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honest-broker.com
Personal blog · honest-broker.comculturewriting
honest-broker.com is a personal blog at honest-broker.com about culture and writing. Since 2023, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 340 times, most often “What's Happening to Students?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ted Gioia's Substack for its cultural critique of entertainment, AI and tech platforms, often as supporting reading for commenters' own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What's Happening to Students?5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-03-22
- Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-06-10
- We're moving to a post-entertainment society4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-02-19
- Propositions about the New Romanticism3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-01-17
- Eleven Predictions: Here's What AI Does Next3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-08
- The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-20
- I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-23
- Google Is Now the East India Company of the Internet3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-21
- Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-27
- Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-Pocalypse3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-30
What Hacker News says?
Touched upon in "The State of the Culture 2024" By The Honest Broker. Many graphics showing how art was swallowed by entertainment which was swallowed by distraction which was swallowed by addiction which is what Silicon Valley wants. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-202...
Comment linking /p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024
on “Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake”Submitted The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public as a story · 458 points
HN discussionMost parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers). Admins want to maintain the status quo as long as possible; they appeal to parents at the cost of teachers…
Comment linking /p/whats-happening-to-students
on “The average college student today”Submitted Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter as a story · 230 points
HN discussionAs I recall, the author of the article looks at this at over a long enough time horizon to call out the difference. I rechecked the article, and they’ve been teaching for 30 years. I went through the links (1) (2) and it looks like this has been accelerating since 2010, with one comment saying they noticed it starting in 2006. 1) https://www.honest-broker.com/p/whats-happening-to-students 2) https://www.ft.com/conte…
Comment linking /p/whats-happening-to-students
on “The average college student today”Submitted The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed as a story · 204 points
HN discussionThat’s probably what the companies spending the money think, that they’re building a huge moat. There’s an alternative view. If there’s a bubble and all these companies are spending these huge sums on something that ends up not returning that much on that investment, and the models plateau and eventually smaller, cheaper, self-runnable open source versions get 90% of the way there, what’s going to happen to that moa…
Comment linking /p/is-the-bubble-bursting
on “Anthropic raises $13B Series F”Submitted What's Happening to Students? as a story · 170 points
HN discussionSpotify have been shown to deliberately promote songs which they call Perfect Fit Content that cost them less in terms of royalties. This includes AI generated songs and you can find the same song under 50 different names according to this article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify...
Comment linking /p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally
on “Goodbye, Slopify”Submitted The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass as a story · 169 points
HN discussionI don't think it's that awful that there be honest labor. There is a great deal of creativity that is not possible without self-sufficiency: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-phil...
Comment linking /p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-philip-glass
on “Retired professor arrested for blocking delivery robot. Will do it again”Submitted 30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok as a story · 154 points
HN discussionSee also: Stupidity: My Reading List for a 12-Week Course (and a Final Exam) By Ted Gioia https://www.honest-broker.com/p/stupidity-a-reading-list Here’s Tuchman from “The March of Folly:” Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conques…
Comment linking /p/stupidity-a-reading-list
on “When the CIA turned writers into operatives”Submitted How Miles Davis hired John Coltrane as a story · 146 points
HN discussionI urge everyone to take some time out to read some of the comments on this post. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-t... Some really interesting perspectives in the comments.
Comment linking /p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-the-audience/comments
on “They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing”Submitted The Death of the Magazine as a story · 113 points
HN discussionOriginal works of art that don't conform to the conventional norms of their time are likely to be panned by critics and ignored by the public at first. Only with the passage of time are we able to reevaluate more objectively those works of art which are truly original. In the cacophony of the moment, it's hard to distinguish genius from folly. It happens with original music that doesn't conform to the norms of its d…
Comment linking /p/why-did-the-beatles-get-so-many-bad
on “In Praise of 'Megalopolis'”Submitted Things I Learned from René Girard as a story · 106 points
HN discussionThe article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a counter-culture [1]. I propose that the avant-garde has been synonymous with deconstruction / meaninglessness and the Enlightenment project of personal freedom. Now that we've come to the place where anyone can define their own gender, or, indeed, choose to identify as a completely differen…
Comment linking /p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-village
on “The Last Avant-Garde”Submitted When Louis Armstrong conquered Chicago as a story · 98 points
HN discussion> And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists. Why say "shekel" here instead of "dollar"? Or any other currency? Given the context of the article, the choice of words is either extremely poor taste or an antisemitic dogwhistle He does have another article [0] where he just hand-waves away LF Celine's antisemitism [1], so if I had to guess it's the latter [0] https://www.honest-…
Comment linking /p/the-most-cynical-novel-ever-written
on “Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?”Submitted Ford Dabney might have been the first jazz star as a story · 91 points
HN discussionSpammy rewrite of a Ted Gioia post from last week: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-we-lost-the-flow
Comment linking /p/how-we-lost-the-flow
on “They hijacked our flow state”Submitted Will West Coast Jazz Get Some Respect? as a story · 85 points
HN discussionThis guy ascends. Welcome to the 0.001% party. Elon and the Larry Ellison / Page are still waiting, as per: "Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?" https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-silicon-valley-building-u... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40702130 (A much more interesting, relevant, and thought provoking read.)
Comment linking /p/is-silicon-valley-building-universe
on “My life-changing SaaS exit”Submitted The new culture war is real vs. bogus as a story · 84 points
HN discussionTed Gioia just wrote about renaming. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/we-have-entered-the-self-loa... BigVirtuousTech is now BVT!
Comment linking /p/we-have-entered-the-self-loathing
on “The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries”Submitted They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing as a story · 80 points
HN discussionNote that this is the exact opposite thesis of this article[1], which I remember seeing on HN a while ago. Rather than having no counterculture, it seems the mainstream is being eaten by a thousand countercultures. We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in…
Comment linking /p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
on “Nobody Knows What's Happening Online Anymore”Submitted We're moving to a post-entertainment society as a story · 73 points
HN discussion
