Amazon, which recently entered the world of original broadcast content, has subverted television’s traditional “pilot season” by forgoing a staggered release schedule in favor of plunking all fourteen of its pilots onto its website at once. The idea is for audiences to watch the eight comedies and six animated shows for free, and then help the company decide which options are the most promising for long term development. Just a tip: Alpha House features appearances from John Goodman and Bill Murray.
This summer I reread Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman, and I don’t know if it’s strange or perfectly reasonable that this is the case, but: Ullman’s 15-year-old memoir is still the best rendering of our new relationship with code that anyone has produced. It is in no way historical; it could have been written yesterday. In fact, I think it fits our world better than it does the world of 1997. Back then, the accelerating dot-com boom was, for most people, strange and remote. Today, who hasn’t at some point copied and pasted a fragment of JavaScript? If we don’t all have a relationship with code, we have, most of us, at least flirted with it.
