Search Results for: Internet

Reading List: Brave New Internet

Longreads Pick

Picks from Emily Perper, a freelance editor and reporter currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

Share your favorite stories in the comments.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 19, 2013

Slow Porn: Cindy Gallop’s Quest to Blow Up Internet Sex

Longreads Pick

Meet the woman who wants to reprogram the porn industry and change our perceptions of meaningful sex:

“Gallop’s residence in the Flatiron District–a glamorous and sprawling loft dubbed The Black Apartment–looks more like the set of a high-class erotic thriller than a casual homemade porn video. A converted YMCA locker room, it was actually used as the set for The Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Nasty Gal’ video in 2005. The cavernous loft, filled with taxidermy and lined with bookshelves, windows, and a display case for Gallop’s 300 pairs of high heels, also serves as the base of operations for Make Love Not Porn when her staffers are in New York.

“As we sat there, Gallop facing me over a taxidermy statue of a mongoose fighting a cobra, she began to tell me the story of her fascination with porn.”

Source: Motherboard
Published: Mar 6, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,573 words)

The Internet’s Best Terrible Person Goes to Jail

Longreads Pick

Hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, an infamous Internet troll, has been convicted of computer crimes for his role in a 2010 breach of AT&T’s customer data. But he also has a surprising number of supporters:

“In spite, or maybe because of, his online notoriety, Auernheimer is good at making real-life friends like Nick with the Buick, and the guy with the private jet—people who can help him out. In person, he exudes a downhome country charm that is so disarming you may not realize he’s been expounding very loudly about Jewish-controlled banks and armed revolution against the U.S. government—that is, until the people in the Starbucks around you start flashing you dirty looks. Auernheimer has found a strong support network in New York, comprised of a colorful group of geeks, bohemian hackers and artists who have helped to keep him off the streets by giving him odd programming jobs and letting him crash on their couches. There is some overlap with Occupy Wall Street, which Auernheimer was involved with briefly, during its height last fall. Auernheimer refers to his New York friends as the only family he has. They clearly adore him for all his peculiarities.

“‘On the one hand he can do and say some really appalling things just for the sake of attention,’ says Meredith L. Patterson, a respected computer scientist and developer. ‘But on the other hand when he’s dealing with somebody who he thinks is genuine and not hypocritical, he’s respectful and genuine towards them.’ Patterson recalls how Auernheimer comforted her after a guy ‘decided to get all grabby’ at a hacker conference this past August in Las Vegas. ‘Of all the people in the world, Weev was genuinely sympathetic and supportive,’ she says.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Nov 27, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,025 words)

Diary: Internet Dating

Longreads Pick

A woman reflects on the virtues and limits of online dating:

“I went on a date with a classical composer who invited me to a John Cage concert at Juilliard. After the concert we looked for the bust of Béla Bartók on 57th Street. We couldn’t find it, but he told me how Bartók had died there of leukaemia. I wanted to like this man, who was excellent on paper, but I didn’t. I gave it another go. We went out for a second time to eat ramen in the East Village. I ended the night early. He next invited me to a concert at Columbia and then to dinner at his house. I said yes but I cancelled at the last minute, claiming illness and adding that I thought our dating had run its course. I was in fact sick, but he was angry with me. My cancellation, he wrote, had cost him a ‘ton of time shopping, cleaning and cooking that I didn’t really have to spare in the first place a few days before a deadline …’ He punctuated almost exclusively with Pynchonian ellipses.

“I apologised, then stopped responding. In the months that followed he continued to write, long emails with updates of his life, and I continued not responding until it came to seem as if he was lobbing his sadness into a black hole, where I absorbed it into my own sadness.”

Author: Emily Witt
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,812 words)

Indentured Servitude, Money Laundering, and Piles of Money: The Crazy Secrets of Internet Cam Girls (NSFW)

Longreads Pick

A look at the women who work as “Internet cam girls,” and the criminal activity that may be occurring behind some of the cam networks:

“‘Cam sites are ideal for laundering. The studios are being used to have girls online accepting a financed hand that uses ‘dirty’ money to buy the private time. The studio gets paid for the private session, the girl gets her (very small) part and so the money comes back clean,’ Mila says. As a result, ‘most Russian and Romanian studios are Mafia owned,’ a claim she extends to the wider developing world. The picture becomes clearer when you remember how scattered and obfuscated these networks’ financial structures are—it’d be easier to confusingly launder money through a company that’s somehow simultaneously based in both Hungary and Portugal.

