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
1. On the internet, we are always living in the past.
The mechanics of this permanent state of retrofuturism are simple: if you have access to detailed data about the behaviour of people, editorial control over what information people receive (as social or search recommendation engines), and the means to nudge people using designed affordances then ... See more
The mechanics of this permanent state of retrofuturism are simple: if you have access to detailed data about the behaviour of people, editorial control over what information people receive (as social or search recommendation engines), and the means to nudge people using designed affordances then ... See more
stealing • Retrofuturism
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.