Why have gadgets become fetish objects? The answer seems simple to me: As screens become the portals through which we communicate with our friends and loved ones, some of our emotional attachment lingers as a ghost in the machine. We can’t reach out and touch someone quite yet, but we feel like they’re just a few finger-swipes away.
Hence the allure of camming. Performing for strangers in front of a webcam is a fast-growing business, so we decided to investigate. Sure, it’s another form of sex work. But strip away the smut—that part’s kind of obvious—and you get a longing for connection.
And yet the screen serves as a distancing mechanism, for both cam girls and their clients. It’s lonely work, talking to people all day. So cam girls connect with each other in online forums, where they find emotional support and intimacy, writer Lauren Rae Orsini discovered.
Yes, even cam girls get the blues.
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We forget that that stranger on Craigslist looking for a room is a person, too. Wade Cothran tried to send up the impersonality of the listing service with his vulgar and hilarious “Best Roommate Ever” post. And for his trouble, he lost not one but two jobs. No matter: He’s travelling the country, taking people up on their offers of lodging.
Speaking of, when did Craigslist get so impersonal? You can chalk it up to sheer size. But I also wonder about the people behind it. Craig Newmark, the site’s founder, still toils away as a customer-service rep. Meanwhile, CEO Jim Buckmaster does the dirty work, like pursuing the company’s feud with eBay. The latest twist: Federal authorities are investigating whether eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar and former executive Josh Silverman passed confidential data about Craigslist to colleagues at eBay working on a competing classifieds service.
Read between the lines here: The criminal complaint bears many similarities to a civil lawsuit pursued by Craigslist against eBay, which had previously sued Craigslist over maneuvers by Buckmaster and Newmark to squeeze eBay out as an investor. (The auction giant bought a stake in the smaller company from a former Craigslist employee, but things went sour.) Did Craigslist sic the feds on eBay? It sure looks that way. Craigslist: Not the best roommate ever.
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Tiffany Shlain fascinates me. I’ve been fairly open in my ridicule over the long years of her Webby Awards, a competition born out of a failed ‘90s magazine about the Web. I dismissed her as a proto-fameball, a seeker of celebrity who settled for cewebrity. I scoffed at her apparent filmmaking ambitions.
I appear to have been deeply wrong, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The trailer for her latest project, Connected, suggests a promisingly heartfelt look at the perils and promise of our modern mediated relationships.
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I’ve been running the Daily Dot with a virtual newsroom for months, but we’re finally having a summit meeting in San Francisco next week. We’re flying the team in from Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, Arlington, Chicago, and our headquarters city of Austin. One big room, full of bad bitches, as my muse Kreayshawn might say.
We’ve grown close and bonded around the Campfire. We Yammer at each other all day long. But what might happen when we put away our laptops and connect in person? It’s downright frightening to contemplate.