martin luther's wordle starter

so much of our lives are dictated by this kind of algorithmic convergence, so that I don’t even trust it anymore. We’re all being herded.

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.

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.

everything has these kinds of convergent aesthetics.

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

The game (Wordle) seems designed to slow you down. And that slowing down, I think, is really its secret thrill.

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

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.

one way to preserve the capacity of a symbol to signify is to limit its quantity or access to the symbol. Things only have meaning if not everyone has access to them, or so the logic goes. It’s an old idea. The heart of all emulation, really.