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I had to explain to a 12yo that not long before she was born, you made a computer display by sucking all the air out of an enormous glass box and then painting one side of it with special paint that sometimes glowed and then applying 2000V to a little bit of hot wire so you ripped electrons out of it and using electromagnets to steer the electrons to hit the special paint so that it glowed, and she seemed increasingly suspicious that I was pulling her leg and at the end she just said “that seems.. ..very inefficient?” and now I feel like a walking exhibit at a mediaeval blacksmithing museum

—@doop

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At the dawn of computers, newsrooms thought their “content” is what made them valued, so they each needed special “systems” to “manage” it. They commodified content until it lost value; so did their CMSes. Here is word that Vox, which made a big deal of creating its own CMS–licensing it to other news organizations–is dropping it for WordPress. Newsrooms are not each so special after all.

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/18/vox-media-chorus

—@jeffjarvis