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.

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.

everything has these kinds of convergent aesthetics.

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.

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!

There must be some way to partake in shared online experiences in a way that does not feel totally beholden to the convergence and optimization of digital life. Like, there must be some way to share what I am thinking and feeling and watching and enjoying with everyone in a way that does not attempt to replicate my preferences into a trend.

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.

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.

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