The psychological impact of the Internet on day-to-day living.

These are consumers who self-identify as being the first person to know about something (often for the sake of coolness, but just as often because that’s the shit they’re legitimately into). It’s integral to their sensibility. And the rippling ramifications of that sensibility are huge.

the myth of universal timeliness.

Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

As Americans, we tend to look down on European countries that impose legal limitations on speech—yet as long as speakers in those countries stay within the specified boundaries, discourse is allowed relatively unfettered (even when it’s unpopular). In the US, there are absolutely no speech boundaries imposed by the government, so the citizenry

it’s not that the 1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; it’s that logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.

There’s an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.”

We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached

It’s among the few remnants of the pre-Internet monoculture;