Brianne Johnson
@bri4nn3
Brianne Johnson
Even now, when I’m lucky enough to be able to write exactly what I want to write with very few external constraints, writing often feels difficult for me in the same way it did when I was pumping out listicles — slow, sticky, clunky, painful, humiliating. I wonder if this, too, is part of the appeal of AI: it is so often humiliating to push up agai... See more
Selfhood and Change & Nostalgia
“The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.”
The Uncomfortable
theuncomfortable.com
The Uncomfortable is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani
How to break out of the emotional ruts within skill building
The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
Selfhood and
“A different view into this, a more optimistic one which i choose to adopt, has to do with what being online helps people do. The original piece in The New Consumer talks about how "younger consumers are also more likely to say they feel “more valued for their talents” online than offline, feel “more appreciated” online, and feel “more creative” online." Which suggests to me the problem isn't necessarily how addictive being online is, it's how unappreciated people feel in the offline world. The internet helps us find our people.
I recently heard a great quote about what is the opposite of depression. It's not happiness. It's expression. And so when you have people say they effectively feel more expressive online, and can bond with others more attuned to their needs and points of view, then this gives me hope that there is a net positive effect of all this time we spend online.
Looking at it this way, i see great news in the idea that people have places where they can feel more like themselves, even if it may not fit into our current worldviews of what personal and collective flourishing looks like. When i grew up, playing video games was going to be the ruin of us all, and yet statistically speaking the vast majority of our generation turned out well enough (if anything, the lack of an economic and social safety net fucked us up later).
So it's entirely possible that a whole generation who feel better online than offline will turn out somehow ok as well. Better or worse than us? Impossible to tell. Different? Most likely.”