Throughlines (Part I)

Naturally, I think about digital spaces a lot. And as many of you know, I have basically dedicated my life to consumer internet. Particularly social. Lately, maybe because of working on Eternal. I’ve been thinking about the next set of digital spaces. And how we will have to design for a sense of depth on mobile.

I think this will happen at the 3 p... See more

Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0, where you were expected to be your whole self online; that expectation, though, was like a legacy company using computers to run their analog business model: it may have been more efficient, but it wasn’t at all an optimal use of technology. The entire magic of software is that it is malleable... See more

Large parasocial platforms transformed the internet into a hostile and impersonal place. They feed our FOMO to keep us clicking. They exaggerate our differences for "engagement". They create engines for stardom to keep us creeping. They bait us into nutritionless and sensationalist content. Humanity cannot subsist on hype alone.

Small and sincere co... See more

These days, we get so much of our content in bite-sized, isolated bits — links in an email, tweets, Slack messages, blog posts. We consume information because it’s in front of us, rather than because it’s relevant for us. This continually present dynamic discourages reflection and thought. The future of content is about interfaces that can help us ... See more

Kelly’s vision depends on an evolution of the Internet in which the vast tangle of possible one-on-one connections partition into countless small cliques—each one a fandom or a mini community revelling in the discovery of others who share their quirks. Instead, the social-media giants effectively rerouted these connections through a small number of... See more

When Zuck famously — and  wrongly  — declared: “Having two identities for yourself is a lack of integrity” we got locked into a single static account, desperate for dynamism and more nuanced expr ession.

Our innate desire for personality multiplicity thrashed against the restrictions of claustrophobic profiles.