Rob Horning explores the term “creator” in this essay on labor, exploitation, and content production and consumption on the internet. “Creator,” like “creativity,” is essentially a null term that signifies nothing about one’s activity but instead marks one’s limitless availability — a willingness to make anything at all in one’s life into content for sale.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
Your Next Hospital Bed Might Be at Home
“In a time of strained capacity, the ‘hospital at home’ movement is figuring out how to create an inpatient level of care anywhere.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple
“Tim Cook takes pride in not hiding his email address, which is readily available on the search engine of your choice.”
Posted inTop 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
This week, we feature stories from Tom Scocca, Giles Harvey, Chris Walker, Krithika Varagur, and N.C. Happe.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How the AI Industry Profits from Catastrophe
The demand for data labeling in the artificial intelligence industry — tagging videos, sorting photos, and transcribing audio in order to train AI — has created a massive need for cheap labor, leading data-labeling platforms such as Appen to hire low-pay workers in countries like Venezuela, the Philippines, and Kenya to do these tasks. In […]
Posted inNewsletter
A Friend Named Arthur and The Week’s Top 5
“But now I like to imagine him in Paris, sitting at a café, drinking an espresso, his notebook open, full of notes and poetry. It’s easy to picture in my mind. He’d look perfect there.” Four years ago, Kevin Sampsell lost his friend Arthur to suicide. He started writing about him three years ago—but the […]
Posted inNewsletter
The Uncanniest Valley (and the Rest of Our Top 5)
In this edition: Concrete memories, grief science, captive cats, relentless pain, and myth meets reality.
Posted inQuotes
How a Hacker Named P4x Took Down North Korea’s Internet
North Korea hacked him. Things got personal.
Posted inNewsletter
Award Tour (and the Week’s Top 5)
Featuring stories about celebrity look-alikes, siblings, desert living, philanthrocapitalism, and life inside a legal brothel.
Posted inNewsletter
Embracing Envinylmentalism
A look at the environmental cost of the booming vinyl record industry.
