dislike club

The Dislike Club (finale/ABC version)

May 12, 2015 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 5 Comments

The Dislike Club (finale/ABC version)

In this program (which originally aired on the ABC last December) your host makes his final attempt to build the ultimate anti-social-media-social-platform. Things continue to decline: the phone in the hand becomes the phone on a stick in the hand. And we meet a controversial blogger who overnight becomes one of the internet’s most disliked people. Plus, of course the real dislike club. dcfinale  

Occupy Siberia (dislike club prequel)

December 29, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 10 Comments

Occupy Siberia (dislike club prequel)

Yours truly is recuperating from 2014 in France but wishing you a happy holiday. Hope you enjoyed the programming this year. The dislike club series pretty much contains everything I have ever wanted to say about social media. Been thinking about all this stuff for quite some time now,  but it all started to crystalize when I got invited to Russia three years ago. I made a show about that trip for my old radio program “too much information” (it used to run on WFMU). I updated it a bit and offer it here, as the ToE 2014 holiday special – or the dislike club prequel. toe35podimage

Logical Fantasies (the dislike club part V)

December 22, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 13 Comments

Logical Fantasies (the dislike club V)

In the penultimate episode of our series, Kathy Sierra tells us how one tweak could fix everything and ToE’s Chris tells us the secret origin of Facebook. PLUS #marksbros (as in Zuckerberg)  #marxhegel (as in Groucho)

Wishful Thinking (the dislike club part IV)

December 8, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 7 Comments

Wishful Thinking (the dislike club part IV)

In 2007 writer, programmer, and horse trainer Kathy Sierra quit the internet because of misogynist hate trolling. She stayed off the social web for 7 years but last year she came back to see what Twitter was like. She tells us why she only lasted a few weeks and her theory about why so many women are targets online. Plus Danielle Keats Citron explains how we could use the law to drain the cesspool. toe33image

If you dislike like, then you will… (the dislike club part III)

December 3, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 10 Comments

If you dislike like, then you will... (the dislike club part III)

This week Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman tells us about the internet’s original Dislike Club, Anonymous. Biella has spent the last eight years hanging out with Anons both on IRC and in IRL. Her new book “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the many faces of Anonymous”  is the definitive book on the topic, nothing else comes close.  Biella also gets me to watch V for Vendetta, something I have refused to do out of my fanboy respect for writer Alan Moore (who refused to watch it or put his name on the movie). I wish I could un-see it already.  Also: Commodify your dislike!

Paying For It (the dislike club part II)

November 25, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 7 Comments

Paying For It (the dislike club part II)

Our mini-series about the internet continues. This week we take a close look at the fundamental business model of the web – advertising. In 1993  your host was a founding member of an international monkey wrench gang that fought billboards in outer space. He recently ran into one of his old comrades in Midtown-South (Manhattan’s tech district) and discovered that his side actually lost the war. Ethan Zuckerman, the man who invented the pop up ad, admits that we must rethink the fundamentals of the web, and activist, writer, and filmmaker Astra Taylor questions whether the internet actually benefits independent creators. toe31pic

Backspace to the Future (the dislike club part I)

November 14, 2014 Benjamen Walker dislike club, Theory Of Everything 9 Comments

Backspace to the Future (the dislike club part I)

Paul Ford is a technologist and a writer, sometimes these two things blur. For example, he’s currently working on a book about webpages, but he’s also building a content management system for webpages –  because you know it could help with the writing.  (yeah his book is late) Its not like he’s trying to procrastinate, this is just what life is like when you are Paul Ford.  A couple of Monday night’s ago he was sitting on his couch drinking some rye whisky and chatting with his friends on twitter  and he accidentally a brand new webpage community.  This is the true origin story of his tilde.club. Yours truly also started a new thing it is called dislike.club. We also check in with Librarian and community manager Jessamyn West for advice on how to start an online community that doesn’t suck. Screen shot 2014-11-14 at 12.03.46 PM