the arrival of a new medium led to an explosion of new ideas that few people with power rightly perceive as a threat to their power, and where the better idea eventually prevails. No, we live in a world where greedy billionaires actively curate algorithms so they push engaging but false divisive content on millions of people to sell ads, and more recently to advance their midlife-crisis driven political agendas.
The data is currently collected by the wrong people, those that can afford extensive hardware to store everything that is being said and done online for eternity. But open APIs that allows access to the data are a thing of the past so the data ends up on closed silos, where it’s useful to few but useless to the majority of society now and in the future.
— A web page that uses every HTML element doubles as a comprehensive reference and learning guide.
Saturday, 25 January 2025
— Questlove on his upcoming documentary on the history of music on Saturday Night Live:
The whole experience is the same as “Summer of Soul.” At first, I said, “Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it.” But I’m not at the place where I’m ready to say: “OK, here’s what you asked for. Where’s my money?” I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.
Funding member of groundbreaking hip-hop group The Roots, member of the Soulquarians, Fallon’s in-house band (neglectable), author of books on music history and creativity and music-history documentary film maker. Questlove is manifesting himself as one of the most important and influential cultural icons of our times.
— Social Networks, Not Social Media. Tom Watson:
Glass may look similar to other services on the surface (there are conventions), but it’s built on fundamentally different principles. For one, we don’t have follower counts. In fact, we don’t show counts at all. When you appreciate a photo, it’s not a performative act broadcast to the larger network; it’s a private acknowledgment to the creator. We emphasize comments and discussion, modeling thoughtful engagement through design and community norms.
I joined Glass a couple of months ago and I found a community with profound love or photography. I believe this community gathers on Glass because photography is front and centre in the app’s design, instead of attention-grabbing design patterns you’ll find on literally any other platform. Glass is a very rare exception in the landscape, one well worth supporting.
Friday, 24 January 2025
Hockney
— Sometimes when you lack inspiration or motivation, all you need is to watch someone as influential as David Hockney create art from everyday scenes and you want instantly pick up your camera, go out and make photos, just for the sake of it.
(2014) Director: Randall Wright. Cast: David Hockney, Arthur Lambert, Colin Self.
— An “Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots” is what we need right now.
It’s also sort of an art work, just me unleashing shear unadulterated rage at how things are going. I was just sick and tired of how the internet is evolving into a money extraction panopticon, how the world as a whole is slipping into fascism and oligarchs are calling all the shots - and it’s gotten bad enough we can’t boycott or vote our way out, we have to start causing real pain to those above for any change to occur.
A true act of rebellion. Love every bit of it.
Wednesday, 22 January 2025
The Golden Glove
— This is an immensely disturbing horror. But it’s also a portrait of a man from the fringe of society who has never experienced affection, compassion or love, who finds himself day in and day out drinking in the company of other lonely people.
(2019) Director/Screenplay: Fatih Akin. Cast: Jonas Dassler, Margarethe Tiesel, Greta Sophie Schmidt.
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
— Hip hop producer Madlib has lost his home and record collection during the LA wild fires. These records were the very essence of Madlib’s production, it’s a massive loss for him personally but also culturally. Just image the music that will never see the light of day because the samples are lost forever.
— Scientists estimate that speed of information flowing through the brain is just 10bps. Yet everyday, instead of making software better, more stable and reliable, droves of skilled software engineers spend hours reinventing the wheel, trying to make website transitions 10 milliseconds faster or adding minuscule animations.