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[1][fpjs]
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[5]Fogus' [6]Thoughts on life, [7]programming, and [8]thinking
❤ [9]c [10]clj [11]erl [12]pl [13]frink [14]fth [15]cl [16]org [17]pure [18]icl
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[23]2024 [24]2023 [25]2022 [26]2021 [27]2020 [28]2019 [29]2018 [30]2017 [31]
2016 [32]2015 [33]2014 [34]2013 [35]2012 [36]2011 [37]2010 [38]2009 [39]2008
[40]2007 [41]2006 [42]2005 [43]2004 [44]2003 [45]2002
[46]The best things and stuff of 2024
Dec 23, 2024
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No
particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
also: see the lists from [47]2023, [48]2022, [49]2021, [50]2020, [51]2019, [52]
2018, [53]2017, [54]2016, [55]2015, [56]2014, [57]2013, [58]2012, [59]2011 and
[60]2010
Great posts | articles | talks read/watched
• [61]ELITE: The game that couldn’t be written from Alexander the ok – Elite
was one of my favorite games on my Commodore 64 1,000,000 years ago and so
I’m a sucker for articles on this gem. If you’re interested, also check out
[62]the annotated C64 source code. ^[63]1
• [64]The Rich History of Ham Radio Culture by Kristen Haring – I missed out
on the Ham radio craze and only recently learned about its rich history.
This article is a good overview and starting point if you’re interested in
learning too.
• [65]Get to Know Your Japanese Bathroom Ghosts by Eric Grundhauser –
Describes the interesting Japanese cultural folklore around bathroom
ghosts.
• [66]The History of WordStar by Abort Retry Fail LLC – A great historical
article about one of the most influential software suites ever created.
Additionally, the comments are a goldmine of additional information and
corrections and should not be skipped.
• [67]Combinatory Programming by zdsmith – Describes combinatorial
programming using motivated examples — a technique that’s surprisingly
scarce in articles about the topic.
• [68]Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music by Open Culture – Discusses
PKD’s love for classical music and the references to composers and their
works in his fiction. The post also, includes an [69]11-hour classical
music playlist for your listening pleasure.
• [70]Goodbye, Kory by Andy Looney – The world lost Kory Heath, a game
designer whom I admire immensely. I’ve talked about his magnum opus [71]
Zendo on this blog before and have run numerous play sessions over the
years. He was single-handedly responsible for hundreds of hours of
enjoyment around my home and within my group of friends. The world is much
the poorer without him in it. RIP. ^[72]2
Most viewed blog posts by me
• [73]On method values, part 1 – We released Clojure 1.12.0 this year and so
I wanted to write about one of the features that I worked on. Method values
are symbolic references to Java methods that can be used in value contexts
and the design and implementation of this feature was interesting enough to
talk about. The feature has been generally well received by the Clojure
community.
Favorite technical (and technical-adjacent) books discovered (and read)
• [74]And so FORTH by Timothy Huang – I found this long out of print Forth
tome via inter library loan and enjoyed it immensely. It’s a nice blend of
the ideas in Brodie’s [75]Thinking Forth and something like Geere’s [76]
Forth: The Next Step. It was a sad day when I had to return this beauty
back to the library because I could have used another read or two at least.
• [77]BASIC and FORTH in Parallel by S.J. Wainwright – This style of book is
exactly the kind of book that I would one day like to write. While the
specifics of any such book would be different, the central conceit is
perfect. That is, this book uses BASIC to create a simple stack machine and
Forth interpreter and then presents simple Forth programs exercising them.
Favorite non-technical books read
• [78]Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams – Follows Harvard drop-out Will
Andrews as he escapes to the American frontier with a wad of cash to find
adventure and “an original relation to nature”. Andrews eventually finds
Miller who is more than happy to help the young man part with his money in
an attempt to find a hidden Colorado valley filled with buffalo that may or
may not still (if it ever did) exist. The book follows Miller and Andrews’
(plus a skinner Schneider and driver Hoge) trek throw the frontier and
describes in harrowing detail their tribulations. I could not stop reading
and finished the book in a weekend. This one demands multiple reads to
really absorb the nuance.
• [79]The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti – Contains two stories by Ligotti:
“Metaphysica Morum” and “The Small People”. The first is quite different
than most of Ligotti’s work that I’ve read so far. It follows a
self-described “metaphysical mutant” and blends overtly dark humor with an
underlying pessimistic philosophy centered on a theme of euthanasia. “The
Small People” is a dream-like exploration of paranoia and isolation. Both
stories are a good introduction to the range in Ligotti’s work if you’re
interested in checking him out.
• [80]The Corvo Cult by Robert Scoble – Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo) was
an little-known Edwardian author who is often remembered more for his
bombastic personality than his fictional works. This book talks about the
rise and growth of the still active “Corvo Cult” — an obscure literary
fandom. In many cases, Rolfe’s fervid devotees matched the controversial
author in eccentricity, but the true fascination lies in the broad range of
people drawn to his eclectic works.
Number of books written or published
0
Number of programming languages designed
0.5
Favorite music discovered
• [81]The Paragons – At some point I became interested in the roots of ska
and The Paragons were the best group that I discovered during my
explorations.
• [82]That’s All! by Sammy Davis Jr. – *A fantastic performance from a master
of the vocal form. The songs are brilliant but the banter between songs
will keep me listening into the distant future.
Favorite films discovered
• [83]Withnail & I – [84]Sam Aaron recommended this film to me years ago but
I only managed to watch it in 2024. It’s a great example of a dry comedy
following a couple of screw-ups and their misadventures.
• [85]Jodorowsky’s Dune – A documentary about the most influential film that
never was.
• [86]Requiem for a Dream – I’m probably the last person in the world to
watch this relentless survey of despair. Not for the faint of heart.
Favorite podcasts
• [87]Will Radio – Will Byrd started the year promising a KiloTube of videos
(i.e. 1024 videos) in 2024 and it’s been a blast following along! There’s
no one quite like Will and so any chance that I can get to experience more
of him I will jump on.
• [88]Eros + Massacre – Another podcast triumph by Samm Deighan surveying the
weird world of psychotronic cinema.
Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with on my own time
• [89]Joy – Joy is a mindfrak of a programming language in the concatenative
functional language family. The core of Joy is beautiful and among the
foundational programming languages in my opinion.
• [90]Forth – Sticking with the concatenative family in 2024, I continued to
explore Forth. Interestingly the language is incredibly rich in history and
conducive to a wide range of techniques and paradigms. I’m unsure if I’ll
ever find the opportunity to use Forth in anger, but I will say that I
should come out of my explorations a stronger programmer and program
designer.
Programming languages used for work-related projects
• [91]Java – Working deep in the Clojure compiler means that much of my work
in 2024 was in Java.
• [92]Clojure – 2024 marks the 15th year^[93]3 as a full-time Clojure
programmer and the 1st year as a full-time Clojure core developer.
• [94]ClojureScript – Less-so now than when I was consulting full-time but I
occasionally dig into explore the implications of changes to Clojure on
CLJS.
• [95]Datalog – The [96]Datomic flavor of Datalog is the flavor of choice for
database access, be it in-process or in the cloud. Again, my day-to-day
usage is limited, but I have my share of personal databases hosted on
Datomic.
Programming languages (and related) that I hope to explore more deeply
• [97]Joy – There’s a mountain of deep information on Joy that I would like
to devour in 2025.^[98]4
• [99]Mouse – Yet another concatenative language to explore that’s long-dead
but still has some lessons to teach one such as myself.
• [100]POP-11 – Another dead language that was designed to support AI
applications in the 70s and 80s. I love the idea of exploring the language
and the suite of applications that built up around it.
Favorite papers discovered (and read)
• [101]Recursion Theory and Joy by Manfred von Thun – Joy’s underlying
reliance on combanatory programming manifests deep in the language even to
the degree that recursion in the language is implemented in userspace via
recursive combinators. This paper describes the “Joy Way” and its
relationship to recursion.
• [102]A Simple Applicative Language: Mini-ML (PDF) by D. Clement and J.
Despeyroux and T. Despeyroux and G. Kahn – Presents a beautiful definition
of ML language and its compilation to an abstract machine.
Still haven’t read…
I Ching, A Fire upon the Deep, Don Quixote, and [103]a boat-load of sci-fi
Favorite technical conference attended
• [104]Clojure/conj 2024 – This was the first Clojure conference that I
played a somewhat active part in organizing. Let me be clear, my part in
the matter was minimal at best, but it did provide me a window into the
complexities of organizing a conference. The conference itself was a blast
and it was great to meet old and new Clojure friends as well as [105]
colleagues!
Favorite code read
• [106]Restrained Datalog in 39loc by Christophe Grande – I’ve learned over
the years that if Christophe writes a technical article then it behooves me
to study it deeply. The highlight of the year from Christophe was his
simple, yet rich, Datalog implementation in 39 lines of Clojure code. It’s
clear that 39 lines of Clojure goes a long way and especially so when a
master of the language plays in it.
• [107]Post-Apocalyptic Programming by Serge Zaitsev – I love the central
conceit of the post, summarized as “what technology could/should we create
in the absence of modern computing niceties?” The post starts with a CPU
emulator, builds a language for it, and motives its decisions along the
way. There’s a brilliant hard science fiction story in here somewhere, I
can feel it.
• [108]MINT – MINT is highly inspirational to me as a lesson in minimal
programming language design. Based on Forth, MINT makes various design
decisions and trade-offs to remain small and fast.
Life-changing technology “discovered”
Nothing this year.
State of plans from 2023
• Clojure 1.12 – Released in [109]early September and one of the biggest
releases in years as far as feature additions go.
• Go much deeper down the concatenative rabbit-hole – An unmitigated success!
• Publish even more non-technical writing – My research into the
Corvo-related archives stored at Georgetown University was a success.
However, my efforts in writing up my findings has stalled.
Plans for 2025
• [110]Clojure 1.13 – Thinking around the 1.13 release is ongoing and we’d
like to get it out sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.
• [111]clojure.core.async next – We’ve laid the groundwork for a new version
of core.async and released it as version 1.7.701. We’d love to leverage JDK
21+ virtual threads to vastly simplify core.async’s implementation and have
started along this path in earnest.
• [112]Simplify my blog – I’d love to move away from WordPress in 2025.
• [113]Juxt – Juxt is my exploration in functional concatenative language
design built on the JVM. It’s not yet clear to me if or when I would ever
release this into the wild, but the explorations have been great fun and
I’ve used Juxt as a vehicle for finding relevant books and papers.^[114]5
That said, most of my programming time is spent maintaining and evolving
Clojure, but there are rare moments of time that I can spend on Juxt, and I
plan to continue to do so in 2025.
[115][juxt-274x300]
2024 Tech Radar
• try: [116]Boox Go 10.3 tablet – recommended by many colleagues
• adopt: [117]Blank Spaces app – helps to avoid phone brain-drain
• assess: [118]TypeScript – What does it buy me over JS?
