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John Ohno
John Ohno

969 Followers

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Sep 19, 2022

Fandom’s two cultures (and third wheel)

An expansion and refinement of On Communities. — On communities An extension & refinement of the MOP theory.enkiv2.medium.com Fandom can be broken down into two subgroups: one based on costly signalling (generally, the production of creative transformative works, but sometimes legally risky maneuvers like tape-trading or technical ones like translation) and one based on consumption (sometimes, but not always, involving participating in a critical discourse, of varying degrees…

Fandom

8 min read

Fandom

8 min read


Jun 18, 2022

Media indoctrination and the patriarchy

There’s a narrative (primarily in second-wave feminist discourse, but still extant) that the media indoctrinates men into a kind of violent objectification of women. This is true to some degree, and was probably more true in the 60s and 70s when these arguments were first being put forth — media…

Feminism

3 min read

Feminism

3 min read


Apr 12, 2022

There’s this idea that every major shift in media technology produces political instability, and…

There’s this idea that every major shift in media technology produces political instability, and that’s absolutely true. But the people who say this (ex., KK) don’t talk about why and how the form of the medium influences the nature of the political formations. The most obvious ramification is actually related…

5 min read

5 min read


Apr 12, 2022

Whenever I complain about dating, there’s a certain kind of guy who sees it, fails to process what…

Whenever I complain about dating, there’s a certain kind of guy who sees it, fails to process what I’m actually saying, and criticizes me for insufficient alpha posturing bullshit. And they all feel entitled to flood my notifications with it, too. Fucking jerks. i know intellectually that my ability to…

2 min read

2 min read


Apr 12, 2022

People who think Torvalds won the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debate & therefore monolithic kernels are…

People who think Torvalds won the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debate & therefore monolithic kernels are “better” forget that Torvalds’ entire argument was “Linux is a toy project that should never ever be used for anything important”, or they remember but don’t care. Worse-is-better is one of the most damaging infohazards in tech. …

3 min read

3 min read


Feb 16, 2022

When it comes to privacy, regulation is not enough

Opsec is hard. When making opsec decisions, you must decide whether it is safe for you to let some second party know something about you — a decision that depends on who you are, who the second party is, and the resources, incentives, and material circumstances of both. This calculation…

3 min read

3 min read


Jan 31, 2022

Property is incompatible with decentralization

A lot of NFT discourse involves people who understand neither intellectual property nor regular property arguing about whether or not it’s good to reimplement both without any kind of enforcement mechanism. I work in IP and let me tell you: property is fucked. Intellectual property is fucked in several very…

8 min read

8 min read


Jan 23, 2022

What does it say about society that Seinfeld ended up being much more popular than Mad About You?

What does it say about society that Seinfeld ended up being much more popular than Mad About You? These two shows about neurotic new yorkers stumbling into elaborate schemes to avoid discomfort and inconvenience began around the same time, ended around the same time, and canonically took place in the…

4 min read

4 min read


Jan 22, 2022

Review: Deadly Friend (1986)

When you have a monster you’re supposed to empathize with, the charisma of the actor is vital. That’s why Dracula’s Daughter is so much better than Son of Dracula. Case in point: Deadly Friend. …

2 min read

2 min read


Jan 14, 2022

Heat Death

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy always increases: even if some arrangement of matter temporarily produces order in one part of the world, it will leak disorder elsewhere, and the house always wins. Stand against the second law and not only can’t you win, but you can’t…

8 min read

8 min read

John Ohno

John Ohno

969 Followers

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net

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