“The Eastern Bloc countries that so many cam girls call home are repeatedly mentioned in sex trafficking reports as both sources and conduits of illicit sex work—MyFreeCams has gone as far as banning all models from the Philippines, where conditions are said to be the most brutal.

“The reasoning isn’t mentioned, but is easy to surmise. Moving the exploitation online, where girls are under ‘contract’ to stay in a room for half a day at a time with dubious legal recourse, makes criminal sense.”

Author: Sam Biddle
Source: Gizmodo
Published: Sep 18, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,903 words)

The Long, Fake Life of J.S. Dirr: A Decade-Long Internet Cancer Hoax Unravels

Longreads Pick

Tracing a years-long Internet hoax back to its creator, a 22-year-old woman in Ohio:

“On the evening of May 13, Mother’s Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the moment she gave birth. The morning after the crash, her husband John (‘J.S.’) Dirr posted a note on Warrior Eli, a Facebook page the Dirrs had created to document their 5-year-old son Eli’s battle with cancer: ‘Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life,” J.S. wrote. “I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend.’ Miraculously, Dana had held on in the hospital just long enough to have her baby—a daughter, and the Dirr’s eleventh child.

“If any of it had been true, it would have made for a very sad story—the kind of story that would have taken over the news cycle on Mother’s Day, even. But there was none of that, because the Dirrs are not real. They are, in some ways, just the latest example of the countless hoaxes perpetrated by bored, lonely people the world wide web over.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Jun 6, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,606 words)

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Longreads Pick

Why do startups struggle after being acquired by giant companies like Yahoo? They’re forced to focus on integration instead of innovation:

“When a new startup comes into an established company, the first wall it typically hits is CorpDev, or corporate development: the group within a business that manages change. CorpDev is usually charged with planning corporate strategy—where a business will grow or shrink, the markets it will enter or exit, and what kind of contracts and deals it may strike with other companies. It often oversees acquisitions. It plans them. Approves them. And then it sets the terms.

“When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It’s similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs.”

Author: Mat Honan
Source: Gizmodo
Published: May 15, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,347 words)

Is an ESPN Columnist Scamming People on the Internet?

Longreads Pick

The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page:

“Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a contributor to her new sports-comedy site. Within 15 minutes, she had another idea: ‘Here’s something I just thought of: Instead of becoming a contributor, would you like to join our team as an editor/creator for the memes section?’

“With this proposal, he could make even more money. She spelled out specifics for him: She told him that her ‘initial goal’ for the site would be 2.5 million pageviews per month, which would bring him $38,400 a year. By the fall, they’d have 7.5 million pageviews per month and he’d be making $102,000 per year. Big money for a 19-year-old college student.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: May 1, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,445 words)

How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet’s Favorite Spambot

Longreads Pick

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out “context-free nonsense” and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase:

“The feed’s strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack Twitter comedians. Since it appeared in August 2010, word of Horse_ebooks has spread steadily, propelled by blog posts and Twitter chatter by internet obsessives. But unlike many internet culture phenomenons, it never truly went viral. Horse_Ebooks is too weird, too much of an acquired taste to break into exponential growth.

“But these same qualities that have relegated Horse_ebooks to relative obscurity have inspired a passionate Twitter fanbase rivaled only by Beliebers. Followers have fashioned an elaborate fandom based on Horse_ebooks, comics, fan-fiction, merchandise, and inside-jokes. A browser plug-in that turned the text of any website into Horse_ebook-isms was the latest craze among fans. A characteristic Horse_ebook superfan boast is: ‘I unfollowed Horse_ebooks, because my friends retweet all its tweets anyway.’ We’re so deep into Horse_ebooks, you couldn’t escape it if you tried.”

Source: Gawker
Published: Feb 24, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,141 words)

Where an Internet Joke Is Not Just a Joke

Longreads Pick

To slip past censors, Chinese bloggers have become masters of comic subterfuge, cloaking their messages in protective layers of irony and satire. This is not a new concept, but it has erupted so powerfully that it now defines the ethos of the Internet in China. Coded language has become part of mainstream culture, with the most contagious memes tapping into widely shared feelings about issues that cannot be openly discussed, from corruption and economic inequality to censorship itself. “Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” says Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose Web site, China Digital Times, maintains an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”

Published: Oct 26, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,908 words)