• hold: [119]Zig – This looks like a dead-end for me
• stop: [120]Joy of Clojure 3rd edition – Another edition is unlikely but
hopefully something else may come of this work… this is an evolving
situation.
People who inspired me in 2024 (in no particular order)
Yuki, Keita, Shota, Craig Andera, Carin Meier, Justin Gehtland, Rich Hickey,
Nick Bentley, Paula Gearon, Zeeshan Lakhani, Brian Goetz, David Nolen, Jeb
Beich, Paul Greenhill, Kristin Looney, Andy Looney, Kurt Christensen, Samm
Deighan, David Chelimsky, Chas Emerick, Stacey Abrams, Paul deGrandis, Nada
Amin, Michiel Borkent, Alvaro Videla, Slava Pestov, Yoko Harada, Mike Fikes,
Dan De Aguiar, Christian Romney, Russ Olsen, Alex Miller, Adam Friedman, Tracie
Harris, Alan Kay, Janet A. Carr, Wayne Applewhite, Naoko Higashide, Zach
Tellman, Nate Prawdzik, Bobbi Towers, JF Martel, Phil Ford, Nate Hayden, Sean
Ross, Tim Good, Chris Redinger, Steve Jensen, Jordan Miller, Tim Ewald, Stu
Halloway, Jack Rusher, Michael Berstein, Benoît Fleury, Rafael Ferreira, Robert
Randolph, Joe Lane, Renee Lee, Pedro Matiello, Jarrod Taylor, Jaret Binford,
Ailan Batista, Matheus Machado, Quentin S. Crisp, John Cooper, Conrad Barski,
Amabel Holland, Ben Kamphaus, Barry Malzberg (RIP), Kory Heath (RIP).
Onward to 2025!
:F
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
1. I also recommend and excellent YT video [121]“The Making of ELITE”. [122]↩
2. Dave Chalker also wrote about Kory on his blog at “[123]Remembering the
Master: An Inelegant Eulogy for Kory Heath“. [124]↩
3. This is strictly my work-life time. My total use of Clojure has been
longer. [125]↩
4. Sadly the death of Manfred von Thun brought the death of Joy with it. The
literature the language is indeed deep but it’s finite and has stopped
growing entirely. I would like to help fix this stagnation if I can in
2025. [126]↩
5. You can see the current [127]Juxt bibtex on Github. [128]↩
Related posts:
1. [129]The best things and stuff of 2023
2. [130]Goodbye Sir Arthur Clarke
3. [131]The best things and stuff of 2012
No Comments, [132]Comment or [133]Ping
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References:
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Functional-JavaScript-Introducing-Programming-Underscore-js/dp/1449360726/?tag=fogus-20
[2] http://www.joyofclojure.com/buy
[3] http://www.joyofclojure.com/
[4] https://blog.fogus.me/
[5] http://fogus.me/me/
[6] http://fogus.me/static/
[7] http://fogus.me/fun
[8] http://blog.fogus.me/linkage/
[9] https://github.com/search?q=username%3Afogus+language%3Ac
[10] https://github.com/search?q=username%3Afogus+language%3Aclojure
[11] https://www.erlang.org/
[12] https://www.swi-prolog.org/
[13] http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
[14] https://colorforth.github.io/
[15] http://www.cons.org/
[16] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
[17] https://agraef.github.io/pure-lang/
[18] https://clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean
[19] http://shenlanguage.org/
[20] http://www.twitter.com/fogus
[21] http://blog.fogus.me/feed/
[22] http://blog.fogus.me/index.php?wptheme=Carrington+Mobile
[23] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/
[24] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/
[25] https://blog.fogus.me/2022/
[26] https://blog.fogus.me/2021/
[27] https://blog.fogus.me/2020/
[28] https://blog.fogus.me/2019/
[29] https://blog.fogus.me/2018/
[30] https://blog.fogus.me/2017/
[31] https://blog.fogus.me/2016/
[32] https://blog.fogus.me/2015/
[33] https://blog.fogus.me/2014/
[34] https://blog.fogus.me/2013/
[35] https://blog.fogus.me/2012/
[36] https://blog.fogus.me/2011/
[37] https://blog.fogus.me/2010/
[38] https://blog.fogus.me/2009/
[39] https://blog.fogus.me/2008/
[40] https://blog.fogus.me/2007/
[41] https://blog.fogus.me/2006/
[42] https://blog.fogus.me/2005/
[43] https://blog.fogus.me/2004/
[44] https://blog.fogus.me/2003/
[45] https://blog.fogus.me/2002/
[46] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/
[47] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/12/18/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2023/
[48] http://blog.fogus.me/2022/12/13/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2022/
[49] https://blog.fogus.me/2021/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2021/
[50] http://blog.fogus.me/2020/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2020/
[51] http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2019/
[52] http://blog.fogus.me/2019/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2018/
[53] http://blog.fogus.me/2018/01/02/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2017/
[54] http://blog.fogus.me/2016/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2016/
[55] http://blog.fogus.me/2015/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2015/
[56] http://blog.fogus.me/2014/12/29/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2014/
[57] http://blog.fogus.me/2013/12/27/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2013/
[58] http://blog.fogus.me/2012/12/26/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2012/
[59] http://blog.fogus.me/2011/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2011/
[60] http://blog.fogus.me/2010/12/30/the-best-things-in-2010/
[61] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC4YLMLar5I
[62] https://elite.bbcelite.com/c64/
[63] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:elite
[64] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-rich-history-of-ham-radio-culture/
[65] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japans-bathroom-ghosts
[66] https://www.abortretry.fail/p/arrogant-difficult-powerful
[67] https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/combinatory-programming.html
[68] https://www.openculture.com/2014/05/philip-k-dicks-favorite-classical-music.html
[69] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1RsnkX0bQWd2CVWW8jcxBR
[70] https://new.wunderland.com/2024/11/20/goodbye-kory/
[71] https://blog.fogus.me/2014/10/23/games-of-interest-zendo/
[72] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:chalker
[73] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/08/19/on-method-values-part-1/
[74] https://books.google.com/books/about/And_So_FORTH.html?id=iqUZAQAAIAAJ
[75] https://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
[76] https://archive.org/details/forth-the-next-step-ron-geere
[77] https://www.amazon.com/BASIC-FORTH-Parallel-S-J-Wainwright/dp/0859341135?tag=fogus-20
[78] https://www.amazon.com/Butchers-Crossing-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171985/?tag=fogus-20
[79] https://www.amazon.com/Spectral-Link-Thomas-Ligotti-ebook/dp/B00LE52256/?tag=fogus-20
[80] https://www.amazon.com/Corvo-Cult-History-Obsession-2014-10-09/dp/B01FIY47AQ/?tag=fogus-20
[81] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TI2FfqGJ8&pp=ygUOInRoZSBwYXJhZ29ucyI%3D
[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_All!
[83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I
[84] http://sam.aaron.name/
[85] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
[86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Dream
[87] https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamEByrd
[88] https://cinepunx.com/podcast-episodes/eros-massacre/
[89] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
[90] https://www.forth.com/forth/
[91] https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2023-December/003959.html
[92] http://www.clojure.org/
[93] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:15th
[94] http://www.clojurescript.org/
[95] http://www.datomic.com/
[96] https://www.datomic.com/
[97] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
[98] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:joy
[99] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(programming_language)
[100] https://poplogarchive.getpoplog.org/poplog.info.html
[101] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/html/j05cmp.html
[102] https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/dominique-clement/applicative.pdf
[103] http://blog.fogus.me/2012/09/21/the-amazing-colossal-science-fiction-ketchup/
[104] https://2024.clojure-conj.org/
[105] https://www.nubank.com/
[106] https://buttondown.com/tensegritics-curiosities/archive/restrained-datalog-in-39loc/
[107] https://zserge.com/posts/post-apocalyptic-programming/
[108] https://github.com/monsonite/MINT
[109] https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0
[110] https://www.clojure.org/
[111] https://github.com/clojure/core.async
[112] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/
[113] https://gist.github.com/fogus/6d716276678b0698c96dd13e040c71eb
[114] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fn:juxtbib
[115] https://blog.fogus.me/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/juxt.jpg
[116] https://www.amazon.com/BOOX-Tablet-Go-10-3-ePaper/dp/B0D4DFT3W3/?tag=fogus-20
[117] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blank-spaces-launcher/id1570856853
[118] https://www.typescriptlang.org/
[119] https://ziglang.org/
[120] https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Clojure-Michael-Fogus/dp/1617291412/?tag=fogus-20
[121] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpWoF5uVgbA&t=529s
[122] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:elite
[123] https://critical-hits.com/blog/2024/11/20/remembering-the-master-an-inelegant-eulogy-for-kory-heath/
[124] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:chalker
[125] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:15th
[126] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:joy
[127] https://gist.github.com/fogus/6d716276678b0698c96dd13e040c71eb
[128] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#fnref:juxtbib
[129] https://blog.fogus.me/2023/12/18/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2023/
[130] https://blog.fogus.me/2008/03/19/goodbye-sir-arthur-clarke/
[131] https://blog.fogus.me/2012/12/26/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2012/
[132] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#respond
[133] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/trackback/
[136] http://fogus.me/
[137] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/
[138] http://blog.fogus.me/about/mo-money/
[139] http://tomayko.com/
[140] https://blog.fogus.me/wp-login.php
[141] https://blog.fogus.me/2024/12/23/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2024/#top

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[46] January 2025 Issue [47] [Report]
The Ghosts in the Machine
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[51] [52] [53]
Spotify’s plot against musicians
by [54]Liz Pelly,
[CUT-8-1124x632]
Illustrations by Yoshi Sodeoka
[55]Listen to an audio version of this article.
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new
to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major
labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had
just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record
label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious
phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie
music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists
with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or
fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even
speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when
playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for
independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these
artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept
coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers,
musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about
anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried
that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within
a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or
Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running
indie labels.[56]^* “But I doubt that it’ll be unique to our corner of the
music world for long.”
By July, the story had burst into public view, after a Vulture article
resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was
filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for
“jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings
created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press
that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not
creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created
them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists. The
spokesperson’s rebuttal only stoked the interest of the media, and by the end
of the summer, articles on the matter appeared from NPR and the Guardian, among
other outlets. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they
suspected to be fake and speculated about how they had become so popular on
Spotify. Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used
analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely
been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose
music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers
a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material
often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video
content.
For years, I referred to the names that would pop up on these playlists simply
as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on
Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, which
were compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often had Spotify’s
verified-artist badge. But they were clearly fake. Their “labels” were
frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles
included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist
biographies or links to websites. Google searches came up empty.
In the years following that initial salvo of negative press, other
controversies served as useful distractions for Spotify: the company’s 2019
move into podcasting and eventual $250 million deal with Joe Rogan, for
example, and its 2020 introduction of Discovery Mode, a program through which
musicians or labels accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic
promotion. The fake-artist saga faded into the background, another of Spotify’s
unresolved scandals as the company increasingly came under fire and musicians
grew more emboldened to speak out against it with each passing year.
