We’re All in ‘Dark Mode’ Now — The Atlantic

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

This very email is an example of this. This theory is being shared on a private channel sent to 500 people who I kno... 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

The internet as we know it today reliably brings out the worst in us. Our platforms incentivize the shallow and new, and our algorithms amplify outrage and despair. The result is an information landscape that keeps us fearful, hopeless, disconnected. It's like a virus that keeps humanity trapped in a destructive emotional state, keeping us at war w... See more

Most people don’t want their information mediated by bloated, monopolistic, surveilling tech companies, but they also don’t want to go all the way back to a time before them. What we really want is something in between. The evolution of Google Search is unsettling because it seems to suggest that, on the internet we’ve built, there’s very little ro... See more

People ask questions on Google. "How do I make a dirty martini?", "What is the best electric car?", "Should I get vaccinated?". Google prioritizes links that answer these questions against a set of well developed rules. Those that rank typically do better serving the user. This too is The Algorithm. Hewing to the Google machine is called Search Eng... See more