Why We Don't Trust Each Other Anymore

The modern internet overwhelms us, disheartens us, and distracts us from what matters most. But most alarming of all, it erodes our ability to trust—in others, in ourselves, in institutions, in humanity, and in the future. The scary thing about losing trust is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we suspect the worst, it creates a downw... See more

Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or ev... See more

We’ve simply stopped believing in many of the stories we once told ourselves, and we don’t yet know what will replace them. As a consequence, we don’t know what to pay attention to, what is worth valuing, and where we might be headed in the future.

We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other. Simultaneously, we’re never really in any place—we can always blame connection issues a... See more

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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