my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Anne Helen Petersen • Culture Study | Anne Helen Petersen | Substack
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my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.
Influencers, now a slowly fading cliché in the Internet’s tableau vivant, found success articulating the cult of personality, and marketing themselves as direct-to-consumer-goods. The shift away from this algorithmic surrender can be traced to the macro and micro “creator economies” spawned by the likes of Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans and even Cameo... See more
Eileen Isagon Skyers • Dirt: Are we post-platform?
For a brand as for a public figure—which, as we now know, any Twitter user can accidentally become overnight—change, ambiguity, and contradiction are anathema.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for f... See more
Freddie deBoer • Review: Kyle Chayka's Filterworld
What defines new relational stages today, given they’re always mixed together with old ones on platforms eager to keep you engaged? How do you mark a new “era” when you’re keeping tabs on the day-to-day lives of hundreds of people who will never tangibly occupy your day-to-day life again?
Real Life Mag • Nostalgia for Nostalgia — Real Life
Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual
Platforms have boxed our social lives and creative endeavors into slick, hyper-designed perimeters, guiding users through algorithmically perfect scrolls.