The Gutter’s own Carol Borden has some thoughts on the new documentary about the world of carpet manufacturing, Carpet Cowboys (USA, 2023)! “Emily McKenzie and Noah Collier’s documentary Carpet Cowboys looks at the world of carpeting—especially the carpet used in big, almost anonymous spaces. If you have ever […]
At The New Yorker, Inkoo Kang writes about turbulence in Hollywood. “To survey the film and television industry today is to witness multiple existential crises. Many of them point to a larger trend: of Hollywood divesting from its own future, making dodgy decisions in the short term that […]
“Today, we’re policed by ads. Targeted with products and services by what a surveilling algorithm “thinks we’ll like.” But people usually know when they are being sold to and when they are being solicited for money. It is not always so clear, however, when a company is seeking […]
BBC Archives shares a 1991 report on “Nintendo and the Japanese Software Boom”: “Gordon Brewer visits Japan, to gauge the state of the Japanese software industry. With Nintendo having already demonstrated that a Japanese corporation can quickly dominate the US video games software market, should the big American […]
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it […]
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student […]