Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #69
the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more
W. David Marx • The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste
As the realm of virtual information complexifies, it is increasingly difficult to collectively experience, let alone agree on concrete descriptions of events. The platforms we use to communicate often lack archival affordances, optimizing instead for the nonstop production of new content. So context collapses and signifiers empty their meaning. Whe... See more
Libby Marrs • How to Read the Internet
Navigating the modern internet feels like trudging through a hostile wasteland. The search and social algorithms, ostensibly designed to give us what we want, keep us trapped in the shallows, gorging on an endless supply of junk media that never quite satiates
rob hardy • The more beautiful internet our hearts know is possible
We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era. Grand visions of the future are few and far between; the pop cultural landscape is littered with post-apocalyptic dystopias. If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to unde... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
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
My current-day interaction with the internet seems to contain ever fewer of these portholes and chance encounters. If the internet is a superhighway, it feels like there are fewer exits, and you’re expected to keep traveling to the same places over and over again, based on your past behavior (and purchasing history). In fact, the highway always see
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