I’ve been writing for years about social media fueling the loneliness crisis and the way capitalism and big tech have innovated away human connection and trapped us in ecosystems that encourage and profit from a meaner, angrier user base. These platforms too often funnel young men into toxic spaces that answer their loneliness by pointing the finge... See more

there’s this struggle in my head. Is the world ending, or is it a nice day and I’m getting coffee? Obviously, it’s not a binary thing, but living this way is sometimes brain-scrambling. It’s not like the constant doom and gloom of Twitter was making me a better climate activist. Instead I’d be paralyzed. Twitter incentivizes you to live in this con... See more

With Twitter especially, like during COVID, it was my attachment to society and community. But Twitter really flattens everything. Like, a tweet from a real, expert doctor about a COVID study would come after a tweet from somebody who doesn’t know anything and was making a glib joke about COVID case rates. Now, I can tell myself rationally that one... See more

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with lit... See more

In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more

Days after our conversation, I attended a corporate mixer where an investor from a Silicon Valley VC fund told me bluntly, “Community building is dangerous.” We were on the topic of social media, and where moderation comes in. It’s a losing game, which makes it unattractive to investors, he said. For startups trying to pull that off, “it’s more of ... See more