If midlength-reads are ok...
http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/atomization_p.html
"The sphere of legitimate debate"
"Deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate is—no way around it—a political act. And yet a pervasive belief within the press is that journalists do not engage in such action, for to do so would be against their principles. As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, 'We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.' I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good. When it is criticized for this it will reject the criticism out of hand, which is also not good."
(This piece is interesting because it is from 2009 and therefore is better at diagnosing the disease than prescribing a cure; it does not notice some of the ways-- some of which had already begun at the point it was published-- that in the coming years the status quo would arrest or co-opt the processes it describes)
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html
"The iron law of institutions"
"the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution 'fail' while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution."
http://mu-foundation.blogspot.com/2011/11/maniac-mansion.html
"Maniac Mansion"
"[Maniac Mansion (1987):] it's small, it's old, it has an interface that wasn't fully exploited. It's still more open, more interested in reacting [to] the player's prodding than most other games I've seen in this vein--even very recent ones."
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
"Lena"
"Between 2030 and 2049, MMAcevedo was duplicated more than 80 times, so that it could be distributed to other research organisations. Each duplicate was made with the express permission of Acevedo himself or, from 2043 onwards, the permission of a legal organisation he founded to manage the rights to his image. Usage of MMAcevedo diminished in the mid-2040s as more standard brain images were produced, these from other subjects who were more lenient with their distribution rights and/or who had been scanned without their express consent. In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without his consent. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image."
