The Hyper-Personalization of Everything

The significance of the shift from “generalized media” to “personalized media” cannot be overstated. Our digital worlds will soon be tailored to our interests in unfathomable ways. On the one hand, personalized experiences are likely to make marketing more effective. Brands have a precious opportunity to make us all feel “known” in our every intera... See more

We will all start to opt-in for ads [read: personalized experiences]: If you subscribe to my view that technology at its best takes us back to the way things once were — but with less friction and at a far greater scale, then perhaps you’re agree: We want local restaurants to know our names and preferences. We want experiences catered to our tastes... See more

when it comes to belonging, what the Long Tail, A.I. and mass-customization offers on a personal scale, it erases in the macro sense.

If you assume that the pace of change in consumer-facing Internet stays high, and that it gets more compelling over time, then in the long run the only options are a) be careful what you use, or b) accept that you're outsourcing a growing share of your decisions to product managers and growth hackers who do not necessarily have your interests at he... See more

The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.

But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we los

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Digital media has made it possible to live an even more intensely private life, inhabiting what Renee DiResta once called “bespoke realities.”

Another idea is that the internet is changing our preferences — we’re getting more interested in either exactly what we want, or whatever’s most frictionless. Aggregate or specialize. In other words, give people everything they want or the one thing they need. Everything in the middle gets slaughtered.

as our everyday software tools and media became global for the first time, the hand of the artist gave way to the whims of the algorithm. And our software became one-size-fits-all in a world full of so many different people. All our opinions, beliefs, and ideas got averaged out — producing the least common denominator: endless sequels that everyone... See more