The Generalist

it’s a directionally correct generalization, and it’s showing itself in where and how people interact online. Many young people prefer the facelessness of Discord, Reddit, a crypto pfp. With the rise of privacy online—both anonymity and pseudonymity—we’ll see more people express themselves through new personas that obscure their “real” identity.

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Unfortunately, the patterns of our techno-social order tend toward the fracturing of community and the isolation of the person. We are offered an array of tools that promise to assuage the resulting economic and psychic precarity, but, more often than not, their real aim implicit in their design is to perpetuate and accelerate social fragmentation ... See more

"One of the reasons I first started The Generalist was because I believe that the great epics of our era will occur in the tech sector . No other field asks – and tests – so many consequential philosophical, psychological, and societal questions so frequently. What is money? What makes something valuable? Will nations exist in the cloud? Can we hac... See more

The primary modern manifestation is what I’ve previously labeled waldenponding — a fearful retreat from the technologically mediated modes of rich connection that would enable such maximal collectivization. The fetish object of the waldenponder is the individual brain doing “deep” work, with minimal collectivization, and maximal egoism.

We’re now observing that consumer social experiences are starting to look and feel like games at every level. Remote networking events in Roomkey are not a panel of Zoom screens; instead, attendees create virtual avatars and can navigate around a virtual conference room on their phones. On the education platform Koala, teachers can create virtual c... See more