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Poet Nora Claire Miller writes about buying Laurie Anderson’s 1995 CD-ROM, Puppet Motel, along with a vintage laptop, and taking both to the acclaimed musician and artist’s Lower Manhattan studio for a spin. “Originally, this was going to be a set-building project about a tour that I was doing. So I thought, let’s do a virtual show first,” Anderson reveals about her foray into multimedia. Fans didn’t bite. “People want a t-shirt. They don’t want to see me roam.”
“ICEBlock is no different from crowdsourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple’s own Maps app, implements as part of its core service.”
– ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron, defending his app after Apple removed it from the App Store following pressure from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. The crowdsourced tool allows users to alert others about ICE agent sightings, which Aaron argues serves a protective function similar to traffic apps—while the Trump administration claims it endangers law enforcement officers.
“Each search helped Google make more advertising money than rivals and gave it more data to improve its ability to accurately field queries. It also gave Apple billions of reasons not to develop its own search engine.”
– Journalists Tripp Mickle and Cecilia Kang, on the absurd economics underlying an antitrust ruling that allows Google to keep paying Apple $20 billion annually to be the default iPhone search engine—effectively paying a competitor not to compete. Google will maintain its search monopoly ”largely without interruption,” they write.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a thousand ‘x’ increase in computational speed. Another thousand ‘x’ is projected in the next five years. Things will be very different when we do this in 2030.”
– Christie’s Ventures lead Devang Thakkar, striking an accelerationist tone in introducing the 10th Christie’s Art + Tech Summit. The two-day NYC gathering featured filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, digital artist Refik Anadol, Signal president Meredith Whittaker, and representatives from Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. [quote edited]
“We are drowning in data but somehow unable to drink from its wellspring.”
– Writer Ian Bogost, on the paradox of contemporary computing. Testing new Apple Intelligence features, Bogost finds that enhanced Siri fails basic tasks—searching email, locating files, understanding voice commands—revealing how little progress has been made toward the frictionless interactions tech companies have promised for decades.
– Graphic designer Jay Dwivedi, responding to another X user’s “what happened to FAANG?” query. His visual update of the acronym swaps Facebook for Meta and Netflix for Nvidia, and adds OpenAI, capturing Big Tech’s new AI-centric pecking order.
“MacPaint and HyperCard had a huge, huge impact on my life—deeply creative and generous tools. Until then, computers were just DOS prompts and green ASCII.”
– Software artist Zach Lieberman, on the influence late Apple engineer Bill Atkinson had on his generation of artists and designers. Atkinson, who passed away on June 5th, created seminal software packages like MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard that were critical to the Macintosh magic.
Apple designer and programmer Bill Atkinson dies at 74 from pancreatic cancer at his Bay Area home. His QuickDraw graphics library, MacPaint drawing program, and HyperCard multimedia database transformed computers from business machines into visual creative platforms for artists and everyday users.
“It’s America’s most iconic company and it’s China’s bargaining chip. Beijing clearly has more of a hold on Apple’s day-to-day operations than Washington does.”
– Journalist Patrick McGee, noting that Apple’s reliance on cheap labour and robust manufacturing capacity makes for complex geopolitics. Chatting about his book Apple in China (2025), he reveals the tech giant’s recent efforts to shift (some) production to India and Vietnam could take a decade to scale. [quote edited]
“The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness.”
– Journalist Susan Dominus, underscoring the prominence of female voices in AI assistants and apps—from Siri and Alexa to Jessie, a text-to-speech model used widely on TikTok.
“The US wields the sharper sword here since the tech giants are headquartered there. Unlike the EU’s fines, the antitrust cases in the US threaten the corporate organization of the tech giants, which, if altered, would redirect the profits and change consumers’ experiences with their products.”
– Techscape columnist Blake Montgomery, assessing the stakes in the antitrust battles being fought against Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta in courtrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.”
– U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta, ruling that Google has stifled competition to protect its 90% share of internet search traffic. The most consequential antitrust case since U.S. v. Microsoft Corp. a quarter-century ago, the designation of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent players as an illegal monopoly will influence upcoming antitrust cases against Apple, Amazon, and Meta.
“This is Apple’s pitch distilled: the messy edges of your life, sanded down via Siri and brushed aluminum. You live; Apple expedites.”
– Tech columnists Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong, describing how Apple’s integration of ChatGPT into its voice assistant could seem appealing to consumers. “The more you buy into its ecosystem and entrust it with your personal information, the more useful its AI tools theoretically become,” the duo concludes, worrying that AI-powered Siri will (further) lock users into reliance on Apple products.
“I wanted to have you on and Apple asked us not to do it. They literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her.’ Like, what is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere?”
– Political comedy titan and returned Daily Show host Jon Stewart, telling U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair and antitrust lawyer Lina Khan about his former bosses interfering in his short-lived current affairs program on Apple TV+. Launched in 2021, The Problem with Jon Stewart was cancelled after only two seasons due to ‘creative differences.’
“Apple selectively restricts access to the points of connection between third-party apps and the iPhone’s operating system, degrading the functionality of non-Apple apps and accessories.”
– U.S. Attourney General Merrick Garland, describing the iPhone and App Store as an anti-competitive walled garden. “Apple has held a dominant market share not because of its superiority, but because of its unlawful exclusionary behaviour,” he says in a speech announcing sweeping antitrust action against the tech giant.
“It’s more than Apple and Microsoft’s market caps combined. It’s more than than any company has raised for anything in the history of capitalism.”
– New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, contextualizing the reported $5-7 Trillion in funding OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking to boost global GPU production. The staggering amount “is a really good indicator of what people in positions of leadership in the AI industry think that is going to take to get AI to the next level,” says Roose.
In the wake of its new After AI issue, the Australian art magazine Artlink revisits its special issues on digital media art practice, beginning with Art & Technology (image), published in 1987 in collaboration with the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) and Apple. Writer Julianne Pierce attributes this “prescient commitment” to founding editor Stephanie Britton’s exposure to holographics, digital animation, and computer-generated video in Adelaide’s Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).
“If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cyberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns.”
– LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant, channelling media scholar David Karpf’s critique of Apple’s “anti-metaverse,” where people disappear into a “totally immersive computer on their face”—alone. “If the world keeps getting worse,” Karpf says, “this will eventually have a lot of appeal.”
“Introducing iPhone, on your face,” quips ‘Famous New Media Artist’ Jeremy Bailey about the reveal of Apple’s Vision Pro. Bailey anticipated the company’s mixed-reality goggles after coming across a 2015 patent (image), while patenting (whimsical) AR interfaces of his own. “Current AR and VR patents,” Bailey wrote in 2016, “are hilariously broad and forecast a future where culture itself belongs to the world’s largest tech companies.” The new Apple face computer still gets a thumbs-up (“this is incredible”).
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