Popularity

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for m... See more

As is now well known, social media platforms have been deliberately calibrated — using likes, retweets, and other reward mechanisms — to hijack our desire for attention and approval.

That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme.

The digitization of social life has also enabled us to trace the detailed movements of ideas and influences, making it difficult to think of ourselves as spontaneous, original actors in our own dramas. Again, keen observers might have always been able to trace such lines, but now we are all overtly conscious of the flows of social capital, and we h... See more