Dec
21
2018

URLs du Jour

2018-12-21

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  • At Quillette, Allen Farrington writes what sounds as if it could be the kickoff for a young adult book series: PewDiePie's Battle for the Soul of the Internet.

    This is a story about the question of who holds power over what we can say, hear, watch and read on the internet—an increasingly urgent issue that many ordinary people have cause to think about every day. And yet the protagonist in this story, the man whose fate symbolizes the future of social media and the corporate web that controls it, is unknown to the vast majority of educated readers.

    That man is PewDiePie, a Swedish comedian whose real name is Felix Kjellberg. With 77-million subscribers, he has the most popular YouTube channel in the world. Within YouTube’s video subculture, he is regarded as a true celebrity—a sort of Joe Rogan, Kanye West and Ben Shapiro all rolled into one. As of this writing, PewDiePie is closing in on 20-billion total views—roughly equivalent to three views for every human on the planet.

    I don't watch PewDiePie (or YouTube much at all), but Allen describes how a combination of Vox and YouTube is trying to crush him. But there's a further interesting point:

    Here, I am getting into an argument that is made better elsewhere—specifically, that this kind of power hoarding exists only because of insufficiently farsighted design of the early web. Were there a public protocol that allowed video to be shared as easily as hypertext, there would be no need for YouTube. Were HTTP sufficiently robust to handle two-way links, there might not be a need for Google. Were there a public protocol for identity, Facebook might be extraneous. And were there a public protocol for value exchange, there would be no need for content that is almost exclusively monetized by advertising—a development that has ushered in a risk-averse ad-driven corporate culture with its attendant censorship and house politics.

    Bring on what people are calling the "Great Decentralization"!

  • David Harsany updates us: The State Of Colorado Is Still Trying To Destroy Jack Phillips.

    In 2016, I wrote about Colorado’s crusade to destroy Jack Phillips’ business over a thought crime. The state’s Civil Rights Commission had bored into Phillips’ soul and established that his refusal to create a specialty cake for a same-sex couple was driven by his personal animosity towards gay customers rather than his Christian faith.

    Unelected officials began fining Phillips in an effort to put him out of business for being a Christian. I wrote about the case numerous times, and every time I was assured that his actions had nothing to do with “religious liberty” — a term almost always placed within quotation marks to intimate that it was a bogus concern. I was assured that it was constitutionally acceptable for a gay couple to force a man to create art that undermined his faith. I was assured the case against him would be a slam dunk for Colorado

    Try to find the uncivil behavior in this case.

  • And Veronique de Rugy points out, regrettably, that we're still on the road to fiscal insanity: A Deficit-Happy Government May Lead to a Debt-Driven Financial Crisis.

    There are milestones you celebrate: a kid's first step, a round-numbered birthday, a marriage anniversary. And then there are the milestones you dread: Reaching $22 trillion in national debt is one of them. We're slated to reach that number next month, yet nobody seems to care.

    The $22 trillion figure we'll soon hit is the total of $16 trillion in public debt (what the government owes to domestic and foreign investors) and $5.8 trillion in intra-governmental debt (the money it owes to other government accounts like Social Security). No matter how you look at it, it's by far the highest level of debt Uncle Sam has accumulated in peacetime. It's also shocking, considering the economy is growing faster than it has for a while. Even worse, there's no end of that red ink in sight.

    I am sad for my kids, who'll have to live with the repercussions of this irresponsibility, and a little ashamed that it's (mostly) my generation that decided to kick the fiscal can down the road.

  • The Christmas season doesn't seem to have put Kristen Schaal in a good mood, judging from her Tweet.

    But that did get me thinking whether the obvious next step in entertainment industry awokeness might be gaining popularity. Alas, all I could find was a Fortune article from March, written by Lilly J. Goren: Commentary: Oscars Should Combine Best Actor Best Actress Categories.

    In the midst of an interestingly reflective period within the entertainment industry—especially given the current #MeToo and Times Up movements—many have wondered if—and how—Hollywood organizations like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will respond. Ahead of the Oscars, it’s worth noting that there is one way to bridge the gender divide that continues to be at the root of the industry’s many issues: eliminating the Best Actor/Actress/Supporting Actor/Actress categories.

    Lilly is a professor of political science at Carroll University. So I assume this is not a joke. She notes that the Grammys got rid of their segregated-by-sex award categories a few years back. (But the Country Music Association Awards still have them.)

    Don't even get me started on athletic competitions.

  • There's a new Clint Eastwood movie out, The Mule, and I happened to watch this IMDB intervew with him and the other actors. May I suggest you watch it till the end, when Mr. Eastwood does an uncanny impression of… well, watch it.

    Did you laugh out loud? I did.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:53 AM EDT