Quick Links for Wednesday, January 3

RelatedHighlights

7. On the internet, the past is a black hole sucking the future into itself.

stealing • Retrofuturism

It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew. When social unrest broke out in the mid-2010s this got even worse — you had to watch your liberal friends and your conservative friends go at ... See more

Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented

The Internet is now a place where everyone has an inventory.

John Palmer • New Internet logic

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.

Maggie Appleton • The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Instead of building rooted, meaningful communities what we have is a worldwide eternal mosh pit. You can log out any time you like — but you can never leave.