Then, in 2022, an investigation by the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter revived the
allegations. By comparing streaming data against documents retrieved from the
Swedish copyright collection society STIM, the newspaper revealed that around
twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,”
and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed
millions of times.
Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in
earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the DN offices in Sweden.
The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an
artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under
this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and
appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill
Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at
the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was
amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as
a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik
music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in
2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019.
“Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example,
because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you
can find.”
Besides the journalists at DN, no one in Sweden wanted to talk about the fake
artists. In Stockholm, I visited the address listed for one of the ghost labels
and knocked on the door—no luck. I met someone who knew a guy who maybe ran one
of the production companies, but he didn’t want to talk. A local businessman
would reveal only that he worked in the “functional music space,” and clammed
up as soon as I told him about my investigation.
Even with the new reporting, there was still much missing from the bigger
picture: Why, exactly, were the tracks getting added to these hugely popular
Spotify playlists? We knew that the ghost artists were linked to certain
production companies, and that those companies were pumping out an exorbitant
number of tracks, but what was their relationship to Spotify?
For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke
with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack
messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I
uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only
has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former
employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,”
but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across
the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage
of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name:
Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for
working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by
having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of
PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of
certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly
lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to
music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push
music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist
filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed
completely.
How had it come to this? Spotify, after all, did not start out aiming to shape
users’ listening behavior. In fact, in the early days, the user’s experience on
the platform centered on the search bar. Listeners needed to know what they
were looking for. The company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, is said to have been averse to
the idea of an overly curated service. When the platform launched in Europe, in
2008, it positioned itself as a way to access music that was “better than
piracy,” like a fully stocked iTunes library but accessed over the internet,
all of it available via a monthly subscription. The emphasis was on providing
entry to “A World of Music,” as an early ad campaign emphasized, with the
tagline “Instant, simple and free.” Users could make their own playlists or
listen to those made by others.
Like many other tech companies in the twenty-first century, Spotify spent its
first decade claiming to disrupt an archaic industry, scaling up as quickly as
possible, and attracting venture capitalists to an unproven business model. In
its search for growth and profitability, Spotify reinvented itself repeatedly:
as a social-networking platform in 2010, as an app marketplace in 2011, and by
the end of 2012, as a hub for what it called “music for every moment,”
supplying recommendations for specific moods, activities, and times of day.
Spotify made its move into curation the next year, hiring a staff of editors to
compile in-house playlists. In 2014, the company was increasing its investment
in algorithmic personalization technology. This innovation was intended, as
Spotify put it, to “level the playing field” for artists by minimizing the
power of major labels, radio stations, and other old-school gatekeepers; in
their place, it claimed, would be a system that simply rewarded tracks that
streamed well. By the mid-2010s, the service was actively recasting itself as a
neutral platform, a data-driven meritocracy that was rewriting the rules of the
music business with its playlists and algorithms.
[57] [Cover-wp-scaled]
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[58] January 2025 issue
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In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label
oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent
stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly
70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating
power from the start. For these major labels, the rise of Spotify would soon
pay off. By the mid-2010s, streaming had cemented itself as the most important
source of revenue for the majors, which were raking in cash from Spotify’s
millions of paying subscribers after more than a decade of declining revenue.
But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some
70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something
shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options:
raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding
ways to attract new subscribers.
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research
showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific
artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for
their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the
lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners
often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result,
the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half
listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content
program was created.
After at least a year of piloting, PFC was presented to Spotify editors in 2017
as one of the company’s new bets to achieve profitability. According to a
former employee, just a few months later, a new column appeared on the
dashboard editors used to monitor internal playlists. The dashboard was where
editors could view various stats: plays, likes, skip rates, saves. And now,
right at the top of the page, editors could see how successfully each playlist
embraced “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved
margins,” as PFC was described internally.
Editors were soon encouraged by higher-ups, with increasing persistence, to add
PFC songs to certain playlists. “Initially, they would give us links to stuff,
like, ‘Oh, it’s no pressure for you to add it, but if you can, that would be
great,’ ” the former employee recalled. “Then it became more aggressive, like,
‘Oh, this is the style of music in your playlist, if you try it and it works,
then why not?’ ”
Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the
company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material.
Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was
coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important
for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I
was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like
and not have them stand out?’ ”
Some employees felt that those responsible for pushing the PFC strategy did not
understand the musical traditions that were being affected by it. These
higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not
necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical,
ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop—music that tended to do well on playlists for
relaxing, sleeping, or focusing. One of my sources told me that the attitude
was “if the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more,
because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.”
Trying to share concerns about the program internally was challenging. “Some of
us really didn’t feel good about what was happening,” a former employee told
me. “We didn’t like that it was these two guys that normally write pop songs
replacing swaths of artists across the board. It’s just not fair. But it was
like trying to stop a train that was already leaving.”
Eventually, it became clear internally that many of the playlist editors—whom
Spotify had touted in the press as music lovers with encyclopedic
knowledge—were uninterested in participating in the scheme. The company started
to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model. These new
editors looked after mood and activity playlists, and worked on playlists and
programs that other editors didn’t want to take part in anymore. (Spotify
denies that staffers were encouraged to add PFC to playlists, and that playlist
editors were discontented with the program.) By 2023, several hundred playlists
were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these,
including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova
Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were
nearly entirely made up of PFC.
Spotify managers defended PFC to staff by claiming that the tracks were being
used only for background music, so listeners wouldn’t know the difference, and
that there was a low supply of music for these types of playlists anyway. The
first part of this argument was true: a statistical breakdown of the PFC
rollout, shared over Slack, showed how PFC “streamshare”—Spotify’s term for
percentage of total streams—was distributed across playlists for different
activities, such as sleep, mindfulness, unwinding, lounging, meditation,
calming down, concentrating, or studying. But the other half of management’s
justification was harder to prove. Music in instrumental genres such as
ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats was in plentiful supply
across Spotify—more than enough to draw on to populate its playlists without
requiring the addition of PFC.
PFC eventually began to be handled by a small team called Strategic
Programming, or StraP for short, which in 2023 had ten members. Though Spotify
denies that it is trying to increase PFC’s streamshare, internal Slack messages
show members of the StraP team analyzing quarter-by-quarter growth and
discussing how to increase the number of PFC streams. When Harper’s Magazine
followed up with the company to ask why internal documents showed the team
tracking the percentage of PFC content across hundreds of playlists if not to
attend to the growth of PFC content on the platform, a spokesperson for the
company said, “Spotify is data driven in all that we do.” And though Spotify
told Harper’s that it does not “promise placement on any playlists” in any of
its licensing agreements, when new PFC providers were brought on board, senior
staffers would notify editors to attend to their offerings. “We’ve now
onboarded Myndstream,” a StraP staffer wrote in one message. “Please prioritize
adding from these as this is a new partner so they can get some live feedback.”
That employee shared with the rest of the team a series of lists made by the
new partner, sorting their tracks into collections titled “ambient piano
covers,” “psilocybin (relax and breathe)” and “lofi originals.” A couple of
months later, another team member posted a similar message:
Our new partner Slumber Group LLC is ready for their first releases. Make
sure to have them set up in your Reverb filters for more snoozy content :)
(“Reverb” refers to an internal tool for managing tracks and playlists.)
The roster of PFC providers discussed internally was long. For years, Firefly
Entertainment and Epidemic Sound dominated media speculation about Spotify’s
playlist practices. But internal messages revealed they were just two among at
least a dozen PFC providers, including companies with names like Hush Hush LLC
and Catfarm Music AB. There was Queenstreet Content AB, the production company
of the Swedish pop songwriting duo Andreas Romdhane and Josef Svedlund, who
were also behind another mood-music streaming operation, Audiowell, which
partnered with megaproducer Max Martin (who has shaped the sound of global pop
music since the Nineties) and private-equity firm Altor. In 2022, the Swedish
press reported that Queenstreet was bringing in more than $10 million per year.
Another provider was Industria Works, a subsidiary of which is Mood Works, a
distributor whose website shows that it also streams tracks on Apple Music and
Amazon Music. Spotify was perhaps not alone in promoting cheap stock music.
In a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the ethics of streaming, Spotify’s
own employees debated the fairness of the PFC program. “I wonder how much these
plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists,” one employee asked. And yet as far
as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the
initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it
removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and
replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music
cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living.
Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music
contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify
had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was
going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had
been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best
would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program
undermined all this. PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and
covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins,
but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of
“authenticity” in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of
musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms
for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against
musicians who knew their worth.
In 2023, on a summer afternoon in Brooklyn, I met up with a jazz musician in a
park. We talked about the recent shows we had seen, our favorite and least
favorite venues, the respective pockets of the New York music scene we moved
through. He spoke passionately about his friends’ music and his most cherished
performance spaces. But our conversation soon turned to something else: his
most recent side gig, making jazz for a company that was described, in one
internal Spotify document, as one of its “high margin (PFC) licensors.”
He wasn’t familiar with the term PFC, but his tracks have been given prominent
placement on some of Spotify’s most PFC-saturated chill-jazz playlists. Like
many musicians in his position, there was a lot he didn’t know about the
arrangement. He had signed a one-year contract to make anonymous tracks for a
production company that would distribute them on Spotify. He called it his
“Spotify playlist gig,” a commitment he also called “brain-numbing” and “pretty
much completely joyless.” And while he didn’t quite understand the details of
his employer’s relationship with Spotify, he knew that many of his tracks had
landed on playlists with millions of followers. “I just record stuff and submit
it, and I’m not really sure what happens from there,” he told me.
As he described it, making new PFC starts with studying old PFC: it’s a
feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again. A typical
session starts with a production company sending along links to target
playlists as reference points. His task is to then chart out new songs that
could stream well on these playlists. “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just
write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then
once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And
it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out
like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the
session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer
from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company
will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times
inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction. The most common
feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be
even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The
goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
This wasn’t a scam artist with a master plan to steal prime playlist real
estate. He was just someone who, like other working musicians today, was trying
to cobble together a living. “There are so many things in music that you treat
as grunt work,” he said. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding
gigs or corporate gigs. It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are
background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from
that. . . . You’re just a piece of the furniture.”
The jazz musician asked me not to identify the name of the company he worked
for; he didn’t want to risk losing the gig. Throughout our conversation,
though, he repeatedly emphasized his reservations about the system, calling it
“shameful”—even without knowledge of the hard details of the program, he
understood that his work was creating value for a company, and a system, with
little regard for the well-being of independent artists. In general, the
musicians working with PFC companies I spoke with were highly critical of the
arrangement. One musician who made electronic compositions for Epidemic Sound
told me about how “the creative process was more about replicating playlist
styles and vibes than looking inward.” Another musician, a professional audio
engineer who turned out ambient recordings for a different PFC partner, told me
that he stopped making this type of stock music because “it felt unethical,
like some kind of money-laundering scheme.”
