Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #69
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
I think that at this point in life—after ten or so years of a proliferative mode in the online idiom—there is a craving to return to an earlier, slower internet. Before real chronology and temporal relationships were replaced with sped-up simulations of real-time.
Substack • martin luther's wordle starter
To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
But I also think that something more profound is happening here. Instead of being a passive consumer of the web, I begin to feel as though the internet is molding itself around my intentions, transforming from a distraction machine into a precision instrument for creativity.
Sari Azout • The End of Productivity
I used to go online in search of things. Now, a huge part of my online experience is based on me waiting for platforms to serve me what they think I will like.