Thanks for the response. You’re right, my beef is probably more with consumer tech writing in general. “Anti-Spotify” still seems a bit hyperbolic to me, but to be fair so was my objection, and headlines are headlines I guess. Thanks too for linking to that piece by Allison McCann— it’s a thoughtful take and I enjoyed it. It’s also good to know about separation between editorial and advertising. I think my skepticism is understandable, given the way BuzzFeed (and to be fair, the so-called “social web” in general) seems to intentionally blur the line between person and corporate entity (for example, Geico and the incessant sharing of “delightful” things over the past few weeks). I guess what I’m saying is that advertising is built into the structure of the site in a way that isn’t always obvious, and sometimes this makes me doubt a writer’s intent when I shouldn’t.

“A lot of the tech writing on this site*…”, excuse me. I also seem to have messed up that link, so let me try again: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/

Wow, this. First, some disclosure about the relationship between BuzzFeed and Rdio seems warranted. Second, if the primary difference between Spotify and Rdio is design, how would that make Rdio the “anti-Spotify”? Because to me their business models seem basically identical. My basic objection to Spotify is that model and how it screws over any musician with fewer listeners than somebody like Rihanna— which is why it’s hilarious that you say “Spotify’s losses mount to $60 million on revenues of nearly a quarter billion dollars in 2011, precisely because of how much streaming services pay record labels and artists.” It turns out that Spotify is maybe not so generous in paying the creators of music. Could it be that the model underlying these services simply doesn’t work? Here’s a good piece by Damon Krukowski from the indie rock band Galaxie 500 about his experiences with Spotify: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/ A lot of the tech writing on this sight feels like “advertorializing,” and this is no exception. Why not get into the interesting issues involved in this stuff, instead of just waxing superficially about how “clean” the redesign is?

This is neat but I feel like your explanations kind of strips the subversiveness from the works. For example “ScrollTV” seems to me like a commentary on the trend towards the “here are X number of things for you to look at” mode of communication favored by BuzzFeed, Huffington Post et al, and “Holiday” seems to me like sort of a dig at the pageview-chasing motivation behind that trend. But then again, maybe not.

I think Rihanna just gave these kids the kick in the pants they needed— now they’ll work to make their TumblrArt less vacuous and superficial. lol

There’s a difference between the military-tech complex at the individual level and the institutional level.  Petraeus uses Gmail to coordinate his affair; the President has a Blackberry. Ok, sure: the men at the helm of the security state use the same consumer tech products as the rest of us, mostly.  I’m not sure how this proves that the government-tech complex is a myth, though. To me, it’s much more an illustration that these people behave in a way that suggests they don’t expect the same (nebulously constitutional) surveillance tools they rely on in the “war on terror” to be employed against them. They’ve eliminated our privacy, but also their own.

if “post-hip-hop” can’t be defined aesthetically but only in terms of a certain critical self-consciousness, then what separates Kendrick from Posdnous? just time?