Brandon Marcus

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

The future of news in the 20th century belonged to Walter Lippmann’s democratic paternalism. The winner-take-all nature of advertising markets, the artificial scarcity of broadcast spectrum space, and the forbidding industrial moats associated with the costs of news production and distribution, gave rise to the era of 20th century mass media, which... See more

So what exactly was the so-called democratization of media going to accomplish, in terms of the country’s political life? We now know the answer: It was going to widen the gap between the pseudo-environments in which people think and feel and the real environment in which they live and act. It was going to reveal a fundamental paradox of modern... See more

We construct our pseudo-environment out of what Lippmann termed stereotypes. When confronted by “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world,” we have to rely on rules of thumb, intuitive judgments, and other mental shortcuts—heuristics, as cognitive psychologists call them—to make sense of things. We comprehend through intuition... See more

Freud did not treat anxiety as a mistake. He understood it, rather, as perhaps our most important, vital, informative feeling—the psyche’s most urgent messenger.

“The problem of anxiety is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental

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If we’re serious about creating space for genuine human connection we need to attack the conditions that make performance necessary in the first place. It should not be hard to see that policies around economic security, affordable housing and universal health- or childcare are what’s really necessary, so we aren’t stuck in a society that doesn’t... See more

As Jia Tolentino wrote: “As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.”