Daze with Willem — USURPATOR

The rise of Grid Zero has prompted Meta to turn its focus to DMs, and one of their new features is an AI assistant to “help” send messages. It’s a horrifying concept to me. The app already mediates our existence, reducing it to branding, professionalism, activism or some combination of those three. One of the few pleasures left are the semi-private... See more

The idea of anonymity is intriguing, and these apps get a lot of downloads by appealing to our natural curiosity — we want to know what other people are really thinking! However, they can quickly turn negative with bullying and trolls taking advantage of the fact that their identities aren’t tied to their posts. It’s also tough to monetize this typ... See more

The basic concept is that you take photos through an interface that looks like a disposable camera, complete with a tiny viewfinder so you can’t really see what you’re shooting. And then the photos are hidden until they’re “developed” at 9am the following morning and shared into “rolls” — basically groups. It’s conceptually similar to Beme, which l... See more

The public arena of social media is a battleground between our most Compressed Identities. But it’s in private DMs, small group chats and offline conversations that I often find the most open and insightful conversations that show me who people are and how they want to be seen.

He offers a hopeful look at the promise of metaverse communities but also pulls no punches talking about the ways in which craven actors threaten to bring the whole experiment down.

When Zuck famously — and  wrongly  — declared: “Having two identities for yourself is a lack of integrity” we got locked into a single static account, desperate for dynamism and more nuanced expr ession.

Our innate desire for personality multiplicity thrashed against the restrictions of claustrophobic profiles.

“Melissa has tapped into the zeitgeist of bored teens in quarantine and given them purpose.” Mueller tells me. Craving community, the app let them “gather and have conversations with each other rather than exclusively interacting with the broadcasts on TikTok.”