There is great stuff everywhere, too, but what’s the cost? Business culture is human culture. And it makes a lot of people in the culture industry feel like they’re losing their minds.

Which is to say, we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with things to desire, to value, to find beautiful. The difference is in the time it took to wait for a new magazine to show up at the newsstand versus the next scroll on the toilet.

When you’re hitting the “heart,” are you tacitly endorsing a world in which nothing matters but money?

“People buy certain goods, make pilgrimages to Marfa’s desert Prada store, and arrange their lives in certain ways to feel close to something,” writes Kieran McLean. The “something” is ephemeral—it’s the being perceived as feeling close to something, not the actual being, that’s the key.

I see the avatars of people I like and respect, people I think of as very smart, among the “likes” on posts where someone is making a bigger check than most people will ever see in their lives promoting commodity grain cereal. I see their avatars in the “likes” on a skinny woman’s bare torso, her head nowhere to be found in the image. I see their... See more

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with things to desire, to value, to find beautiful.