kontextmaschine:

I just learned that you can buy your message’s way into a full okcupid mailbox for $1

and the friendly-seedy tone - the offer is a popup saying “with a little bribery we’ll let it slide”

OKCupid is SO GOOD at correctly humanizing life-by-profitseeking-algorithm

has anyone else here read John Varley?

You know I would TOTALLY trust Valve to craft people’s social experience and Facebook to sell them microtransaction games and it’s a shame how that worked out.

There was something on maybe Reddit? the other day asking what the biggest most overhyped disappointment ever was and I was like the Segway? but maybe that’s just because (being the kind of person who reads Reddit today) I was the kind of person who read Slashdot back in the day.

“The Apocalypse”? That’s an evergreen. (You know the Seventh-Day Adventists started out as an 1844 apocalypse cult? American religions are bonkers.)

Then I thought “space exploration”, because I’ve been looking at some ‘70s pop culture lately and it’s just heartbreaking how much they expected everything to be about that by now.

And that’s kind of the last thing that the postwar optimism was invested in, where we went bankrupt, nothing like that since.

I know, I know, I carry a connection to the universal akasha in my pocket now and I should be more in awe of that but it just doesn’t feel grandiose. Maybe it’s cause it came on gradually, maybe because it’s so entwined with the preexisting world. Like, the universal akasha runs on 5V power and credit cards, that’s kind of bullshit.

And then I stopped and thought that if these developments had been scripted as a story, I would have appreciated that detail as gritty realism.

And then I realized OH MY GOD we live in the capitalpunk AU.