According to a former Spotify employee, the managers of the PFC program
justified its existence internally in part by claiming that the participating
musicians were true artists like any other—they had simply chosen to monetize
their creative work in a different way. (A Spotify spokesperson confirmed this,
pointing out that “music that an artist creates but publishes under a band name
or a pseudonym has been popular across mediums for decades.”) But the PFC
musicians I spoke to told a different story. They did not consider their work
for these companies to be part of their artistic output. One composer I spoke
with compared it to the use of soundalikes in the advertising business, when a
production company asks an artist to write and record a cheaper version of a
popular song.
“It’s kind of like taking a standardized test, where there’s a range of right
answers and a far larger range of wrong answers,” the jazz musician said. “It
feels like someone is giving you a prompt or a question, and you’re just
answering it, whether it’s actually your conviction or not. Nobody I know would
ever go into the studio and record music this way.”
All this points to a disconcerting context collapse for musicians—to the way in
which being an artist and the business of background music are increasingly
entwined, and the distinctions of purpose increasingly blurred. PFC is in some
ways similar to production music, audio made in bulk on a work-for-hire basis,
which is often fully owned by production companies that make it easily
available to license for ads, in-store soundtracks, film scores, and the like.
In fact, PFC seems to encompass repurposed production-music catalogues, but it
also appears to include work commissioned more directly for mood playlists, as
suggested by one the Spotify StraP team’s discussion of an ongoing “wishlist
for PFC partners” on Slack.
Production music is booming today thanks to a digital environment in which a
growing share of internet traffic comes from video and audio. Generations of
YouTube and TikTok influencers strive to avoid the complicated world of sync
licensing (short for music synchronization licensing, the process of acquiring
rights to play music in the background of audiovisual content) and the
possibility of content being removed for copyright violations. Companies like
Epidemic Sound purport to solve this problem, claiming to simplify sync
licensing by offering a library of pre-cleared, royalty-free production music
for a monthly or yearly subscription fee. They also provide in-store music for
retail outlets, in the tradition of muzak.
As Epidemic grew, it started to behave like a record label. “Similar to any
label, we were doing licenses with DSPs,” one former employee told me,
referring to digital service providers such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, and
Spotify. “Epidemic’s content is primarily being made for sync, so it’s
primarily non-lyrical. This includes ambient content, lo-fi beats, classical
compositions. Things a YouTube creator might put over a landscape video. And
this content tends to also do well in playlists such as ‘Deep Focus,’ for
example, on Spotify.”
Unsurprisingly, one of the first venture-capital firms to invest in Spotify,
Creandum, also invested early in Epidemic. In 2021, Epidemic raised
$450 million from Blackstone Growth and EQT Growth, increasing the company’s
valuation to $1.4 billion. It is striking, even now, that these venture
capitalists saw so much potential for profit in background music. “This is, at
the end of the day, a data business,” the global head of Blackstone Growth said
at the time. The Spotify–Epidemic corporate synergies reflect how streaming has
flattened differences across music. The industry has contributed to a massive
wave of consolidation: different music-adjacent industries and ecosystems that
previously operated in isolation all suddenly depend on royalties from the same
platforms. And it has led to the blurring of aesthetic boundaries as well. The
musician who made tracks for Epidemic Sound and ended up on many PFC-heavy
playlists told me that he was required to release the tracks under his real
artist name, on his preexisting Spotify page. “My profile on Spotify picked up
a lot once my Epidemic compositions found their way onto playlists,” he said.
“The sad thing is that rarely results in playlist listeners digging deeper into
the artist of a track they hear or like.”
The Epidemic artist explained how each month started with the company
presenting a new playlist it had created. “You are then to compose however many
tracks you and Epidemic agree on, drawing ‘inspiration’ from said playlist,” he
told me. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, these playlists had very little to
do with my own artistic vision and vibe but, rather, focused on what Epidemic
felt its subscribers were after. So essentially, I was composing bespoke music.
This annoyed the fuck out of me.”
But at the end of the day, he said, it was still a paycheck: “I did it because
I needed a job real bad and the money was better than any money I could make
from even successful indie labels, many of which I worked with,” he told me.
“Honestly, I had no idea which tracks I made would end up doing well. . . .
Every track I made for Epidemic was based on their curated playlist.”
While it’s true that the business of sync licensing can be complicated,
musicians from the Ivors Academy, a British advocacy organization for
songwriters and composers, say that the “frictions” companies like Epidemic
seek to smooth out are actually hard-won industry protections. “Simplicity is
overrated when it comes to your rights,” Kevin Sargent, a composer of
television and film scores, told me. In claiming to “simplify” the mechanics of
the background-music industry, Epidemic and its peers have championed a system
of flat-fee buyouts. The Epidemic composer I spoke with said that his payments
were routinely around $1,700, and that the tracks were purchased by Epidemic as
a complete buyout. “They own the master,” he told me. Epidemic’s selling point
is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect
royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
But in the case of the musician I spoke with, the streaming royalty checks from
tracks produced for Epidemic Sound were smaller than those for his non-Epidemic
tracks, and artists are not entitled to certain other royalties: to refine its
exploitative model, Epidemic does not work with artists who belong to
performance-rights organizations, the groups that collect royalties for
songwriters when their compositions are played on TV or radio, online, or even
in public. “It’s essentially a race to the bottom,” the production-music
composer Mat Andasun told me.
The musician who made ambient tracks for one of the PFC partner companies told
me about power imbalances he experienced on the job. “There was a fee paid up
front,” he explained to me. “It was like, ‘We’ll give you a couple hundred
bucks. You don’t own the master. We’ll give you a percentage of publishing.’
And it was basically pitched to me that I could do as many of these tracks as I
wanted.” In the end, he recorded only a handful of tracks for the company,
released under different aliases, and made a couple thousand dollars. The money
seemed pretty good at first, since each track took only a few hours. But as a
couple of the tracks took off on Spotify, one garnering millions upon millions
of streams, he started to see how unfair the deal was in the long term: the
tracks were generating far more revenue for Spotify and the ghost label than he
would ever see, because he owned no part of the master and none of the
publishing rights. “I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially
peanuts,” he said.
He quickly succumbed to the feeling that something was wrong with the
arrangement. “I’m aware that the master recording is generating much more than
I’m getting. Maybe that’s just business, but it’s so related to being able to
get that amount of plays. Whoever can actually get you generating that amount
of plays, they hold the power,” the musician told me.
“It feels pretty weird,” he continued. “My name is not on it. There’s no
credit. There’s not a label on it. It’s really like there’s nothing—no composer
information. There’s a layer of smoke screen. They’re not trying to have it be
traceable.”
A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether
they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s
purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as
interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart
of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial
interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among
users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to
more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their
profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the
continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist
altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using
generative-AI software.
“I’m sure it’s something that AI could do now, which is kind of scary,” one of
the former Spotify playlist editors told me, referring to the potential for AI
tools to pump out audio much like the PFC tracks. The PFC partner companies
themselves understand this. According to Epidemic Sound’s own public-facing
materials, the company already plans to allow its music writers to use AI tools
to generate tracks. In its 2023 annual report, Epidemic explained that its
ownership of the world’s largest catalogue of “restriction-free” tracks made it
“one of the best-positioned” companies to allow creators to harness “AI’s
capabilities.” Even as it promoted the role that AI would play in its business,
Epidemic emphasized the human nature of its approach. “Our promise to our
artists is that technology will never replace them,” read a post on Epidemic’s
corporate blog. But the ceaseless churn of quickly generated ghost-artist
tracks already seems poised to do just that.
Spotify, for its part, has been open about its willingness to allow AI music on
the platform. During a 2023 conference call, Daniel Ek noted that the boom in
AI-generated content could be “great culturally” and allow Spotify to “grow
engagement and revenue.” That’s an unsurprising position for a company that has
long prided itself on its machine-learning systems, which power many of its
recommendations, and has framed its product evolution as a story of AI
transformation. These automated recommendations are, in part, how Spotify was
able to usher in another of its most contentious cost-saving initiatives:
Discovery Mode, its payola-like program whereby artists accept a lower royalty
rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. Like the PFC program, tracks
enrolled in Discovery Mode are unmarked on Spotify; both schemes allow the
service to push discount content to users without their knowledge. Discovery
Mode has drawn scrutiny from artists, organizers, and lawmakers, which
highlights another reason the company may ultimately prefer the details of its
ghost-artist program to remain obscure. After all, protests for higher royalty
rates can’t happen if playlists are filled with artists who remain in the
shadows.
[63]Liz Pelly
is the author of [64]Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the
Perfect Playlist, from which this excerpt is taken. It will be published in
January by One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Atria Books.
Tags
[65]Amazon Music [66]Apple Music [67]Artificial intelligence [68]Corporate
profits [69]Epidemic Sound (music production company) [70]Exploitation [71]Jazz
[72]Liz Pelly [73]Music [74]Music production [75]Music streaming services [76]
Musicians [77]Perfect Fit Content (PFC) [78]Playlist editors [79]Publishing
rights [80]Record labels [81]Scandals [82]Slack [83]Songs [84]Sony Music
Entertainment [85]Spotify [86]Stock music [87]Strategic planning [88]Sweden
[89]TikTok [90]Universal Music Group [91]Warner Brothers Records [92]Yoshi
Sodeoka [93]YouTube
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[94] [95]
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[96] [97] [98]
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[44] https://harpers.org/category/podcast/
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[46] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01
[47] https://harpers.org/sections/report/
[48] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/#
[49] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/#
[50] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/#
[51] https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fharpers.org%2Farchive%2F2025%2F01%2Fthe-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians
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[53] https://harpers.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#d6e9f0a5a3b4bcb3b5a2eb82beb3f3e4e691beb9a5a2a5f3e4e6bfb8f3e4e6a2beb3f3e4e69bb7b5bebfb8b3f0b4b9b2afebbea2a2a6a5f3e597f3e490f3e490beb7a4a6b3a4a5f8b9a4b1f3e490b7a4b5bebfa0b3f3e490e4e6e4e3f3e490e6e7f3e490a2beb3fbb1beb9a5a2a5fbbfb8fba2beb3fbbbb7b5bebfb8b3fbbabfacfba6b3babaaffba5a6b9a2bfb0affbbba3a5bfb5bfb7b8a5
[54] https://harpers.org/author/lizpelly/
[55] https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=harpers&articleID=ghosts-machine-pelly
[56] javascript:;
[57] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01
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[59] https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/#
[63] https://harpers.org/author/lizpelly/
[64] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Mood-Machine/Liz-Pelly/9781668083505
[65] https://harpers.org/tag/amazon-music/
[66] https://harpers.org/tag/apple-music/
[67] https://harpers.org/tag/artificial-intelligence/
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[69] https://harpers.org/tag/epidemic-sound-music-production-company/
[70] https://harpers.org/tag/exploitation/
[71] https://harpers.org/tag/jazz/
[72] https://harpers.org/tag/liz-pelly/
[73] https://harpers.org/tag/music/
[74] https://harpers.org/tag/music-production/
[75] https://harpers.org/tag/music-streaming-services/
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[77] https://harpers.org/tag/perfect-fit-content-pfc/
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[1]Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
[2]Tom MacWright
• [3]Writing
• [4]Reading
• [5]Photos
• [6]Projects
• [7]Drawings
• [8]Micro⇠
• [9]About
Maximization and buying stuff
2024-12-29
I’ve been revisiting the vintage 37signals blog post [10]A Rant Against
Maximization. I am by nature, a bit of a maximizer: I put a lot of time into
research about everything and have grown to be unfortunately picky. On the
positive side, I don’t regret purchases very frequently and can be a good
source of recommendations.
