OOPS
Last Friday, you may have noticed that our main extratone.com domain returned a generic database error, as I did. The CMS was unable to access its database for reasons we have yet to pin down for sure - not that they matter, necessarily - so we are now attempting to restore the entirety of the Extranet from a backup. So far, we’ve been unsuccessful in this - the Extranet, it turns out, is quite fucking huge these days - and it’s starting to look like more technical dissemination and restoration will be required. As such, the main domain will redirect to The Tone’s landing page for the immediate future. Please remember though, that Extratone is much more than our magazine. You’ll always be able to find us on Discord and Twitter to stay updated. I’m giving us a maximum of one month to fix this - hopefully, we’ll have everything back up much sooner. On behalf of everybody, I’d like to apologize for the interruption. This is certainly an event we’ll learn from.
David Blue
Editor-in-Chief
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DIVISION
⊚ Microsoft is microwaving your children (again.)
"Students have always been central Microsoft’s broadband plans."
⊚ A gorgeous piece on the culture of the group chat.
⊚ YouTube's radicalization.
"In effect, YouTube has created a restaurant that serves us increasingly sugary, fatty foods, loading up our plates as soon as we are finished with the last meal."
⊚ Define: nationalism.
⊚ "Censorship" is a uniquely-American scapegoat.
"Casual references to twentieth century totalitarianism have been cropping up lately like clover in the lawn."
⊚ More or less all you need to know about Toys R Us.
⊚ Where the apps are taking us.
"A new information layer is destroying the nudging infrastructure that traffic planners built into cities."
⊚ The Big Boy crisis.
"Many straight white men feel besieged by 'uppity' Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people."
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MEDIA
A bunch of petty drama was instigated by publications and journalists that cover the media over The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo and his “unplugged” piece. (Disclosure: I did my part in furthering aforementioned drama.) If you read the Columbia Journalism Review, or NiemanLab, you’ll probably have already seen far too much mention of the excess of mention of this story, but watching this bizarre, stalker-ish spiral has been interesting, if quite existentially debilitating. If you haven’t, here’s the jist: Manjoo threw his fedora into the ring of the “I reduced my internet usage” microgenre that has trended in the industry this year, and a few folks who did or maybe did not accurately interpret his argument with perhaps too much time on their hands said “nuh uh!” because he was Tweeting.
It is altogether reasonable to ask who gives a fuck? here, but the purpose of all these words (which are, despite everything, about nothing more than one man’s internet habits) in all these pieces, I think, is to examine how best we should consume how much of the exponentially-greater information available, which is not an unimportant conversation. You may or may not find it all to be utter bullshit, but I would plead you to read The Atlantic's offering, at least, and to ask what the fuck are we doing?
The next thing I remember, I came to in a room that had been hit with a whirlwind. My blankets lay shredded and filthy in pieces across the floor. New scraps of newspaper lay littered across the entire room. Instead of clothes, I now found pieces of The New York Times op-ed pages plastered all across my body.
⊚ The Death Desk makes no (effective) apologies.
"We make no judgments, moral or otherwise, about human worth. What we do try to judge, however, is newsworthiness, and that’s a whole other standard."
⊚ Kara Swisher once again dances around the term "class," this time with Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg.
I hope you're not getting tired of this, yet.
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