The Seven Deadly Sins of Consumer Technology

But beyond dating apps, there’s a new entrant in Lust: OnlyFans. OnlyFans exploded during the pandemic by cutting out the middleman of pornography, allowing creators to directly share content (usually NSFW) with their subscribers.

perhaps the best example of Vanity is Lightricks, the maker of the editing app Facetune. What Facetune did is allow anyone to harness the power of professional-grade photoshopping, a decades-old practice in advertising and magazines, all from a smartphone.

Comparison is the root of Envy, and social media is built on comparison.

Netflix tacitly admits its slothdom when it asks you if you’re still watching after you haven’t touched the mouse / remote in a while. (You are always still watching, and you hit “continue” to carry on watching while feeling just a little bit worse about yourself.)

the sector that best captures Sloth in 2022 is gaming. Gaming is a larger industry than fellow Sloth industries like movies and TV combined. And the premise of the metaverse is inherently sloth-like: our bodies remain motionless in the analog world while our minds explore virtual worlds.

It’s normal to feel these emotions, and every consumer-facing company—in some way—taps into the negative emotions as well as the positive. Social networks, for instance, are as much about spreading kindness as they are about spreading malice. They are conduits for human communication, which runs the full spectrum of emotion. Both the good and the b... See more

The second additional sin—“the 9th sin”—is Acedia, a word which has faded from our vocabulary. Acedia is effectively apathy or listlessness, “not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world.” It’s the sin which I think most succinctly sums up Gen Z nihilism. Acedia is evident in the gallows humor, the 💀 emojis, the ... See more

Today, everything is investable. We can invest in sports cards with Alt. We can invest in fine art with Masterworks. We can invest in people with Rally and we can invest in collectibles with a different startup called Rally. Everything is being financialized.

Instagram disruptors like BeReal, Poparazzi, Dispo, and Locket have promised a more authentic, less curated reality. But even authenticity, over time, becomes performative; “photo dumps” become carefully-crafted compilations of artsy images that show us in a good light (“Look how this blurry photo implies I’m too busy having fun to take non-blurry ... See more