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In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital cl
Five companies that privately own the public communications and commercial operating system that increasingly write the rules of society We have outs
“..in the United States, it is the industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech…The marketplace of ideas depends on the structure of
Calcified attention as an indicator of quality orsuccess has gained importance far beyond the realm of socialnetworks and many of our daily choices ar
Ellul’s analysis of freedom holds up, since most of us are not masters but consumers of technology, adapting to it and prone to mistake the valuable t
So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be co
The demonic recognizes in our shortcuts the perfect opportunity: tempt humans away from the difficult labor of making, growing, and building with our
Slop emerges when we eliminate not just toil (the burdensome aspects of work) but labor itself (the meaningful human engagement with creation). Slop i
Iris Murdoch, who extended Weil’s thinking into moral philosophy, made this point explicit in The Sovereignty of Good: the quality of our attention de
Increasingly, algorithmic powered systems promise to read for us: to summarise, extract, simplify, and pre digest. What is presented as convenience is
But to love is to be drawn out of our self-centered patterns toward some positive object that is other than oneself. Love thus has the same outward-pu
Some Questions to Reflect or Journal OnWhat’s a dominant narrative in your industry or community that no longer serves?What alternative story do you w
Within the parameters of modern science, subjective experience has come to seem entirely unreal—a private drama of sensations, thoughts, and beliefs t
We interact with these constructs of other people that make our own minds instead of interacting with the person as they really exist. We are machines
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no
The true strategist chooses which challenge among many to accept. Some challenges seem insurmountable with current knowledge and resources. The strate
I call my perspective challenge-based strategy. The central proposition is that a strategy is a set of policies and actions carefully designed to over
There are six core insights to uncover: Job. What did they try to accomplish? Alternatives. What other solutions have they used or considered in the p
So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological
Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no
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 b
Digital communication is largely communication without community. Digital communication leads to self-production. The compulsion to present ourselves
Rituals can be thought of as ensembles of “mind hacks” that exploit the bugs in our mental programs in subtle and diverse ways.
Synchronous movement, rhythmic music, and goal-oriented teamwork all interact to endow rituals with their power to infuse participants with communal f
Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a com- munity are physically experienced and solid
The culture of authenticity goes hand in hand with the distrust of ritualized forms of interaction. Only spontaneous emotion, that is, a subjective st
As the importance, diversity, and complexity of cultural products ratcheted up, natural selection gradually strengthened our inclinations to rely on c
Norms create social rules or standards that prescribe, forbid, or sometimes endorse some set of actions. These actions are incentivized and sustained
Humans are a cultural species. Our brains and psychology are specialized for acquiring, storing, and organizing information gleaned from the minds and
Individuals and communities preferentially attend to and learn from more successful or prestigious groups. This causes social norms and beliefs to dif
Information and attention: A century in which the key to human history is not how the economy grew, but rather how humans learned to give attention to
The digital network is an environment, we're incorporated into as components: nodes, continuously receiving and transmitting signals. Our actions are
Culture is shaped by the technology we are surrounded by, and the marketplace of ideas depends on the structure of the communications and culture indu
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.
“..in the United States, it is the industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech…The marketplace of ideas depends on the structure of
The future of news in the 20th century belonged to Walter Lippmann’s democratic paternalism. The winner-take-all nature of advertising markets, the ar
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 problem isn’t just that people deliberately lie, spreading disinformation for personal or political gain. It’s that the public sphere has shattere
We construct our pseudo-environment out of what Lippmann termed stereotypes. When confronted by “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer wo
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 w
The problem isn’t just that people deliberately lie, spreading disinformation for personal or political gain. It’s that the public sphere has shattere
We construct our pseudo-environment out of what Lippmann termed stereotypes. When confronted by “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer wo
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 w
This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be con
It’s difficult to live in this country in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at
the delusion at the heart of capitalism, the existence of some essential, infinite wellspring of innovation and efficiency such as to make the prospec
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
. You have to gradually ramp up your capacity to handle complex ideas and precise prose. I read a few hours a day, and I mostly read books that are co
Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. The
John Keats, whose portrait by Severn captures exactly this quality of absorbed attention, gave us another language for it. His “negative capability”,
The more AI can execute, the more your eye for what's interesting – your ability to discern and curate what matters and why – becomes everything.
even B2B software now feel the pull of user experience, design, aesthetics, and storytelling.
“Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge,” Montesquieu continued, “it’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know.”
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
Francis Bacon warned that when we have no clear “prenotion or perception of what we are seeking, we seek and toil and wander aimlessly, as if in infin
Our imaginationshave been industrially deformed to conceive only what can bemoulded into an engineered system or social habits that fit thelogic of la
The commodity called 'education' and the institution called'school' make each other necessary. The circle can be brokenonly by a widely shared insight
I’m trying to achieve narrative-market fit, which I see as deeply understanding your market of readers to figure out what questions they have that you
Narrative-market fit is that intersection between: Questions your audience is asking Questions you can credibly answer Topics that are valuable for yo
I believe that narrative is a system of stories.
Narrative control: you choose what to elevate and what to exclude and you then get to tell the story of why that curation matters
And if the real America, the true America, is disappearing, then extreme measures might be required to save it.
But the answer may also lie, simply, in the depth of Ingraham’s despair. The America of the present is a dark, nightmarish place where God speaks to o
How is a nation defined? Who gets to define it? Who are we? For a long time, we have imagined that such questions were settled—but why should they eve
The right wants to impose a narrow, exclusionary vision on everyone of what America is, what it should be, and who belongs. Liberalism supports moral
Cultures that sustain cohesive mythological images connect individuals to the four orders of mystery: the transcendent (the gods), the environment (th
Then came the dawn of modern science, which turned the world into a subject of investigation. Nature was no longer a source of wonder but a force to b
For Weber, disenchantment was not merely an ontological hollowing-out—the realization that there are no spirits hiding in rocks or souls lurking in bo
Some critics have argued that emergentism is just an updated version of vitalism—the ancient notion that the world is animated by a life force or ener
I treat the SVC as a hegemonicalignment of ideas and institutions that recodes ‘innovation’ as common sense and renderstechno-capitalist solutionism t
Many reasons can be advanced for why the lords of Silicon Valley went MAGA, but one is the shared belief in reshaping reality to fit massive egos, rat
In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital cl
For all the people on these platforms, every interaction, every moment of passive consumption, is mediated by algorithmic recommendations. Even if som
Filterworld can be fascistic, in that the algorithmic feeds tend to create templates of how things are supposed to be, always informed by inherent bia
“Feedback loops reinforce a user’s pre-existing preferences, diminishing their exposure to a diverse range of cultural offerings and denying art, aest
In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital cl
Anyone who has ever been forced to contend with the empire’s footprint knows this argument by heart. We treat you so much better than we have to; why
The fear of some comfort disappearing collides with a different fear—a fear that any society whose functioning demands one ignore carnage of this scal
Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is n
Every round of violence is the justified as the sole consequence of the last Palestinian act of violence. The barbarians instigate and the civilized a
Popularity is not always a measure of merit, and, in any case, it is not static. What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter o
What is entrepreneurial journalism?I interpret entrepreneurial journalism as knowledge-driven, creator-led storytelling that reaches and engages audie
The "creator economy" turned out to be an economy where the thing being created, more and more, is demand for more of yourself. Your aesthetic, your o
There’s a model of self-perception among some journalists that views the world as a playing field and the reporter as some combination of referee, sco
it’s when people get together and say, we want to manage the shared wealth for our mutual benefit and steward it properly to sustain it.
The idea that people could actually self-organize durable arrangements for managing their own resources and that this paradigm of social governance co
Ivan Illich described the commons this way: “People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of t
The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and tru
Four questions to ask before we open a search bar:What am I trying to understand? (Not “what’s my topic” but “what would I need to know in order to fe
Franklin the Turtle meme about its own uselessness
This is the informational ecosystem we’ve made, without really intending to: one that has reshaped all of culture by privileging the outlook of those
The relationship between narrative and reality truly inverted in 2024. Events used to create narratives. Now, narratives create events. This inversion
We’re in a chasm between stories that used to function and new stories which haven’t yet gathered enough coherence to function effectively. We can res
The breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflic
This might explain why the conspiratorial claims in the Mirror World so often seem to contradict one another. For this new political configuration, co
Why is a Good Insight Like a Refrigerator?Because the moment you look into it, a light comes on.
