thebaffler.com

When severance agreements demand workers' silence.

What is it, exactly, that is connecting us on the internet? Is connection for its own sake, without some common aim or purpose, altogether valuable?

Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

The new mural “The Chronicles of San Francisco,” on display at SFMOMA, is the perfect neoliberal delusion of harmony transcending difference toward a better world.

When it comes to figuring out what This Whole Trump Thing really means, actual juveniles are reading at several grade levels above the sophisticated adults.

Lonely, confused and horny brands are irritating enough, but Netflix accounts regularly tip over into ugly self-righteousness, presenting a corporation with an estimated $165 billion valuation as a friend to the underrepresented and the downtrodden.

Jenny Holzer’s short, shareable observations have obtained a new audience in the age of the internet, and with that audience, a more varied range of significance.

Sacramento teachers have had to make a series of difficult compromises.

April 15th is a day for redistributing the wealth — directly to the corporations and the rich.

A step away from your devices doubles as a step toward using them more efficiently, often for the ultimate benefit of bosses and shareholders. For Jenny Odell, “doing nothing” means breaking this cycle.

The Vessel in New York’s Hudson Yards is a structure that invites parody — it has already been likened to a giant shawarma, a beehive, a pine cone and a wastebasket.

There are, of course, things that become occluded in this process, not the least of which is that corporations, by their very nature, exist and survive and thrive on the rank exploitation of millions, even as others seem to be uplifted.

The trouble with the civility fetish.

When Silicon Valley usurps the transcendent potential of extraterrestrial life.

Inside the great digital mis-engineering of the Toronto waterfront.

A largely white boomer fan base has come to embrace the unironic confession of troubled male life only when it excises the expression of black pain — not to mention black history.

In the novels of John Williams, everything happens suddenly and signifies nothing

The internet feeds on its own dying dreams.

Decoding the defenses and alibis that R. Kelly uses to survive the ever-increasing allegations against him.

The right’s bid to short-circuit inequality with cheap gizmos.