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Before social networks became the de-facto place for logging mundane moments from our lives, Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch incorporated a feature that let users send footage they’d filmed directly to YouTube. The uploads were all assigned the same generic file names—IMG_0000, IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc. The straight-to-YouTube button existed for only a few years, beginning in 2009, but that stretch of time coincided with the popularization of both iPhones and user-generated multimedia online, prompting an explosion of self-documentation. Millions of these early phone videos are still easily accessible on YouTube if you know how to search for them, like digital fossils of life a decade ago. A man shakily films a conversation with a dog breeder (IMG_0907); a washing machine rattles dramatically (IMG_0006); a child plays with a toy fire truck at a restaurant table (IMG_0129); fish float serenely in an aquarium, with the reflection of a phone visible in the glass (IMG_0116). These clips may have been uploaded to YouTube for the benefit of a few family members, or, in some cases, perhaps sent there accidentally. Many of them have accumulated only a handful of views; some have never been watched at all.
Riley Walz, a twenty-two-year-old artist and programmer in San Francisco, came across the videos earlier this year thanks to a blog postwritten by the engineer Ben Wallace, and he got hooked on watching them. “I was thinking maybe one in ten would be interesting, but all of them are,” Walz told me recently. In our current era of branded YouTube channels and professionalized TikTok personas, the amateurish, incidental quality of the videos seemed poetic. They weren’t there to pander to followers or to court virality; they were private notes left over from a less public-facing time. “They feel like memories,” Walz said. In November, as a kind of online found-video installation, he decided to create a Web site devoted to collecting the videos. Titled “IMG_0001,” it is formatted to look like a television screen, with an image of a remote that you click to turn the footage on. A box beneath the screen allows you to click forward to see the next clip. In the past month, more than six hundred thousand visitors have played more than six million videos.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
The first thing I am nostalgic for at “A Nostalgic Night With Macaulay Culkin,” a show touring the Northeast this holiday season featuring a screening of Home Alone followed by a live Q&A with Culkin himself, is life before security theater. I’m at the doors of the Toyota Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, Connecticut, where everyone must have their bag checked and pass through a metal detector. I am immediately sent back to my car for having a bag one centimeter too large. To park in a lot anywhere near the venue, you have to pay an additional $30 “premier parking fee” (this event is first and foremost a shakedown), and I have not paid, so I am parked a quarter of a mile away.
After running back and forth, I finally show the ticket taker my ticket, and she looks at me in surprise. “Just the one?” Yes, I tell her. Like Kevin McCallister, I am alone. Once I’m inside, I observe that no one else is solo at this event. I observe that going solo to this event is, in fact, incredibly weird. I am getting looks. This is an event for families and rowdy groups of friends. Bros, oddly. Lots of bros. I expected the crowd to be made up of mostly millennials (highly susceptible to ’90s nostalgia). But actually, it’s a mix. There are some millennials, with and without kids, but older people too. Many of them wear ugly sweaters with light-up components or Santa hats. At the end of the event, after you’ve paid $40 to upwards of $150 for orchestra seats, you can pay an additional $250 for a meet and greet and photo op with Culkin, and I assume this is why people have dressed this way.
I talk to a few of them, and they’re from New York and Connecticut. Stratford, Fairfield, Cromwell, Westchester County. Christmas is ten days away, and this is something festive to do. Many audience members have heard about the event from Instagram. A goth couple who traveled all the way from Long Island tell me they are big Culkin fans. They mention Bunny Ears, the name of both his humor website and his podcast. Another group from Westchester, maybe in their 40s, has made posters. One poster has the battle plan Kevin draws up before he booby-traps the house, and the other lists the prayer he says over his mac and cheese on Christmas Eve. I don’t know what they’re going to do with the posters. Hold them up when Culkin comes out?
