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May 27 2014

four links, may 27

Maciej’s talk for Beyond Tellerand. “These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It’s easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you’ve buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected.”

A head-shaking correction in the Times’ Upshot, in a post about Piketty’s use of spreadsheets. “An earlier draft version of this article, which drew a different conclusion about Thomas Piketty’s use of spreadsheets, was initially posted in error.” I’d love to see the email thread about this one.

danah boyd: Selling Out is Meaningless. “These teens are not going to critique their friends for being sell-outs because they’ve already been sold out by the adults in their world. These teens want freedom and it’s our fault that they don’t have it except in commercial spaces.” Note: I started to tell my 13 y/o at dinner about this post, and her first question was “what do you mean, ‘sell out?’” And then this happened…

…which in my mind is completely related to this point that danah was making:

Rather than relying on the radio for music recommendations, they turn to YouTube and share media content through existing networks, undermining industrial curatorial control. As a result, I constantly meet teens whose sense of the music industry is radically different than that of peers who live next in the next town over.

Zach Baron’s profile of 50 Cent, via kottke. every little bit is quotable, but I’ll pull this:

He represented a vision of street-oriented realness that not enough people cared about anymore, even if his fan base wouldn’t let him be anything but that. “I even saw when keeping it real—like, that concept or that phrase ‘keeping it real’—went out of style. Now it’s like, it doesn’t matter what it is, it just matters that it sounds good.”

Even if it’s fake…oh, never mind.