31 October 20189 November 2018 Announcement / Events / Technology Our never-before attempted VR event at the 2018 Digital Writers’ Festival Editorial team The Politics and Possibilities of Virtual Reality 7 pm (AEDT) Thursday 1 November Online (via AltspaceVR or Digital Writers’ Festival site) Join Overland‘s resident tech-genius and poet Benjamin Laird, experimental storyteller Mez Breeze, and writer and VR enthusiast Mark Riboldi to boldly go where no writers have gone before: a panel examining the history and present of VR taking place in virtual space! So satisfy your Matrix-spurred curiosity with this free event, as part of the 2018 Digital Writers Festival, and learn what happens when we finally go beyond imagining to immersing ourselves in alternative realities. Various and easy ways to join this event: Attend in virtual space! For this you’ll need a compatible device (Google Daydream, Gear VR, Oculus Go, etc) and a free account. Find out how on AltspaceVR. In 2D mobile mode via an Android mobile device, using the AltspaceVRapp. In 2D desktop mode. For this option, install the AltspaceVR app on your Windows machine. If that all sounds too much for your first foray into VR, watch the YouTube stream instead! You’ll hear the discussion, can ask questions, and will have a window onto the Overland+DWF VR space. Watch via the DWF website from 7pm. Check out the rest of the 2018 festival program Editorial team More by Editorial team Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays First published in Overland Issue 228 23 January 202325 January 2023 Announcement An announcement Editorial team In 2023, as we look towards our 250th edition and prepare for Overland’s 70th anniversary, we wish to make a tangible commitment to improve working conditions for our community, and ensure that whatever funding challenges we might face as a left-wing not-for-profit publisher are not passed on to our contributors. As such, we are proud to become the first publishers to sign onto the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance’s Freelance Charter, which affirms the rights and protections of freelance contributors. 3 First published in Overland Issue 228 12 December 202213 December 2022 Technology The Spotifyification of music Ben Brooker By giving the most insipid music the biggest platform—not because it’s what listeners want, but because it’s one of the ways they can most easily fatten their profit margins—Spotify is reducing music to a kind of aural wallpaper, and marginalising if not erasing the work of actual musicians in the process.