martin luther's wordle starter

So when people ask me what I am reading or watching or doing, I don’t tell them. Because I want to preserve my own dumb little route through the universe.

Social media seems to have this intrinsic character of convergence. I talked about that in a previous newsletter. The idea that once you become a part of a digital community, your very participation in that community further optimizes the platform’s convergence upon a single set of ideas, idioms, modes, or what have you.

I thought the real pleasure of mass experience was disappearing into a crowd and blending in.

more and more every day that once people decide you have clout or social capital, they want to synchronize with you. They begin to want to converge with you. And that sounds fine, right? Like, people want your opinions. They trust your taste. But the problem becomes then that once you are someone that other people set their watches by, you cease to... See more

Peak saturation can be accomplished so easily, so readily on social media.

I think that at this point in life—after ten or so years of a proliferative mode in the online idiom—there is a craving to return to an earlier, slower internet. Before real chronology and temporal relationships were replaced with sped-up simulations of real-time.

The point of the haul is novelty, abundance, proliferation. We all love to watch acquisition and permutation. Mix and match. I personally am very susceptible to an unboxing! I can’t help it! They are so engrossing! The stuff! The abundance!

So we’re all chasing novelty. The pulse of something new, something brilliant by which we can distinguish ourselves. The irony is that we don’t know it until someone else shows it to us and then we all copy them and the thing ceases to be novel or particular.

for most of human history, those things were invisible to us. They were there if you wanted to look, but for the most part, people just went about their lives, being acted upon by systems and forces, not really thinking about it, just vibing.

It used to mean something, finding your people, your herd, your crowd, your familiar souls. It used to mean something to stumble upon people who cared about what you cared about. But now, even amid the internet’s turn back toward the notion of scarcity, it feels like all of our symbols have lost their capacity to signify.