Note by Gurwinder on Substack

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

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“Twitter makes money from your attention, so they need to compel your attention. Sometimes that leads to good things, like connecting you to people and ideas that matter. But it also means that the addiction, abuse, and outrage that thrive on Twitter and other social platforms may be impossible to eradicate. So what’s left to do? You can change the... See more

Like New York, the internet never arrests its massive sprawl. Instead, it exists as complex adaptive system that renders senses overworked and synapses under-rested.To open any app is to wade into frenzied maelstrom whipped by gale-force winds. Whether requests, reminders, or retweets, waves and winds alike pummel your attention as you try your bes... See more

The challenge, or opportunity, for companies like Substack is to figure out how to help creators reach new audiences and grow without having to compromise on ownership. The aggregators of the early internet unlocked great power for creators through building central gathering places. We are doing the same with the Substack app and features—like Reco... See more

The thing I didn’t understand going into it was that Substack wasn’t just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers thanks to the leverage technology gives them—it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The Substack model wasn’t just a business... See more

Platforms have boxed our social lives and creative endeavors into slick, hyper-designed perimeters, guiding users through algorithmically perfect scrolls.

If our primary urge when we go online is to avoid remaining static, why should our content be siloed within the enclosed walls of a proprietary platform?

When platforms make their livings by harvesting and selling our attention, they achieve that by shoving unsolicited junk into our minds, while we obediently scroll down and down and down.