About messages

A question worth asking:

When there is so much on the web, it is easy to fall prey to the impression that this has been done before when you come up with an idea. When this happens, ask: ‘What is my take on this?’

Replicating taste with AI seems impossible because our real preferences hide in the shadows—we read without liking, enjoy without sharing. The platforms that know us best guard their data like dragons. And taste itself shapeshifts through lived experience: A chef's palate emerges from years of burnt soufflés and perfect reductions, from connecting ... See more

German philosopher Heidegger argued that technology is neither the machine nor the way people use that machine. Technology is the truth that the machine reveals about us and about the world around us (and how it conceals the parts of our lives that are hard to value). I worry that AI technology is showing that the average person is just lonely and ... See more

Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late. What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds... See more

This may be a different kind of attention economy, less about mass reach, more about small, meaningful engagement. It may be a sign of something more intimate, and perhaps even more human.

The experiment of social media was: build a virtual room, let everybody in, reward the people who scream that loudest, and then see what happens. The experiment of AI seems to be: build an interlocutor with specific ideology and élan, scale it infinitely across the Internet, and see what happens.

Language is how we make sense of uncertainty, how we convince ourselves and others that we're moving toward something meaningful. An honest position is to hold our words lightly - to use them as tools without mistaking them for the work itself. Perhaps the goal isn’t to master the words, but to succumb to their lifecycle, or to learn, at last, how ... See more