Ryan Law’s five traits of good thought leadership: Personal: Everything we share in thought leadership has to, in some way, come from you and be uniq
Content Flow — - Content Flow is the connective tissue between all of the content assets and channels your brand creates and invests in. - Content Flo
We talk a lot, both in broader conversation and specialied academic discussions about what the “public” believes and wants. The problem is that we can
The social media platforms built by people who believed behavioral data was a reliable substitute for understanding human psychology produced a decade
Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this e
As Merry puts it, metrics and indicators require all kinds of political compromises and judgment calls to compress so much rich information into a sin
an indirect yearning not for the exclusivity itself, but for the bygone world where universal access (as enabled by the internet) was not yet a defaul
The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “somet
In her brilliant and singular book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French writer and reluctant mystic Simone Weil put the case starkly: To be
Despite the claims of some later Marxist historians, the Luddite uprisings were not simply about ‘class’. Wages mattered, and so did injustice, but wh
In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problemof retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you haveto do your thinking in m
Homeric Greeksvalued clichés because not only the poets but the entire oral noeticworld or thought world relied upon the formulaic constitution ofthou
o, secondary orality is “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality,”[20] according to him. Writing and print, on which this orality dep
A great Marshall McLuhan quote on the speech-to-text transition:Until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, hor
Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or instit
I find it helpful to think about my choices with regards to technology as falling into three general possibilities: embrace, negotiation, refusal. Mor
The problem is that “saving” time and labor have become default settings and social imperatives. Rather than wisely judging what labor or time can and
the proliferation of media artifacts and the growing colonization of our experience by varieties of digital mediation have generated an imperative to
We are moving from what Birkerts calls “vertical” reading: deep, devotional, recursive engagement with a single text, toward “horizontal” reading: ski
Wolf’s concept of cognitive patience helps name a phenomenon central to the decline of meaningful discourse. We are not merely losing our capacity for
What we are seeing is not less exposure to text, but a fundamental shift in the nature of that exposure. The immersive arc of narrative is giving way
Widespread literacy, then, is not a natural baseline but a costly ecological accomplishment. It depends on sustained, large-scale societal investment
The constant scrolling tells us that nothing is worth remembering, nothing is worth reflection, nothing is worth production because the act of consump
William Carlos Williams: “It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its orig
If we want to get our bearings, we need to see more than what is available to us in the immediate moment. Only by framing our moment within a longer h
There will only be vibes and feedback loops in a permanent ahistorical present.
a good competitive analysis is like a map of the land you’re trying to travel through: Where are the easy paths? Where’s the rough going? How can we g
The problem with marketing is that much of the impact we're having is hidden from direct measurement.
A value prop is a utility poem. It’s the most concise way to explain what you do, and who you do it for, and why that’s important.Accordingly, a lot o
You have to tell your story to yourself before you can tell it to your customers. That is, you have to do the messy, therapeutic work of deciding who
Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and show
So I challenge you to think clearly about the many disparate networks you’re part of and think about the ideas you might want to offer those networks
The people with followings, or those gatekeepers at the publications, events, email newsletters, blogs, journals, broadcasts, and accounts have three
In the same way that digital speech combines oral and written speech, digital orality combines the preliterate and literate epistemologies of truth. T
People still select and deliver important content to one another, but content no longer takes the form of logical statements with truth-values that ca
When human beings serve as the repeaters in a communication network—when they take on a signal-amplification role while still acting in their traditio
In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has low
Since then, researchers have expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions
Think of your default patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting as algorithms you’ve been programmed to run unconsciously in response to inputs from o
Why not bypass individual choices altogether and create an automatic behavior—a rule—that requires no decision-making in the moment and that gets no p