But this year I decided to starting figuring out how to spend money more
effectively – to figure out what it’s useful for that gives me joy and
long-term satisfaction. Partly inspired by [11]Die With Zero and [12]Ramit
Sethi’s philosophies.
It has been a tough transition. I’m used to finding some price/quality local
maximum, and nice stuff is always past that point. Leicas, luxury cars, fancy
clothes, etc are usually 80% more expensive and 20% technically-better than the
value-optimizing alternative.
To be clear, I bought a fancy bicycle, no BMWs for this guy. But it followed
the same diminishing-marginal-utility arc as other fancy stuff. I’ve spent a
lot of time thinking about whether I would have been better off choosing a
different point on the cost/value curve.
But really: for most things there are a wide range of acceptable deals. We were
not born to optimize cost/value ratios, and it’s not obvious that getting that
optimization right will really bring joy, or getting it wrong (in minor ways)
should make anyone that sad. And it’s a tragedy to [13]keep caring about
inconsequential costs just because of psychology. I’m trying to avoid that
tragedy.
Anyway, the bike is awesome.
Also, with the exception of sports cars and houses, people in the tech industry
and my demographic in the US likes to keep its consumerism understated. For
example, an average tech worker in San Francisco tends to look clean-cut middle
class, but going up the stairs from the subway you’ll see a lot of [14]$500
sneakers. There are acceptable categories of consumerism – you can buy a
tremendously oversized house and get very little flack for it (maybe the home
is a good investment, though I have my doubts), and a big car (bigger the
better, to protect your family in crashes with other big cars, apologies to the
pedestrians). Uncoincidentally, I guess, these are also the two purchases that
in the US are usually financed, or in other words, leveraged.
References:
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/
[3] https://macwright.com/writing/
[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
[9] https://macwright.com/about/
[10] https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/a-rant-against-maximization/
[11] https://macwright.com/2021/09/11/die-with-zero
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramit_Sethi
[13] https://wggtb.substack.com/p/having-a-healthy-relationship-with
[14] https://www.nordstrom.com/s/common-projects-original-achilles-sneaker-men/4976450

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[1]Tom MacWright
tom@macwright.com
[2]Tom MacWright
• [3]Writing
• [4]Reading
• [5]Photos
• [6]Projects
• [7]Drawings
• [8]Micro⇠
• [9]About
I want brands
2024-12-03
I think a weird thing that’s happening with capitalism right now is that I want
brand consistency more than ever. It’s come up in conversations with friends,
too, how brands like OXO, IKEA, Costco or Muji are starting to feel like an
escape, rather than a luxury. Even Target, in-store, is kind of a place where
you can, mostly, buy a thing that is fine.
It’s mostly because of the Amazon effect. Amazon went from a store to a
‘marketplace’ of drop-shipped nameless junk that takes too long to wade
through. Alibaba was this kind of experience before Amazon even thought about
it. Walmart is the same sort of experience now. It’s an overwhelming and
complicated experience: I’ll look at t-shirts, and for the same ‘brand’, there
are multiple ‘sellers’ from whom Amazon dynamically picks to serve my sale. The
color blue is two cents cheaper than green. For anything more complicated than
a t-shirt, the odds of it being a [10]counterfeit are fairly high.
I don’t want to engage in the supply chain this much, and I don’t think most
people do either, even if it enables incredible new levels of cheapness.
To some extent, Amazon has to be a reflection of consumer preference: buying
more stuff, faster, for the cheapest price possible. And e-commerce is a hard
industry.
But I strongly believe that there’s an opportunity for a brand like Costco’s
‘Kirkland’ or OXO to become the standard place for middle-class people to buy
stuff. Paying 5-10% more for something with better odds of being genuine and
high-quality, and for a less overwhelming junk-pile buying experience… there’s
something there.
References:
[1] https://macwright.com/
[2] https://macwright.com/
[3] https://macwright.com/writing/
[4] https://macwright.com/reading/
[5] https://macwright.com/photos/
[6] https://macwright.com/projects/
[7] https://macwright.com/drawings/
[8] https://macwright.com/micro/
[9] https://macwright.com/about/
[10] https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-28-amazon-counterfeit-problem-ink-cartridges/

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[1][header-2]
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[2]Meat-Ax Your News Consumption
Grant me the serenity to ignore the things I cannot change.
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024
As someone who lives in a democracy (for now), I believe it is both good and
important to be an informed citizen. However, in Donald Trump’s first term as
America’s commander in chief, I was unnecessarily tuned in to each and every
horrid aspect of his presidency. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake when we
take this wretched ride for a second time.
During my [3]recent respite, I made a conscious effort to scale back just how
much awfulness I let into my life. I deleted a few redundant RSS feeds from my
reader and reduced the quantity of news I read, as well as the frequency with
which I read it. Just as I had previously [4]meat-axed my notifications, I’ve
now meat-axed my news consumption.
I’m fortunate that my own day-to-day life does not actually need to be so
negatively impacted by Trump’s every offense. Perhaps yours needn’t be either.
It is no doubt a fine line, but it should be possible to stay aware of what’s
happening without being consumed by the relentless malfeasance over which we
have no control.
I urge you to consider how you can do that for yourself. Your mental health is
worth it.
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Software for stationery lovers
How software might learn from paper clips, & other thoughts 🐷📎
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Dec 26, 2024
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pov: hanging out on your favorite website [16]journalhelper.com 😎
Merry Christmas, everyone!! 🎄
It’s December 26th, I’m at home and cozy, and over the last few days I’ve had a
blast finishing up my 2024 journal and finalizing my [17]Techo Kaigi for 2025.
Those would have been perfect topics for this last newsletter of the year,
BUT!!! I decided I had another story to tell!
If you follow Pouch Studio on Instagram, you [18]might have seen that I
launched a software tool a few weeks ago! It’s called Hobonichi Journal Helper,
and it’s a free tool that I made that lets you preview, crop, and resize photos
for your Hobonichi journal.
Check it out here:
✨[19] https://www.journalhelper.com/hobonichi ✨
It’s a very small tool, and intentionally so 🌱
Today I want to share with you what I think it means to build software for
paper lovers, or more specifically — software for stationery lovers. It’s the
thinking that led to the creation of this tool, and the inspiration fueling me
as I build software in 2025.
I hope you enjoy! Have a wonderful rest of your holidays, and see you in
January!! 🎊
♡ vrk
PS: If you’re sad I’m not talking about my 2024 journal + Techo Kaigi today,
don’t worry!! I’ll be posting those updates on the Instagram, and this
miiiiight even become the topic of January’s newsletter…. I don’t plan my
newsletters that far in advance though 😆 We’ll see what January brings! ☃️
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
⚡️ Oddly specific software
It was Saturday, November 30th, I was riding the subway on the way to meet some
friends for brunch, when suddenly — out of nowhere — I knew what I needed
build! And more importantly, I knew why.
Hobonichi Journal Helper is not a new idea I’ve had, and it’s not even that ~
interesting~ of an idea.
It’s a tool that helps you make, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY, journal layouts
that look like this:
[21]
A6 Original monthly calendar
This masterpiece is from [22]Hobonichi Stationery Club Issue #23
I love journal layouts like this, and — prior to Hobonichi Journal Helper —
there wasn’t a special tool to help you make layouts of this style. You’d have
to find a way to resize and crop each photo you want to use, then print them
out and hope for the best when you sat down to arrange the tiny photos in your
journal.
What if there was a software tool that let you select photos you wanted to use,
crop them to size, preview it in your Hobonichi, and print all when done? It
would make this experience 100 times nicer!!
It’s an obvious idea, but I had been reluctant to build software for such a
niche use case.
This problem was SO small, SO oddly specific. It’s not just limited to journals
or even Hobonichi journals, but the monthly pages of Hobonichi journals. By
design, its most passionate users would probably use it AT MOST, once a month.
Why would I bother to build software for this? Almost reflexively I would
dismiss it: Yeah it’s too niche, I’ll come back to this later.
But in that fateful moment on the subway, I had sudden 3-way realization:
1. 🚙 For stationery lovers, there’s no problem too small!
2. 🐷 There’s life from 1000 paper clips
3. 🎮 A good demo is a polished glimpse
… and from that moment, I knew how I wanted to build software for stationery
lovers.
Allow me to elaborate!
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🚙 No problem too small
Working in tech, I was taught to avoid working on problems that were too small.
There are plenty of neat ideas, but at the end of the day, you gotta think
about, “How many users will this affect?” If it’s not a big enough problem,
there aren’t enough potential users, and if there aren’t a lot of potential
users, then it’s not a problem worth solving.
Very logical, yes? So logical that it’s easy to be fooled into thinking this is
the “correct” approach.
But then for some reason, sitting on the subway, it finally dawned on me:
“Too small of a problem”?? This concept does not exist in the land of
stationery!!
To show you what I mean, here’s a roundup from JetPens on “oddly specific
stationery:”
The first example is the Sakura Mixline Underline Highlighter, which lets you
highlight and underline at the same time:
[24]
[https]
BUT OF COURSE
If you’re unfamiliar with products like this, you might think they’re silly
novelties you buy for the idea rather than the function.
Like… do you really need to highlight and underline? Even if this was your
preference, couldn’t you just buy a separate highlighter and a separate pen?!
Is it that much effort to switch between pens? It’s so much more useful, more
practical, more logical to have them separate. Right??
But I gotta say, as a stationery lover, my gut reaction to this pen is….
Cool!!! I never thought about underlining my highlights… should I try it?
[25]
[https]
The color combos they’ve chosen are truly inspired too
And I find that interesting — this is a very opinionated tool, and an
opinionated tool provides built-in inspiration for how to use it.
What are you gonna do with a pencil? I dunno.
What are you gonna do with a Mixline Underline Highlighter? Oh my mind is
racing with ideas!! I could highlight some sentences, create headers, I could
make cute forms with this…
There’s a second aspect to these ultra-specific tools, too.
Later in the video is a tool I do own, the Midori Eraser Dust Mini Cleaner II:
[https][https]
a practical purchase!
It’s a small plastic car that you can use to sweep up eraser dust or other
small debris on your desk.
