11 Questions You Need to Ask a Digital Agency Before Working with Them
Written by Joaquín Gatti for Elevate. Our 10 year experience creating digital products has allowed us to elaborate the ultimate guide for you to choose the right partner to work with based on both client and product needs.
Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net.
Take a Photo Here – The New York Times
Images from Instagram: The stairwell at the New Museum in New York.We carry the cameras built into our phones around all the time, and the resulting flood of images says something about what people, in the aggregate, like to photograph.
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.
Malcolm Harris on Glitch Capitalism and AI Logic
In the stories of algorithms gone haywire, the glitches prompt programmers to reassess what they really want from their programs, and how to get it. What we can learn from the errors of machine learning is that we do not have to live according to a set of rules that produces obviously unfair and undesirable outcomes like a bloated one percent, apartheid prisons, and the single worst person in the country as president. There are American political traditions that saw these problems coming and envisioned relationships between our algorithms, our state, and ourselves better than the one we have now. For instance, the final clause of the tenth point of the Black Panther Party’s 1972 Ten-Point Program was “people’s community control over modern technology” — that sounds like a good idea, especially compared to walking on your face.
But until we reassert control over our societal machine learning, we’re stuck face-planting. I remember the scholar Cornel West telling a joke about success as a narrow goal: “Success is easy!” he said. Then, mimicking a mugger, “Gimme your wallet.” America looks like a glitchy computer, and it’s because capitalism is a machine language, reducible to numbers. America exists to create wealth, and the system isn’t broken, it’s just obeying the rules to disaster; as a country, we’re more ourselves than ever. Donald Trump, who seems to be speedrunning American democracy, is like a living, breathing cheat code, proceeding through life by shortcuts alone. But if Trump represents a terminal failure of this system, it’s because he is a solution, and the easiest one in our current environment. He reminds me of another one of Shane’s examples: A program that, told to sort a list of numbers, simply deleted them. Nothing left to sort.
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?).
This fall, when hundreds of gorgeous, expertly lit portrait shots of friends, relatives, and their pets inevitably begin to dominate your Instagram feed, feel free to thank 17th-century Dutch master painters like Vermeer. It’s the day after Apple’s Sept.
The summer’s hottest destination for video entertainment is a U.K.-based social media brand called LADbible. In July alone, the viral clips that churn out of its Facebook page were viewed more than 3 billion times.
All the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality.
The scholarly environs of the New Media research lab at Stellenbosch University in South Africa gave rise to a diabolically clever plan to deal with video piracy in 2015: Lure pirates with bitcoin to find out the source of the contraband material.
