Utamu
@utamu.bsky.social
100 followers 170 following 1.3K posts
Scribe, wanderer, head nodder, knee slapper, looks like we got ourselves a reader. #215.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Utamu
thedailyshow.com
The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.
Reposted by Utamu
junoryleejournalism.com
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
Reposted by Utamu
davidsirota.com
If you're complaining about independent media asking you to pitch in as a paying subscriber, I can only assume you are happy with "free" billionaire-owned corporate media monetizing your attention, selling you to advertisers, and immersing you in oligarchs' self-serving content.
Reposted by Utamu
kairyssdal.bsky.social
This is the lesson of 2025
qjurecic.bsky.social
he's going to come after you either way, so you might as well act with integrity
utamu.bsky.social
I love Brian Diploma. When did he graduate?
Reposted by Utamu
johngonzalez.bsky.social
Two plans for tonight. Outcome dependent:

1.) Aaron Nola and the Philadelphia Phillies win a baseball game. Huzzah.

2.) They do not win a baseball game and we wade out into the Pacific and let the tide take us out. Ah sweet relief.
Reposted by Utamu
davidsirota.com
The Lever's subscriptions are up 22 PERCENT in the last 90 days.

My sense is a media breaking point is upon us, people feel like they're drowning in bad hot takes & they're now seeking out accountability journalism - which is good.

Subscribe here - and please share👇
Subscribe to The Lever, Support Investigative Journalism
Supporting subscriptions grant you complete access to our entire website and all content for just $10 per month, or $100 per year.
LeverNews.com
utamu.bsky.social
"I was in my hotel room, retracing Berners-Lee’s past across the network he'd built. Some links were broken, but Internet Archive filled the gaps. Next month, in SF, the org will honor Berners-Lee with its Hero Award, to mark the trillionth page its crawlers have downloaded from his World Wide Web."
utamu.bsky.social
“If creators who are actually producing aren’t going to reap the rewards, what’s going to be the initial economic incentive?”
utamu.bsky.social
Lina Khan: “These companies are basically free-riding off of the content and production of others. A millennial like the web itself, she is concerned not only with the platform economy’s unfairness but also its threat to online creativity."
utamu.bsky.social
"They grew at breakneck speed, squeezed sellers, served ads & extracted value from users while making exit ever costlier. They bought out rivals and turned into monopolies: between 2007 and 2018, Wu notes, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon collectively acquired more than a thousand firms."
utamu.bsky.social
"Berners-Lee’s escape hatch is Solid Protocol, whose mission is to revolutionize the web by giving users control over their data. He launched a company, Inrupt, in 2017. “We can build a new world in which we get the functionality of things like FB & IG. And we don’t need to ask for permission.”
utamu.bsky.social
"Sir Tim has written “This Is for Everyone,” with Stephen Witt. It might have been a victory lap, but for the web’s dire situation—viral misinfo, addictive algorithms, escalating disruptions of A.I. In such times, Berners-Lee can no longer be Cincinnatus. He has taken up the role of Paul Revere."
utamu.bsky.social
"He’s the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia & if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called “the gentle singularity”—or else buries us in slop—that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness."
utamu.bsky.social
"The way thru is to craft new modes of renewal adequate to the landscape of the world in which we find ourselves. A century ago, just barely out of living memory, we found pathways to a better place. The answer turns on experiments we've only barely begun to launch."
utamu.bsky.social
"The fiery intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois & columnist Walter Lippmann were among the first to grasp a core feature of modern mass politics: Information & a crisis of trust in the news had deformed US political life in the aftermath of World War I, just as they do in our current age of media disarray."
utamu.bsky.social
But "US' dangerous decade led not to fascism & end of democracy but to the New Deal & civil rights era. The US ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment & prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow & established free speech w/ court-backed protections for the first time in history."
utamu.bsky.social
"Staggering levels of economic inequality underlaid a fast-changing industrial landscape and rapidly evolving racial demographics. Influential voices in the press warned that a crisis of misinformation in the media had wrecked the most basic democratic processes."
utamu.bsky.social
In "the 1920s, a wave of attempted assassinations & political violence crested alongside new barriers to immigration, a campaign of deportations & govt crackdown on dissenting speech. US was fresh off a pandemic in which divisive public health measures yielded widespread anger and distrust."
utamu.bsky.social
‪@johnfabianwitt.bsky.social‬: "As US democracy spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy & violence, a ? has been loosed in minds across US: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. There's a more hopeful example: the US of a century ago." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/o...
Opinion | How to Save the American Experiment
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Utamu
timcarvell.bsky.social
A regrettable thing about being a parent in these times is that so many public figures’ names fit perfectly into “Baby Shark” and once you mentally hear it, even once, you can’t read them any other way.

Anyway. Bari Weiss.
utamu.bsky.social
“The federal govt is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the govt, media, judiciary, academia, the entertainment industry,” signed by Fonda, Spike Lee, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal and more than 800 others.”
utamu.bsky.social
“The original Committee for the First Amendment included Mr. Fonda, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and others who rallied to defend free expression.”
utamu.bsky.social
“Jane Fonda Revives Her Father’s McCarthy-Era Free Speech Group
The actress joined Spike Lee, Billie Eilish, Pedro Pascal & others in reviving the Committee for the First Amendment, a group that her father, Henry Fonda, was a member of in the 1940s.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/a...
Jane Fonda Revives Her Father’s McCarthy-Era Free Speech Group
www.nytimes.com