I can attest first hand: I use my Mini Cleaner regularly! I draw a lot, and
erase a lot, and when I just swept up the eraser dust with my hands, pieces
would fall to the floor, get smushed into my floor by the wheels of my desk
chair, which was annoying to clean up… Therefore the Mini Cleaner, a device
that helps me keep my floors cleaner by keeping my desk cleaner? Felt like a
practical purchase to me!
I think it’s the allure of products like this — it’s not a gimmick; it’s a
thoughtfully made tool for a particular person, a particular problem in mind.
Whether I’m its target customer or not, I can appreciate who it’s for and why
it was made, even if it’s not for me. I’m probably not buying a Mixline
highlighter, but I respect the product, and its mere existence has inspired me.
But when I AM the target customer — like in the case of the Mini Cleaner — it
truly feels like a miracle! That someone saw my problem, and invented a way to
solve it just so. I feel a small, invisible, but warm connection to both its
creator and all its users. It’s a tool so specific that simply by using it,
we’ve got something in common.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🐷📎 A stationery collection
The question was posed to me: Would a stationery lover buy one 3-color
multi-pen, or 3 individual pens, one of each color?
And the answer, of course, is C) All of the above!! I’ll take the multi-pen and
one of each color, please 😆
Which is to say, I think stationery is a “yes, and” culture — for better and
worse!
Stationery lovers tend to curate a large collection of analog tools and
stationery. Similarly, stationery brands tend to produce a large catalog of
products, too.
The Midori Mini Cleaner is not Midori Japan’s only product — far from it! The
brand has hundreds of products:
[27]
[https]
And Midori itself it just one of several brands under company Designphil
Software companies take the opposite approach. They often build one massive
product, to the point that the product and company name is one and the same —
for instance, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb. Even when if there is a suite of products,
like from Microsoft or Google or Adobe, each product is still huge enough to be
is own standalone business.
But why? It’s certainly one approach to building software, but it can’t be the
only way.
What would it look like for a software company to instead to try a model like
stationery? To produce potentially hundreds of tiny software apps, each
carefully and thoughtfully made — as special-purpose and opinionated as, for
instance, these paper clips by Midori:
[28]
[https]
There is a lot of aggression baked into tech culture, which especially comes to
light when discussing products of the same category. In my career as a software
engineer, I worked on both Google Chrome and Arc Browser. When I worked on
Chrome in 2010, the question was, “Will Chrome be the IE-killer?” When I worked
on Arc over ten years later, the question was still, “Will Arc be the Chrome-
killer?” Even when we aren’t talking about software murdering each other, still
the word — and goal — is “domination.” Who is the dominant browser? This
competition for dominance is recapped on the Wikipedia page entitled, [29]
Browser wars.
In the stationery world, there’s a rich ecosystem of products — hundreds, maybe
thousands of variations of something like a paper clip: a product with the same
narrow focus, same goal, trying to solve the exact same problem — and yet these
products seem to coexist peacefully.
Somehow I don’t think this pig is trying to declare war on the paper clip:
[30]
[https]
Our pig comes in peace
Is our little 🐷 even a “competitor” to the 📎? I’m not sure if I’d describe it
that way! Competitor or not, I feel like they’d be friends, hanging out,
appreciating each other’s unique qualities.
I’m interested in creating non-warring software, where variety is celebrated,
and “a different approach to the same idea” is seen as a like-minded friend
rather than an enemy to destroy. This goes hand in hand with a yes, and culture
— when there’s room for you, there’s little need to fight for survival.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🎮 A polished glimpse
I love playing video games and I watch a lot of cozy gamers on YouTube. My
favorite channel is [32]@JoshsGamingGarden.
Josh plays lots of indie farming games, and he notes that many first-time game
developers make this same mistake: They want this game to be their DREAM game,
and so they try to include in it EVERYTHING they ever wanted. Then they release
their game as a demo or in Early Access as a wide-but-shallow experience where
most of the game is there, but it’s all like 25-50% complete.
Whenever this happens, [33]Josh says, “I feel like a demo should be a very
polished, but small portion of your game.” When you have a game that is
incomplete in all areas, it’s not a good experience, and it’s hard to get a
feel for what the full game is going to be like. In comparison, a
narrow-but-deep sliver of a game is a much more compelling introduction!
A game that gets this right is [34]Super Farming Boy. The demo is only a few
hours long, but EVERYTHING presented — the the visuals, the dialogue, the
gameplay — is highly polished, and you leave with a strong feel for what this
game will grow up to be.
[35]
[https]
You can watch the gameplay from Josh’s stream earlier this year!
Truthfully, I empathize so much with those indie game developers. Hobonichi
Journal Helper is not the complete version of the software I want to create,
not at all!! Ughghgh I want to launch so much more than this! It’s frustrating
to launch something that feels like 0.01% of what I set out to do.
But I agree with Josh! It’s worth limiting myself in scope, both to make its
completion more feasible and to most effectively communicate the type of thing
I’m trying to build.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🚃 Following my zoomies
So — back to November 30th, back to the subway!
I sat on the train and I had these 3 simultaneous thoughts. I realized that
this simple unclever idea for a tool, i.e. Hobonichi Journal Helper, embodied
the spirit of these 3 insights:
• 🚙 It’s a super specific tool designed to solve a super specific problem
• 🖋️ It’s a tool that’s intended to be one of many, rather than THE ONE tool
that does everything
• 🎮 It’s a narrow and focused demo for what I am trying to do as a whole
It felt like a 4-D epiphany!! And consequently, I got this powerful urge to
DROP EVERYTHING AND BUILD JOURNAL HELPER…
…WHICH GAVE ME A MINI CRISIS! Journal Helper was NOT my plan for December!! I
was planning to focus on Pouch Issue 2 in December, and Pouch aside, I had been
developing a totally different piece of software-for-journalers lolll, whose
development I was going to pick back up in January.
Do I stick to my original plan, or do I follow this surge of inspiration?
At my past tech companies, I know exactly what I would have done: The original
plan, of course!! This was a fun idea that should be backlogged. It’s not
urgent enough to change my priorities. I should let the emotion pass and govern
myself by logic.
But earlier in November, I had a memorable conversation with an artist friend I
admire. In it, she mentioned how she gets the “productivity zoomies,” where she
feels a burst of sudden inspiration, and that energy would propel her to be
absurdly productive in a short period of time, like “designing an entire
sticker line at 2am” sorta thing. It was a style that really worked for her. As
she talked, it occurred to me how deeply I recognized the feeling she
described, yet how rarely I let myself work off that feeling.
I decided: This time, I’m gonna follow my zoomies! I dropped everything, and I
created Hobonichi Journal Helper in 10 days[37]1, from the spark of the idea on
November 30th to posting the Instagram announcement on December 10th. Only then
did my soul find peace. Zooming was the right move!
I won’t always be building-by-zoomies — my artist friend doesn’t do that,
either — but it’s something I want to incorporate more in my practice. Impulse
shouldn’t always win, but neither should restraint.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
📝 Software for paper lovers
As some of you know, I embarked on this sabbatical in July 2023, originally
with the sole intention of building software for paper lovers. As most of you
know, that’s not how I ended up spending my time! Instead, I’ve been leveling
up my design skills, taking drawing classes, I started a zine store, and I
launched my pride and joy, Pouch Magazine. None of this was planned! These
projects emerged after having uninterrupted time to follow my passions 💖
But — y’know what’s weird, maybe? — I’ve never thought of this as not on the
path to building software.
Back in August 2023, I mentioned [39]needing to level up my non-software skills
in order to level up my software-building skills. This was true, and I felt the
difference as I built Hobonichi Journal Helper: I’m a lot faster and tbh a lot
better at creating the tools I want to create!
But also: As a person who respects analog mediums equally to digital ones, why
would I limit myself to creating software? Why not make some stickers? Why not
draw a thing, if I want to? Why not make a magazine?
In the same way that I will reach for my Kokuyo Pasta Markers one day, and my
Pentel MatteHop Pens another… I want to reach for “coding” as I would any other
tool in my toolbox. As any other pen in my pouch!
With Pouch Studio, I hope to publish magazines *and* software. I’ve focused on
Pouch magazine in 2024, but I’m excited to expand the software side in 2025 and
beyond. I want to build independent, community-minded software that emerges
from a reverence for pen and paper ❤️‍🔥 Software worthy of the stationery
community that I love so dearly!
Thanks so much for reading today’s newsletter! And thank you to everyone who
has supported me and Pouch Studio this year. I’m so moved and grateful to each
and every one of you 🙏 Writing and creating for this wonderful community has
been the greatest privilege of my career.
Rest well this holidays, and I’ll see you next year! 🎄☕️
[40]1
In case unclear: I didn’t use AI tools for this. No Pouch Studio products have
been nor will be created with AI, software or otherwise. There’s more to say on
this, but it’s a big topic (and a rather draining one), so I’m containing this
to a footnote today! Will write more on this in the future when I have the time
and energy.
22
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[48]
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[49]Cheryl Lindo Jones
[50]6d
Liked by vrk
I admire your journey to build products for people intentionally and in
opposition to the logical, but not necessarily correct approaches of Big (and
not so big) Tech focusing on problems for the masses and dominating in their
product spaces. I think solving problems for niche areas and markets can build
really loyal customers who are loyal because they feel seen and heard.
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[53]1 reply by vrk
[54]
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[55]Emily
[56]3d
Liked by vrk
This is adorable and I can absolutely see this being a beloved tool by the HUGE
stationery community! Your thoughts about the “productivity zoomies” also
really spoke to me as well, and perhaps I’ll lean into my own in the future ✨
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[59]1 reply by vrk
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References:
[1] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/
[2] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/
[8] https://substack.com/home/post/p-153265026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[9] https://substack.com/profile/976344-vrk
[10] https://substack.com/@vrkmakes
[12] https://substack.com/home/post/p-153265026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[13] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comments
[14] javascript:void(0)
[15] https://www.journalhelper.com/
[16] https://www.journalhelper.com/
[17] https://www.google.com/search?q=techo+kaigi
[18] https://www.instagram.com/p/DDaEnmSRx_Q
[19] https://www.journalhelper.com/hobonichi
[21] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a664556-71a2-4271-be7e-4e00767fbb20_1600x1600.jpeg
[22] https://www.1101.com/store/techo/en/magazine/contents/stationeryclub/m1w9rgq7k.html
[24] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff0f9009f-aa89-4542-89ab-a7875045f0d0_1276x872.png
[25] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8aa810a-7d86-4966-a8aa-fa1a87dcccf9_1396x904.png
[27] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F82e6816d-a937-40e8-b76d-82e36ec3d885_2498x1352.png
[28] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fab5625ca-bf42-48c9-bbe3-6175edea2d5a_1462x1624.png
[29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
[30] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8e355d26-4a21-499c-b77a-bdcd608c1c57_280x312.png
[32] https://www.youtube.com/@JoshGamingGarden
[33] https://youtu.be/QK0Lg7QLnr8?t=1393
[34] https://www.superfarmingboy.com/
[35] https://youtu.be/wbo3Su6Y3mo?t=7116
[37] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers#footnote-1-153265026
[39] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/i/136113453/what-could-be-improved
[40] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers#footnote-anchor-1-153265026
[42] https://substack.com/home/post/p-153265026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
[43] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comments
[44] javascript:void(0)
[48] https://substack.com/profile/25419300-cheryl-lindo-jones?utm_source=comment
[49] https://substack.com/profile/25419300-cheryl-lindo-jones?utm_source=substack-feed-item
[50] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comment/83172494
[53] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comment/83172494
[54] https://substack.com/profile/7452338-emily?utm_source=comment
[55] https://substack.com/profile/7452338-emily?utm_source=substack-feed-item
[56] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comment/83634788
[59] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comment/83634788
[60] https://vrklovespaper.substack.com/p/software-for-stationery-lovers/comments
[77] https://substack.com/privacy
[78] https://substack.com/tos
[79] https://substack.com/ccpa#personal-data-collected
[80] https://substack.com/signup?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_content=footer
[81] https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_campaign=app-marketing&utm_content=web-footer-button
[82] https://substack.com/
[84] https://enable-javascript.com/

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DVD is dead. Long live DVD.
