Craig Mod is a writer and photographer. His podcast is On Margins.

“You pick up an iPad, you pick up an iPhone—what are you picking up? You’re picking up a chemical-driven casino that just plays on your most base desires for vanity and ego and our obsession with watching train wrecks happen. That’s what we’re picking up and it’s counted in pageviews, because—not to be reductive and say that it’s a capitalist issue, but when you take hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital, and you’re building models predicated on advertising, you are gonna create fucked-up algorithms and shitty loops that take away your attention. And guess what? You need to engage with longform texts. You need control of your attention. And so I think part of what subverted our ability to find this utopian reading space is the fact that so much of what’s on these devices is actively working to destroy all of the qualities needed to create that space.”

Thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

  1. @craigmod
  2. craigmod.com
  3. Criag Mod on Longform
  4. [01:15] Flipboard
  5. [01:26] On Margins
  6. [02:40] "Roden Explorer's Club," Craig Mod's Newsletter
  7. [09:30] McSweeney’s
  8. [20:30] "Embracing the Digital Book" (PRE/POST • April 2010)
  9. [22:25] Books in the Age of the iPad (PRE/POST • 2012)
  10. [25:30] Post Artifact Books & Publishing (PRE/POST • 2011)
  11. [43:10] Primitive Technology

 

Direct download: Craig_Mod_Full_Episode_Edit_1.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:56pm EDT