When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness.

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much it sucks, and how stupid it is, and how if you make garlic oil like it tells you to you will give botulism to your entire family -

we don’t use it.

like internally. we don’t use it.

I mean that we don’... See more

“Connectivity between restaurants and guests has eroded. There’s a difference between knowing it’s someone’s birthday and being able to contact that person and invite them in for a drink.” - Ben Leventhal

Blackbird transforms traditional loyalty systems and fosters a more interactive and valuable relationship between consumers and businesses.

the best content on the internet is created by people who have turned research into their leisure activity.

In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new.

If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.Make no mistake. For the conscious news consumer, there has never been a better time to be alive. Th... See more

he does see trouble in the glut of franchise and comic book entertainment that currently makes up much of what you can see in a theater. “The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” Scorsese said. “Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those—that’s what movies are.”

I think people already think that.

Milner, after keeping a diary and trying to pinpoint what experiences truly make her feel alive, realizes that she seems to pay two kinds of attention: “narrow attention” and “wide attention.” She describes them in a chapter called “Two Ways of Looking”:

(1) Narrow attention. – This first way of perceiving seemed to be the automatic one, the kind of... See more