Tech’s takeover of show business has turned everything into streaming. The only
recourse is to focus on the physical.
By [39]Matt Schimkowitz | December 26, 2024 | 10:00am
Photo: Apple
[40]Film [41]Features [42]Blu-ray
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[49]
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DVD is dead. Long live DVD.
“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,”
MGM founder Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says in [50]Mank. “What he bought
still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies, and
don’t let anybody tell you different.”
Appropriately, Mank exists as a memory on Netflix. So too does David Fincher’s
follow-up, [51]The Killer, and thousands of other movies and TV shows exclusive
to the world’s largest streamer. Only a handful of Netflix originals find
domestic releases on home video, and Fincher’s work is not among them. It
belongs to the men who sold it to you, Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters. 
[52] Most Popular
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• [55] The best TV performances of 2024
This is the landscape in which the sad state of home video continued
deteriorating in 2024. Best Buy [56]ceased carrying DVDs this year. Target [57]
followed suit. Redbox rented its final Liam Neeson movie [58]and shuttered its
kiosks in July. Finally, LG[59] announced just last week that it would
discontinue all its UHD Blu-ray and Blu-ray players, joining Samsung and Sony
in ditching the optical drive.
Over a decade into the streaming revolution, tech companies have retrained
viewers on where to find and expect entertainment. They also taught them not to
expect permanence. Everything is streaming now, and we don’t mean “everything
is on streaming.” If that were the case, people [60]could have watched the 2002
movie 28 Days Later digitally before…[61]last week. Instead, everything acts
like streaming: fleeting and unpredictable. Thanks to [62]last year’s shutdowns
, [63]fewer movies were released in 2024 than in 2023. Still, despite theaters
so desperate for movies that they’ll offer an auditorium to an animated Lord Of
The Rings prequel, [64]theatrical windows kept shrinking, too. That’s if the
film sees release at all. Following outcries over Warner Bros. Discovery’s
decision to trade [65]Batgirl and [66]Scoob! Holiday Haunt for a tax write-off,
some hoped Coyote Vs. Acme [67]might find a home at a different studio.
Sacrilegious as it might be for a Looney Tune to appear under a different
shield, that hope was about as effective as an umbrella against an anvil.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav [68]scrapped the finished movie without
even watching it. 
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Peaks, I Love Lucy, and more
It wasn’t just Warner Bros. In 2023, Disney began cutting back on its library
offerings, locking dozens of titles, including brand-new ones from legacy
properties, in the vault. Show creator Jon Kasdan might be “[72]kinda into”
Disney scrubbing his Willow series from Disney+, but star Warwick Davis
continues to be [73]less enthused. “It’s a travesty that ⁦⁦@DisneyPlus value
shareholders over subscribers in their creative decision-making,” Davis [74]
posted on December 11. “I only ever saw each episode once!”
Streaming shows aren’t the only thing disappearing. Theatrical windows have
finally adopted the Steven Soderbergh dream model. Speaking to [75]The Atlantic
in 2018 to support his Netflix movie [76]High Flying Bird, Soderbergh laid out
a distribution model that resembles our current one, arguing that “the minute”
he knew Logan Lucky or Unsane were flopping, “the studio should let me drop the
movie on a platform the next week. There should be a mechanism for when
something dies at the box office like that.” Five years later, Soderbergh’s
wish was Zaslav’s command. Two of the year’s most expensive underperformers,
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie À Deux, found their theatrical windows
slammed shut. Less than two weeks after the films failed to meet opening
weekend expectations, both were in half as many theaters and all but gone by
the end of the month. Forget about allowing movies to find their audiences
(which both Furiosa and Joker have now begun to do); even sleepers-by-design
can’t catch a break. Juror #2, the latest (and perhaps last) from Clint
Eastwood, a director who has made over a billion dollars for WB, got a [77]
shrugged-off release for awards contention and an unceremonious dumping on
Max. 
Again, it’s not just Warner Bros. Discovery. Several filmmakers spoke out
against tech-run studios reversing course on theatrical releases this year. In
January, amid his spat with Amazon over Road House, Doug Liman [78]published an
op-ed accusing Amazon-owned MGM of having “no interest in supporting cinemas”
and using his movie “to sell plumbing fixtures.” He continued: 
Amazon will sell more toasters if it has more subscribers; it will have
more subscribers if it doesn’t have to compete with movie theaters […] But
a computer doesn’t know what it is like to share the experience of laughing
and cheering and crying with a packed audience in a dark theater – and if
Amazon has its way, future audiences won’t know either.
By the end of the year, Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts was in a
[79]similar situation. Watts made the George Clooney/Brad Pitt two-hander
Wolfs, assuming it would receive a theatrical release. Ironically, its
distributor Apple was a wolf in a fleece vest. “[Apple’s] last-minute shift
from a promised wide theatrical release to a streaming release was a total
surprise and made without any explanation or discussion,” Watts told [80]
Collider. “I wasn’t even told about it until less than a week before they
announced it to the world.” Watts later confirmed to [81]Deadline, “Apple
didn’t cancel the Wolfs sequel. I did, because I no longer trusted them as a
creative partner.” No wonder Apple’s big awards contender, Blitz, was mainly
left online.
The impermanence, both on streaming and in theaters, shows how much power
consumers have ceded to corporations and their shareholders. Just as people no
longer own music collections, opting to rent monthly from Spotify, they’ve done
the same with movies in a grander fashion. Recent studies [82]have shown that
Americans, on average, pay for 2.9 streaming services a month, costing them
about $46. Other studies show that 62% of Americans think there are too many
streaming options, each with its own unpredictable rotating library. 
The promise of streaming was always impossible. How long could these
once-maverick start-ups, which vacuumed streaming rights up before the industry
knew how valuable they were, continue to offer the world’s history of recorded
art for a simple fee? However long we expected our liberation from cords and
ads, we’re at the end of it. Two years after Netflix cracked down on passwords
and launched its ad tier, Prime and Apple TV+ have followed suit. One doesn’t
become a $3 trillion company by giving The Instigators away for free, and
Apple’s theatrical missteps Argyle and Fly Me To The Moon didn’t help. Now, the
world’s largest TV manufacturer, TCL, which revolutionized [83]serving ads sans
content, is looking to [84]replace entertainment with AI slop. It also doesn’t
help that, 15 years into the streaming revolution, most subscribers still opt
to watch licensed material produced by traditional networks and studios. “The
new shows can come and go,” [85]said former NBC Studios president Tom Nunan.
But it’s Suits and The Office that keep people subscribing.
Outside of piracy, the only thing consumers can do is invest in permanence. To
wit, the right time to start collecting physical media is immediately. While
optical drives became an even more endangered species, there were some moments
of hope. Retailers that announced the end of DVDs struggled to keep Oppenheimer
4Ks on the shelf. People love to meme Christopher Nolan’s analog advocacy, but
he’s right. There is a risk that an “[86]evil streaming service can come to
steal” movies from personal devices. Just ask Indiana Jones. Recently, [87]
Disney lost the rights to stream the first four Indiana Jones movies. However,
fans can always watch The Dial Of Destiny, the only Jones film on Disney+.
Nolan [88]explained how a company like Disney losing a jewel of the $4 billion
Lucasfilm empire they bought more than a decade ago is business as usual:
The danger I’m talking about with a filmmaker’s film just sort of
disappearing from streaming one day and then maybe not coming back or not
coming back for a long period of time, that’s not an intentional
conspiracy. That’s just a way that with the particular licensing
agreements, the way things are evolving.
But while the doom and gloom of the industry could weigh heavy, physical media
has rarely felt more joyous. Fourteen years after Guillermo del Toro made his
first Closet picks for an impromptu Facebook video, Criterion made its storage
room between two bathrooms the company mascot. GQ [89]noted that the Criterion
Closet videos had a similar effect as Hot Ones, the rare opportunity to see
“actors and other film professionals outside the usual promotional context,”
becoming the “least cynical part on the press tour.” The joy of the videos is
seeing Willem Dafoe talk about Onibaba or Maya Hawke recommending 3 Women,
leading with a reverence for art rather than content. In a world where studios
seemingly resent having to make, let alone release, motion pictures, producers
of physical media have made their brands on love and curiosity for the medium.
It’s a stark contrast from how artists like Dafoe see streaming consumption.
“People go home, and they shop around on these streaming platforms,” the actor
[90]told Vulture. “There’s some good things about the platforms. They create a
lot of movies. They create a lot of jobs. But there’s so many distractions that
you can’t enter the stuff. People watch five minutes of something and they say,
‘I’m not really into it’ and they go to another thing. ‘I’m not really into
it.’ Then another thing. ‘I’m not really into it.’ Then they go to bed. If you
don’t put in the effort, you’re not going to receive much. And the discourse
gets lowered, and everything gets a little more dumbed down and then that’s
when the ruffians come in, and they’re the ones with energy and stupidity and
then they can crush all the thoughtful people. That’s not good for culture, and
that’s not good for humanity. We see the results of that all the time.”
But those are the big guys. Independent DVD rental houses and repertory
theaters are also having a rebirth. And we’re not just talking about the [91]
successful re-releases of Interstellar and Coraline. As some theater chains in
North America [92]contemplated evolving into Dave & Busters, rep theaters [93]
saw a surge in popularity. Meanwhile, as everyone waxes nostalgic about going
to Blockbuster, indie video stores are giving cinephiles the real deal. Stores
like [94]Scarecrow Video in Seattle and [95]Vidiots in Los Angeles build
communities that unite film fans who want to see and appreciate movies. People
don’t travel from across the globe to stream Damsel, but they will [96]drive
350 miles to see Interstellar in IMAX. 
