Any given Sunday: inside the chaos and spectacle of the NFL on Fox — Read this amazing behind-the-scenes look from the Verge about what goes into a typical TV broadcast of a professional football game: the investment in technology, the employees who can only pull it off after developing their skills and talents. To wit: “Kevin Callahan, Fox’s director of technical operations, estimates Fox credentialed between 150 and 200 people for the weekend, from Troy Aikman and director Rich Russo to runners and microphone holders. The network brings in about $25 million worth of equipment, with thousands of individual parts.”
David Lowery: Silicon Valley must be stopped, or creativity will be destroyed — Love or hate the idea of an artist actually speaking out, David Lowery has provide much food for thought over the past year. He is in top form in this interview with Spin, particularly here where he is talking about resistance to making the internet more ethical: “That would be like in the Industrial Revolution saying, ‘You can’t have a non-polluting factory; you can’t have a factory that doesn’t have child labor; you can’t have a factory that’s safe to work in.’ Of course you can! We’re the fucking masters of our own destiny, we pass the laws for this country, we create this country, we decide what kind of a society we’re going to have — not the Internet.”
Silicon Chasm — How bad is Silicon Valley? The extreme economic inequality present there shocks even Laissez-faire conservatives.
Best photos of the year 2013 — Beauty, tragedy, hope, sorrow: the range of human experience is captured by photographers. I couldn’t get through all these in one setting because of how powerful they are, but it is worth it — not just to see the images but also to read the observations from the photographers themselves.
The Failure of the DMCA Notice and Takedown System — Bruce Boyden has released a new paper with the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property that details the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after fifteen years. “A tool that was originally designed as an emergency stopgap measure, to be used in isolated instances, is now expected to manage infringement on a persistent, ubiquitous, and gargantuan scale.”
Thom Yorke Calls Himself a ‘Luddite and Proud of It’ in Spotify Debate — The only people who think “Luddite” is an insult are people whose exploitative machines are being smashed. As Spin points out, the Luddites “weren’t anti-machine — they were against low-paying bosses, against being put out of a job in the name of efficiency, you name it.”