Technology & Digital Culture

Where Decisions Go to Die: The Five-Thousand-Year Evolution of the Pointless Meeting

Ancient Assyrian tablets, Ming court records, and Napoleon's dispatches all document identical phenomena: gatherings designed to project authority rather than make decisions. Modern meeting culture represents the latest iteration of a social technology that has always served power more than productivity.

Apr 11, 2026

From Frontpage to Footnote: The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg

Digg once stood as the undisputed king of social news aggregation, shaping how millions of Americans discovered content on the early internet. Its collapse — and the improbable rise of Reddit in its wake — remains one of the most instructive cautionary tales in the history of digital media. What went wrong, and can Digg's repeated attempts at reinvention ever recapture what was lost?

Mar 12, 2026