Cybercultural Archive (2019-2022)

Ever since Facebook pivoted to “the metaverse” last October, including renaming itself Meta, I’ve been pondering the technological framing of this move. When he announced the change, Mark Zuckerberg pitched the metaverse as “the successor to the mobile internet.” In other words this new platform (which hasn’t yet been built) will be a mix of…

One of my favourite pop culture writers is Chuck Klosterman, who is around my age and so I’ve been reading his books and online essays since he started in the 1990s. He has a new book coming out this month called The Nineties. I’m really looking forward to reading his take on a decade that…

Web3, a new paradigm for the web that is fueled by crypto and decentralization, has caught the imagination of the tech community. Whether you like it or not, it’s taking off like Web 2.0 did back in 2004-05. I was at the forefront of covering Web 2.0 back then, with my blog ReadWriteWeb. For Web3,…

More NFT cyber-cultural action this week, and my thoughts on Microsoft’s massive $69 billion acquisition of video game publishers Activision Blizzard. Let’s get to it… Notes from the Present 📱 Twitter Launches NFT Profiles More big news in the crypto/Web3 space, as Twitter launches NFT profile pictures for its premium members (Twitter Blue). You will…

This week I’ve been looking into NFTs, a kind of digital asset that has taken crypto culture onto “the streets” — due to its internet-meme aesthetics, along with some 80s-style $$ greed. While many in the tech community are highly critical of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), there may be viable use cases for it. I mention…

Welcome to the first Cybercultural of 2022. This week, I look at the past, present and future of social networks — featuring Instagram (before and after), how FarmVille may give us a glimpse of our metaverse future, and what the CES shows of 2002 and 2022 tell us about our tech culture. Notes from the…

2021 has been a crazy year, as I’m sure you’ll all agree. Things got weird on the tech front too, with the crypto market going nuts, Facebook rebranding to Meta, and more. Check out my annual summary of tech news below… Notes from the Present 📱 Top 5 Internet Technology Stories of 2021 My second-to-last…

For my column this week, I did my annual review of the top internet technologies of the year. I’ve been doing this every December, in one shape or form, since 2004. I miss the ReadWriteWeb days, as I used to love doing annual roundup stories — and in its heyday, each RWW writer had their…

This week’s newsletter is all about the metaverse, a buzzword that Facebook (now known as Meta) introduced to the mainstream at the end of October. I’m tracking this trend closely, so here are some of my recent notes 👇 Notes from the Present 📱 What is Meta Building? My column at The New Stack this…

Over 2021, I’ve had two parallel writing projects on the go. One, a weekly column tracking the latest trends in web development, published on The New Stack (where I work). Two, an indie website called Web Development History (WDH), where I write 1-2 articles per month chronicling internet history from a developer perspective. So, I…