Online anonymity advocate Cole Stryker on why namelessness gets a bad rap:
Cole Stryker, whose new book, Hacking the Future, discusses the uses on online anonymity, discusses his work and why namelessness gets a bad name.
Bio: B Michael Payne is a music and culture writer in New York. He has a website and two dogs.
"Anonymity definitely has a branding problem," Stryker told me when we spoke earlier this week. "The guy on the street thinks of the Silk Road [the illicit online marketplace where users pay in bitcoins] and the child pornographers." He went on to say that a lot of the web-privacy battle, both offensive and defensive, only tends to gets covered if it’s sensational. "It’s a lot easier," he told me, "to make a big splash doing something 'trollish.'" More
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on September 13th, 2012 2:12pmYet just a few months before that debut, Waka became more the victim than the beneficiary of his own rising fame, robbed and shot at an Atlanta carwash. A recent profile in Spin outlined the contours of Waka’s other woes: the violent death of his best friend, rapper Slim Dunkin’; his mother getting picked up by the police; his house being raided. Waka’s life, perhaps especially since his success, is less sanguine than sanguinary, and it would be easy to see Triple F Life's darker tone as a celebration of nihilism and violent decadence, but it’s more complicated than that. More
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on June 13th, 2012 1:29pmThis tension between biological identity and socially-constructed identity became the night's theme, and Gates didn’t restrict his analysis to others. He noted that his DNA test revealed that he’s 56 percent white. In fact, it was his own family’s racial mixture that catalyzed his passion for genealogy. "My grandfather was so white, we used to call him Casper behind his back," he said. "How has your standing in the African American community changed?" Stavans asked about Gates' DNA discovery. "I got a raise at Harvard," Gates said. More
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on May 1st, 2012 5:18pmSam Brumbaugh, a special events coordinator at the Guggenheim and the producer of the "Divine Ricochet" series, said that he'd worked with the curatorial side to find musicians who match with the artists on display. In years previous those bands have been Animal Collective and Beirut; for Chamberlain's exhibition, something more austere was called for. More
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on April 17th, 2012 9:24amBefore a reading on Wednesday at Housing Works Bookstore to celebrate last week’s release of his debut poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator (Penguin), I talked with Robbins about his recent influences and interests. More
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on April 6th, 2012 2:09pmThese are the wages of maturity, one supposes. The group, whose sophomore effort, The OF Tape, Vol. 2 is out today, has cleaned up its act (particularly when it comes to homophobic slurs and extended fantasies of horrific sexual debasement and cartoon violence), and even grown up, after a fashion. Two years ago, the group’s leader, Tyler the Creator, would spin a yarn about drowning a woman in a tub of semen; now he’s content simply to screw the old-fashioned way—albeit possibly with someone else's girlfriend. But the issue confronting the group—several members of which are no longer teenagers—on the release of Vol. 2 is whether the advancement is artistic or simply developmental. More
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on March 21st, 2012 9:54amIt’s odd that so few showed up to catch Beans’ set, since there’s a direct line connecting him with the night’s headliners, Main Attrakionz, and in some ways it’s hard to imagine the latter having a place in rap music, or a following, without the former. More
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on March 5th, 2012 5:34pmWednesday night at Greenpoint’s WORD bookstore brought a seemingly unlikely pairing: comedian and actor Michael Ian Black and blogger/personality Meghan McCain. Yet the pairing is more germane than it might sound: McCain and Black are at work on a book together, tentatively titled America, You Sexy Bitch. Yet Black was there to read from his own new book, a comic memoir titled You’re Not Doing It Right, which centers on the honest vicissitudes of marriage and parenthood. McCain interviewed him. More
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on March 1st, 2012 12:07pmThe literary differences fell, maybe unsurprisingly, along gender lines. The three male readers went for laughs, joked about rappers (as though nothing could be further from their heady literary experimentalism than the black experience), and seemed cooly aloof, while the two women performed their sexuality and their awkwardness, less for laughs than for the sake of some therapeutic confessionalism. If a Muumuu House house style emerged, it was one that was very much in line with the affectless, self-concerned style of Thought Catalog: diaristic essays and Twitter poetry. And it's succeeding. Gaby Dunn, a Thought Catalog writer, scored that Times gig, while Calloway is meeting with literary agents. More
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on February 21st, 2012 9:55amFive minutes before the scheduled start, the line at the counter (at that point a bar) was three deep. Patrons were drinking coffee still, but also beer, and largely wine: pendulous goblets in twos and threes dotted virtually every table. Even before the reading had begun, the night was going exactly as co-curator Patrick Gaughan envisioned it over a year ago.
"I wanted to create a reading series in a lowlit backroom atmosphere," Gaughan said. "As easy as that sounds, I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I made it." More
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on February 14th, 2012 11:54am