Read the rest of this article at: Vulture
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Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge
Like countless other people around the globe, I stream music, and like more than six hundred million of them I mainly use Spotify. Streaming currently accounts for about eighty per cent of the American recording industry’s revenue, and in recent years Spotify’s health is often consulted as a measure for the health of the music business over all. Last spring, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported global revenues of $28.6 billion, making for the ninth straight year of growth. All of this was unimaginable in the two-thousands, when the major record labels appeared poorly equipped to deal with piracy and the so-called death of physical media. On the consumer side, the story looks even rosier. Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did. It can seem too good to be true.
Like considerably fewer people, I still buy a lot of CDs, records, and cassettes, mostly by independent artists, which is to say that I have a great deal of sympathy for how this immense reorganization in how we consume music has complicated the lives of artists trying to survive our on-demand, hyper-abundant present. Spotify divvies out some share of subscriber fees as royalties in proportion to an artist’s popularity on the platform. The service recently instituted a policy in which a track that registers fewer than a thousand streams in a twelve-month span earns no royalties at all. Some estimate that this applies to approximately two-thirds of its catalogue, or about sixty million songs. Meanwhile, during a twelve-month stretch from 2023 to 2024, Spotify announced new revenue highs, with estimates that the company is worth more than Universal and Warner combined. During the same period, its C.E.O., Daniel Ek, cashed out three hundred and forty million dollars in stock; his net worth, which fluctuates but is well into the billions, is thought to make him richer than any musician in history. Music has always been a perilous, impractical pursuit, and even sympathetic fans hope for the best value for their dollar. But if you think too deeply about what you’re paying for, and who benefits, the streaming economy can seem awfully crooked.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
At present, describing historians as political actors evokes bias, political manoeuvring and a lack of critical thinking. This description conjures up historians merely as political pundits, rummaging through history in search of evidence to support their own political goals and potentially falling into presentism. The past few decades have seen the rise of this hybrid profile, and while some have claimed that politicians need historians so that we can transform current political debates and use their expertise to help us project ourselves into the future, critical voices have warned that ‘rapid-fire’ superficial histories might serve political aims at the price of historical accuracy.
Therefore, defining J G A Pocock (1924-2023) both as a historian and a political actor stands in need of clarification since, arguably, he does not fit into a two-camp debate on the usefulness of history, but instead he shows how history inhabits us at a much deeper political level.
Originally published in 1975, Pocock’s book The Machiavellian Moment is an acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most influential 20th-century works for intellectual historians, political philosophers and political theorists. By 2025, it will have inspired scholars and public debates for 50 years. The Machiavellian Moment presents a fluid, non-linear and geographically diverse history of republicanism as a transatlantic political language that can travel among different periods and contexts, namely, from classical antiquity to Renaissance Florence, early modern England and colonial America.
The book generated academic and wider public controversies, since Pocock decentred the history of the foundation of American politics when he placed the American Revolution as only an episode of an Atlantic republican tradition. In other words, he traced the intellectual origins of the foundation of the United States as far back as the ancient Aristotelian ideal of citizenship and Florentine civic humanism. In doing so, he challenged, first, the understanding that the US Declaration of Independence was a pinnacle of modernity, the deliberate and singular foundation of a polity, and, second, the view that the debates surrounding America’s foundation were coined in a liberal vocabulary. In Pocock’s interpretation, these debates were neither fully liberal nor completely unprecedented in history.
The book generated academic and wider public controversies, since Pocock decentred the history of the foundation of American politics when he placed the American Revolution as only an episode of an Atlantic republican tradition. In other words, he traced the intellectual origins of the foundation of the United States as far back as the ancient Aristotelian ideal of citizenship and Florentine civic humanism. In doing so, he challenged, first, the understanding that the US Declaration of Independence was a pinnacle of modernity, the deliberate and singular foundation of a polity, and, second, the view that the debates surrounding America’s foundation were coined in a liberal vocabulary. In Pocock’s interpretation, these debates were neither fully liberal nor completely unprecedented in history.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
