Ben Werdmuller - Ben Werdmuller (Page 19)

Culture

Experimental Playgrounds

[Adrian Hon] I was today years old when I learned the original meaning of an "adventure playground": "The post-war period saw “junk playgrounds” flourish as a kind of reparations for the trauma of war. They gave children the freedom to build, explore, experiment, and role play – and

Technology

How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms

[Ross Douthat and Marc Andreessen in The New York Times] This podcast conversation with Marc Andreessen is very revealing. It's particularly fascinating to me that what I experienced as "America finally having a much-needed moral awakening" presented to people like Andreessen as "radical Marxism"

Technology

TikTok’s “cute winter boots” meaning explained

[Taylor Lorenz at UserMag] This is like something from a cyberpunk novel: "The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It's a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users

In the face of this, who do you want to be?

I was out buying eggs when I saw a video of Elon Musk giving a Hitler salute at the inauguration. In the movies, this stuff is highlighted and separated: punctuation in itself instead of an event that you see in the background of your everyday life. Hannah Arendt talked about

Seeking trans-friendly employers who sponsor visas

Nobody should have to move to another country to be themselves. However, I’ve spoken to multiple people who feel they need to move away from the US in order to avoid harms caused by the new administration’s executive orders that target trans people. Exactly how to do this

The next four years

The last time this man was in power we wound up with one of the largest civil rights movements ever conducted in the United States. There is so much light; so much bravery; so much fairness and equity and rebellion in so many. Those are the people I believe in.

Technology

Rogan Misses The Mark: How Zuck’s Misdirection On Gov’t Pressure Goes Unchallenged

[Mike Masnick at TechDirt] On Zuckerberg's claims about why he's changing Meta's fact-changing policy: "If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck

Notable links

America Is No Longer the Home of the Free Internet

[Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic] I completely agree with the points Ethan makes here. The TikTok ban was a spectacular own-goal for all kinds of reasons. In particular: "[...] This is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the

So how, exactly, did blogging help my career?

I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how. The arc

Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption

[Matthew Green] I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI: "[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot

I'm very interested to see how this plays out.

Notable links

‘The Interview’: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done

[David Marchese in The New York Times] This profile of Curtis Yarvin in the New York Times (paywalled, probably for the best) is far softer than it should have been, with far less formal fact-checking. It is of the moment, though: this guy’s writing is highly influential to the

See all