Good Morning,
David Hockney died at 88 (AP), and the argument that ran through his seventy-year career is one we’re still having: a new tool — the Polaroid, the fax machine, the iPad — is an invitation, not a threat. He drew with whatever was at hand.
That argument runs through the rest of today’s stories. A landmark German court ruled Google liable for what its AI Overviews assert (The Decoder) — the first real test of whether a machine can be held to account for answers it invents (and gets wrong). The Walrus, meanwhile, pleads to bring back the gatekeepers (The Walrus) as a means of sorting out culture with values, even as BookTok keeps minting the authors the old gatekeepers passed over (Yahoo).
So what does an algorithm with no gatekeeper actually feed us? Spotify’s biggest hits are now from the 1970s and ’80s (WSJ) — infinite access curdled into nostalgia, the past outdrawing the present for our attention. Spotify did fix one thing: it killed the disco-ball app icon everyone loathed (Variety).
And lastly — not because it’s less important, but the Kennedy Center saga drags on. Washington National Opera sues the Kennedy Center over a $17M endowment the Center has kept and which belongs to the opera company (The Hill) . And the Atlantic argues that the Kennedy Center is a metaphor or at least a cautionary tale about the difficulties of de-Trumpifying after he’s moved on. It’s a long way back (The Atlantic).
All of our stories below.
Doug
