Mark O’Connell

Polanski: I think there should be boycott of Israel
Peston: A boycott of a democracy? How dare you
Polanski: Well actually Israel just tortured a load of international civilians which is a war crime
Peston: Wow would you look at the time

The Dublin Review at 100 - Dublin Book Festival The Dublin Review, Ireland’s quarterly magazine of essays, memoir, reportage and fiction, is celebrating its 100th issue. Join us for a special live broadcast of RTÉ Arena on Radio 1 in conversation w...

We'll be doing a live Arena show at @dublinbookfest.bsky.social celebrating 100 issues of @thedublinreview.bsky.social.

We'll have editor Brendan Barrington, contributors Sara Baume, @patrickfreyne.bsky.social, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and @mrkocnnll.bsky.social.

Do come, it's going to be special...

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

The War App | Mark O’Connell Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data

“It is often said that many nonfiction books should really have been magazine articles; this one feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages.” —Mark O’Connell on Palantir’s founder’s first book

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

Yeah man, keep being patronising snobs, that’ll get liberalism back on the road

Terrible book, terrible guy, great magazine

Yes, in the same way your thermostat suffers from the pain of burning

Exactly the effect I was going for, thrilled I pulled it off

Catholic handbags!!

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Instagram ads have gotten exponentially worse recently, right? Just an endlessly encroaching tide of slop and cheap scams

Thank you!

An Opera Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space

The NYT talked to @jenniferwalshe.bsky.social and me about MARS, which opens tonight at Galway Arts Festival

This is such a terrific piece of criticism

I think that’s a solid assumption

Hell yeah! Let’s fuckin DO THIS!!!

Oo remembers lying awake after dinner at Combray for maman to give you a goodnight kiss?

LMFAO

The outcome of the last ten years or so of culture is governments doing cancel culture on behalf of a military death machine

British aid workers 'died from blast wounds' in Gaza - inquest James Kirby, James Henderson and John Chapman were killed in an air strike on 1 April.

The IDF killed three British aid workers last year.
The UK refuses to investigate Israel for killing its citizens but will investigate British people for cursing the IDF
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Don’t tell me about a thing being “downstream of” another thing. I don’t want to hear it, and I won’t listen to it!

X post by Bryan Johnson: I'm 18 years old and have a 19 year old kid. Pretty wild.

This is an X screenshot I can get behind. No more J.K. Rowling screengrabs, just Bryan Johnson being delusional about how well his age reversal project is going

Patrick Collison here, illustrating a mindset that is, in many ways, a simple misunderstanding of life itself

It didn't strike me that it might be one of those words you don't really hear anymore

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star – podcast He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde ge...

For those of you who were simply too lazy to read my essay about MrBeast and the attention economy yourselves, here's me reading it for you www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2...

thinking again about this 2018 cover

Seems a little drastic, he could just shut them down in the normal way

"noice" bsky.app/profile/zack...