In 2024, the future of streaming has never looked shakier. The products,
practically and creatively, are getting worse, and the waning enthusiasm from
companies like Apple represents a chance to break this cycle. Investing in
physical media at least partially separates oneself from a system failing its
consumers and ensures that the thing you want to watch is always available. A
Blu-ray won’t suddenly sprout advertisements or disappear from your collection.
It’s one of the reasons that buying DVDs has felt so empowering this year.
Physical discs continue spinning as the mainstream model cuts its nose to spite
its face. In a media landscape where the only sure thing is that there are no
sure things, our best bet is still to put a disc in a drive.
[97]More from A.V. Club
• [98]DVD is dead. Long live DVD.
• [99]Shrinking ends season two with an earned sweetness
• [100]Justin Baldoni is being sued by his own former PR now
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[2] https://www.pastemagazine.com/
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[62] https://www.avclub.com/strike-victories-one-year-later
[63] https://www.themarysue.com/a-lack-of-movies-in-2024-has-the-box-office-poised-to-lose-billions/
[64] https://www.indiewire.com/news/box-office/theatrical-windows-summer-2024-films-week-shorter-previous-year-1235056046/
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[71] https://www.avclub.com/best-prime-day-deals-blu-ray-dvd-1849166802
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[115] https://www.avclub.com/justin-baldoni-sued-former-publicist-it-ends-with-us-blake-lively
[116] https://www.avclub.com/justin-baldoni-sued-former-publicist-it-ends-with-us-blake-lively
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How to disappear completely
The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when
websites start to vanish at random?
By [14]s.e. smith
Dec 18, 2024, 1:00 PM UTC
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[How_to_dis]
Michelle Rohn / The Verge
Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old
article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists,
teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply
people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link
suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found
references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to
its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society
and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in
cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on
digital decay found that [19]38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not
accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed,
and entire websites vanish, as in the case of [20]dozens of scientific journals
and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for
news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose [21]
one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that
have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a
series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. Sometimes it is me
searching for that content, spending an hour reverse engineering something in
the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the whole article, not
just a quote in another publication, an echo of an echo. It’s reached the point
where I upload PDFs of my clips to [22]my personal website in addition to
linking to them to ensure they’ll remain accessible (until I stop paying my
hosting fees, at least), thinking bitterly of the volume of work I’ve lost to
shuttered websites, restructured links, hacks that were never repaired, servers
disrupted, sometimes accompanied by false promises that an archive would be
restored and maintained.
Who am I, if not my content?
When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to
find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if
not my content? It is hard not to feel the disappearance of creative work as a
different kind of death of the author, one in which readers can’t interpret my
work because they can’t find it. It is a sort of fading away, of losing shape
and relevance.
We live in a content era, the creator economy, in which everyone and their
grandparent has turned into a “content creator.” We are watching the internet
slip away as websites and apps rise and fall, swallowed by private equity,
shuttered by burnout, or simply frozen in time — taking with it our memories,
our cultural phenomena, our memes. In theory, as we like to tell Zoomers who
are putting it all out there, “the internet is forever.” Employers and enemies
can and will ferret out your worst moments on the internet, and even things
that were, in theory, deleted can be resurfaced on mirrored sites and archives,
with screenshots of half-forgotten forums. And yet, in reality, things can
disappear as though they never were, sometimes quite suddenly. The same
accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a
website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into
an easy go. A social media account can be locked or banned for a real or
perceived terms of service violation in the blink of an eye, a venerable
feminist publication can [23]abruptly vanish, a news startup can [24]wink out
of existence just as quickly as it rose to prominence, and news organizations
can nuke [25]decades of music journalism or [26]TV archives at the flick of a
switch. Restructured links and a [27]fundamentally broken search infrastructure
can shift an article out of view to all but the most determined. I wonder, for
example, how long my [28]National Magazine Award-winning column at Catapult
will remain accessible online, living as it does [29]at the whims of its owner,
an eccentric billionaire.
The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies,
marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a
distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote,
and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also,
of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable
penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For
every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more
have been destroyed over the millennia. 
Two hands holding two postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an
old-fashioned computer and reads: Content Goblins.Two hands holding two
postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an old-fashioned computer and
reads: Content Goblins.
Two hands holding two postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an
old-fashioned computer and reads: Content Goblins.Two hands holding two
postcards, the front of which shows a goblin at an old-fashioned computer and
reads: Content Goblins.
This story is featured in [30]Content Goblins, a limited-run print magazine
about “content” and the people who “make” it. Get your copy of this gorgeous /
deranged publication by [31]signing up for an annual subscription to The Verge,
while supplies last.
This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every
painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted,
content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I
discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover
some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box
to the racks of servers [32]slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to
obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with [33]even the
Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.  
Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how
people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of
contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s
our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the
gaps that we read history or are forced to consider why some things are more
likely to persist than others, are more remembered than others, why other
histories are subject to active suppression, as we’re seeing across the United
States with legislation targeting the accurate teaching of history.
So why does the present situation feel so severe? The shortest and most obvious
answer is that things feel more real when we are living through them and they
affect us directly; what we understand intellectually about history hits
different when we’re living it, especially for the “Extremely Online” among us
who are constantly saturated in a steady supply of mourning over the death of
the internet and “you might be a millennial if [you recognize a floppy disc /
landline phone / LAN party]” memes. 
The longer answer speaks to the arc of historical trends that are fundamentally
reshaping humanity, with the boom in artificial intelligence standing out as a
particularly brutal contributor to our present state. While many have been
enjoying a little AI, as a treat, dabbling in ChatGPT to help draft an angry
letter to the utility company, or goofing around with increasingly unhinged
Midjourney prompts, we are unwittingly contributing to the engine of our own
despair. 
There’s a phenomenon that happens where I live along the rugged coastline of
Northern California, when conditions are right, or more accurately, wrong: a
layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the
waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking
slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet
feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully
into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively
replaced by garbage. 
How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and
artistic pursuits?
Garbage created by an industry broadly referring to itself as “artificial
intelligence” — a term so overused that it is starting to lose all meaning —
devouring and then regurgitating our content, a froth of green, smelly foulness
that rests on the sands where people once walked. I am starting to disassociate
every time I get a new notification about terms of service in which I learn
that my content will be used to train yet another large language model designed
to replace me, as corporations attempt to replace creativity and joy with a
mountain of trash. I attempt to negotiate for protective clauses in contracts
and am rejected, lie awake at night wondering how much of my work has already
been folded into systems generating billions in profits for their makers on the
backs of our labor, sigh every time I log in to LinkedIn and all the writing
jobs are actually advertisements for training the latest AI hotness. 
The comparison with our green tides runs deeper than that, as AI is literally
[34]burning up the world in the name of profits, driving the climate change
that [35]causes toxic algae blooms. Much like the British tossing papyrus and
mummies into the hungry maws of steam engines, we are destroying history and
culture to fuel the empire, and the empire is profit. The result is [36]
internet poisoning, a landscape saturated in misinformation and AI garbage — at
best [37]comical, at worst, [38]lethal. For future generations interested in
knowing more about the world we live in, it has the potential to make it nearly
impossible to untangle fact from fiction, art from fakery. There is something
deeply offensive in knowing not only that hundreds of thousands of my words
have vanished, but that some LLM is probably crawling through the tattered
fragments to churn out mockeries of the very real sources, research, and energy
that once backed those words. They’ll be vomited back on the shores of my
browser, squirming and stinking. 
There is also a strange and bitter loss of autonomy in watching humans slowly
disappear beyond a veil of AI murk and inherently unstable digital storage, a
dark twist at a moment when so many of us are fighting for our right to exist
in our own bodies. We have come to accept, without reading, the terms of
service that assign the rights of our content to the platforms we post on, and
when those platforms abruptly close or [39]delete our content or lock us out of
our accounts, we mourn the loss as we receive a firsthand lesson in what it
means to sign our digital rights away. When I choose to delete my tweets, take
my self-hosted blog off the internet, or set up a finsta, I’m in control of my
data destiny, but the loss of control when archives are maintained by the
winners serves to make me feel small, forgotten, easily disposed of.
The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet
will always be there — potentially to haunt us — feels less true in an era when
data is constantly disappearing. The internet is not, in fact, forever;
sometimes the zombie of a bad take will linger, sure, but just as probably,
we’ll vanish, as I recently discovered when I realized that one of my Twitter
accounts, active from 2009–2023, had been wiped because I hadn’t logged in
recently. An untold number of bon mots, educational threads, exchanges with
fellow users, photographs, and of course, misinformed, shitty opinions I’d
rather forget, simply gone, into the ether. It felt, perhaps irrationally, like
being erased, like that person had never been. 
I think sometimes of the [40]Voyager Golden Records, spinning endlessly into
eternity, a cry into the void that features a selection of carefully curated
human experiences in an attempt to communicate the vastness of Earth’s history
and culture to other beings. The offerings, selected by a committee led by Carl
Sagan, include a photograph of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of
footsteps, a sampling from The Magic Flute, an image of an astronaut in space,
a human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must
have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations,
but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly
fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a
testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival
work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve
information. 
We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first
lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve
the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a
conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which
things should be allowed to disappear into the waves, and who among us stands
to be remembered, echoing, like Sagan’s laughter, into the future. How
comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and
artistic pursuits? And who is making these decisions — private equity or
journalists, AI or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these
questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture of the
future.
Most Popular
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One dead, seven injured as Cybertruck explodes outside Trump’s hotel in Las
Vegas
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Popeye and Tintin are now in the public domain
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The Steam Deck has finally been surpassed — by a fork of Valve’s own
experience
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4. [45]
Is Sleep’s Dopesmoker still the heaviest album of all time?
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5. [46]
Nosferatu is the stuff of exquisitely erotic nightmares
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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References:
[1] https://www.theverge.com/24321569/internet-decay-link-rot-web-archive-deleted-culture#content
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[8] https://www.theverge.com/entertainment
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[13] https://www.theverge.com/internet-culture
[14] https://www.theverge.com/authors/s-e-smith
[19] https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/
[20] https://www.science.org/content/article/dozens-scientific-journals-have-vanished-internet-and-no-one-preserved-them
[21] https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/06/newspapers-close-decline-in-local-journalism/
[22] https://www.realsesmith.com/clips
[23] https://www.opb.org/article/2022/04/17/portland-based-bitch-media-closing-doors-june-2022/
[24] https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/the-messenger-shutting-down-effective-immediately-1235893470/
[25] https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/mtv-news-website-archives-pulled-offline-1236047163/
[26] https://latenighter.com/news/paramount-axes-comedy-central-website-show-clips-library/
[27] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
[28] https://magazine.catapult.co/column/stories/the-beauty-of-spaces-created-for-and-by-disabled-people
[29] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/business/elizabeth-koch-perception-box.html
[30] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24307540/verge-print-magazine-seo-content-goblins
[31] https://www.theverge.com/subscribe
[32] https://www.hcn.org/articles/do-data-centers-mean-doomsville-for-renewable-energy/
[33] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/scientists/projects/cd_longevity.html
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