John Cheever, writing in 1960, unfurled a prescient survey of the emergent American landscape's least beloved elements: "Ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans." Today, it’s easy to compile a similar list of digital refuse: "Spambots, sponsored content, gratuitous push notifications, shitposting, broken URLs, trolls, hacks, filter bubbles, phishing scams, network outages."
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#37: Outposts in the Ruins
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John Cheever, writing in 1960, unfurled a prescient survey of the emergent American landscape's least beloved elements: "Ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans." Today, it’s easy to compile a similar list of digital refuse: "Spambots, sponsored content, gratuitous push notifications, shitposting, broken URLs, trolls, hacks, filter bubbles, phishing scams, network outages."