From Julia Montes Landa and the Small Performances team. 'The manufacture of the Baskerville typographic punches: the versatile chaîne opératoire of an 18th-century printing workshop'. Read the full piece for free here. www.nature.com/articles/s40...
“In a January interview with Digiday, Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould described ForbesPredict as the ‘gamification of following a story.’”
🤬 futurism.com/future-socie...
Amazing
On my way to my fourth media/journalism conference for field research. Absolutely ready to burn some bridges at this point.
“[…] at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.”
www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...
“To paraphrase Wittgenstein, with genomics, the metaphors used are temporary scaffolding — you use them to climb up to the window, the concept, then kick them away. By contrast, with AI, the metaphors are the window.” makingsciencepublic.com/2026/04/17/s...
someone else said this today but i think this is less of a reflection on AI and more of the power and precarity of the tech industry in the 2020s
Ah we’ve reached the “Long Island ice tea blockchain”-stage of the bubble
I spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on anti-tech extremism about the rising violence against executives and politicians who support AI data centers.
Our conclusion?
Expect a lot more future violence over AI data centers, period.
My latest for @heatmap.news
The Massachusetts General Court required in 1776 that in each community a person be appointed to collect rags. To conserve paper, it remained until 1818 a punishable offense in England to print newssheets or broadsides larger than 22 by 32 inches (roughly the current size of the New York Times). The search for a reliable, less expensive alternative to rag scrap as the raw material for paper had been unsuccessful - though not for want of effort. Several materials were tried experimentally, including hemp, pine cones, used shingles, potatoes, and asbestos. A particularly imaginative source for rag itself was found in the mid19th century in Egyptian mummies. Shiploads of mummies were sent from Egypt to paper companies in the United States, where their linen wrappings were taken off and recycled, so to speak, into paper. This continued for some time, apparently without the intervention of concerned health officials, outraged clergy or jealous archaeologists. The only competition the papermakers had for the mummies was from the new Egyptian railroad, which, it seems, used them as fueL
I love stumbling across bonkers niche histories. Today: mummy paper.
(Cook, 1995)
Tapping the sign.
“You see the go-fast-but-also-meh-whatever vibe everywhere if you look for it.” honnibal.dev/blog/clownpo...
There's also a very neat little hype panel planned, based on the project between @akademie.dw.com and @hypestudies.bsky.social. www.journalismfestival.com/programme/20...
I'll be (Lufthansa strike willing) at the International Journalism Festival from tomorrow until Saturday. Hit me up if you're also in town! Always down for an espresso between my fieldnotes. ✌🏻 www.journalismfestival.com
I nominate “Archivschreck”.
Anyway… always fun reading the comments of Americans trying to stick together absolutely nonsense combinations.
Screencap from Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex showing Batou and a Tachikoma. The shot has been altered to show the Tachikoma handing Batou a copy of the preprint.
Sneak preview of a new preprint looking at adoption of Generative AI in the cybercrime underground: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.29545 we use a very large crime forum dataset to explore how cybercrime actors are adopting (or not) these tools - a phenomenon we call 'vibercrime'
Curiously, if you read the actual report backwards, it spells out “management failure” over and over again fortune.com/2026/04/08/g...
Eh, it most likely simply draws on the catechisms and a saint database and is also most likely not in any way officially sanctioned by the Vatican.
It’s an attractive premise, and it has saved lives. But as I wrote in my CGM feature earlier this week, fulfilling this wearable vision is often harder than it seems and can come at a high personal cost. And this wearable promise is starting to shift. Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed a new cycle emerging. Tell people using wearables will help them take control of their health. To do that more effectively, collect even more specific and specialized data. To make sense of this massive amount of data, inject AI into the process. To justify adding AI, hop on wellness trends and frame this as a more personalized way to take control of their health.
From there, the hype cycle evolves. To reinforce the previous feature cycle, reemphasize that wearable tech will not only help people take control of their health, it will help them live longer. To do that effectively, introduce new scores that predict lifespan and aging. To make sense of new scores, update AI bots to dispense generic health advice as a resource. To justify adding AI, remind them that this personalized experience holds the key to living a longer, healthier life. Rinse and repeat with a new wellness trend.
Gotta say, it’s really affirming to see someone who covers wearables as their job point this out. www.theverge.com/column/90973...
“The sparrows are dead. The locusts haven’t arrived yet. The flowers bloomed full of poison pills. The furnaces produced pig iron stamped as steel that’s now load-bearing.” leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/0...
We created a Hype Literacy course for journalists with @akademie.dw.com 🔥Also relevant for educators, policymakers, and researchers interested in how tech narratives shape public understanding.
Great work by Jascha Bareis, @imaginaries.bsky.social @klingebeil.bsky.social
▶️ shorturl.at/bDJU4
My biggest “there should be a paper on this somewhere”-itch is a strong suspicion about the link between street cleaning standards and the popularity of white leather sneakers/trainers.
The hype literacy toolkit for journalists What is hype? Hype is characterized by the fascination with the future: Exaggerated and unrealistic promises of value development are coupled with a strident optimism that captures the attention of investors, technologists, politicians, journalists, and the general public. What hype does: Hype often feels like a natural force surrounding technological development, but it is not. Hype is made. Powerful actors generate promises to attract resources, prestige, shape agendas, and position themselves as stewards of technological futures, foreclosing alternatives and silencing dissenting voices. Why do journalists need hype literacy? Journalists play a central role in deciding which stories gain traction, whose voices appear authoritative, and which visions of the future become publicly plausible. Hype literacy is about strengthening democratic accountability. It helps societies understand how the future is negotiated and whose interests dominate that negotiation.
How to better cover hype 1. Diversify sources- Does my source list overrepresent people who stand to gain from the technology's success? Who is absent? 2. Go beyond first-person experiences - Does my personal experience reflect the average user's? 3. Ask who benefits - Who has an interest in staging a technology in a certain way? Who can gain money, prestige, (geo-)political advantage, visibility, and the power to set or advance certain techno-political agendas? 4. Beware the "critics" vs. "experts" narrative - Who is labelled an expert and in what field? Is the expertise of critical voices recognized? 5. Highlight uncertainties - Who is making the prediction, and what is their stake in its acceptance? What data supports the claim and is it independent, peer-reviewed, or anecdotal? 6. Develop a historical awareness- Have similar claims been made about earlier technologies? What actually happened?
I worked on a thing! (With @imaginaries.bsky.social and Jascha Bareis from the @hypestudies.bsky.social group.) akademie.dw.de/hype-literacy/
Yeah that story has made its rounds for years but it’s a bit more nuanced, esp. when it comes to claims of addiction. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/w...
And yeah, generally the shift to subscriptions is a part of it, making some less reliable on search traffic but it still hurts. It's not a “everything is fine” situation, but the sky is also not falling. At least not faster then usual. Chatbot usage for news is so far minimal.
Tbh industry-wide traffic data is hard to get and unreliable. The Reuters journalism trends reports are a somewhat good source. But contrast them with the PG article and you see its a mess. Still, this is what I hear from talking to se people in newsrooms. pressgazette.co.uk/media-audien...
