“Metaverse” means “pivot to video”

Fool me twice, we don’t get fooled again.

“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to note the effect — added a touch here and there — criticised the effect again — Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

In 2003, a 19-year-old Harvard undergrad named Mark Zuckerberg had an idea: he’d create a website for Harvard students to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of their classmates. He called it Facemash.

Later that year, Zuckerberg changed the name of the site to The Facebook, and, in 2005, the site was renamed, simply, “Facebook.”

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Pluralistic: The antitrust Twilight Zone (16 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face (15 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: This "inflation" is different (14 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: Orphaned neurological implants (12 Dec 2022)


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Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers

He was a dick.

A statue of Plato with a Greek temple behind him. Plato has been tinted blue and out of his eyes glare the hostile red eyes of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The temple behind him has been tinted dark red. Part of the temple’s facade has been replaced with the Matrix ‘Code Waterfall’ graphic.
Cryteria/CC BY 3.0 (modified)

In The Reactionary Mind, political scientist Corey Robin articulates a common thread that runs through all right-wing ideology. Robin starts from the observation that “conservatives” are a coalition of people who believe irreconcilable things:

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Pluralistic: Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech (10 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: One weird trick to make monopolies self-destruct (08 Dec 2022)


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Pluralistic: EU to Facebook, 'Drop Dead' (07 Dec 2022)


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