Normal sounds

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are engines of distraction and cultural rot. They stand in front of the more difficult but more rewarding aspects of life: deep work, intimate connections with friends and loved ones, focused attention for hobbies with intrinsic rewards. By training users to crave constant novelty and the immediate approval of an... See more

Many things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more

In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge... See more

With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to complet... See more

The feed is such a familiar, dominant organizing structure for social platforms I feel silly describing it to you. But is it inevitable? Are there other ways we could build platforms that might welcome users, engender connection and understanding, and facilitate action? What other styles of platform navigation might allow us to feel safe and flouri... See more

“Perhaps, then, that Instagram shot or confessional tweet isn’t always meant to evoke some mythical, pretend version of ourselves,” he surmised, “but instead seeks to invoke the imagined perfect audience—the non-existent people who will see us exactly as we want to be seen.” “We are not curating an ideal self,” Alang added, “but rather, an ideal Ot... See more

Why was that pseudonymous presence on the internet better? Social media platforms have made all of us minor celebrities, and celebrity is an unpleasant thing. Celebrity psychology is fundamentally anxious, burdening us with constant performance, self-consciousness and self-censorship.

Social as a model works when people have about as much to offer as they want to receive along a given axis. But no trait is distributed uniformly; there are are outliers in the nice-to-look-at, nice-to-listen-to, nice-to-read, nice-to-get-stock-tips from axes, there's a population that can offer a respectable performance with these traits, and ther... See more