Atomized, bespoke digital realities

Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.

The internet's infinite private worlds at times feel more like the clan-based societies that predated individualism. But where past worlds were bound by blood, today’s are bound by interests, desires, identities, and what the algorithms governing these spaces — helmed by capitalistic KPIs —nudge us to do.

Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to.

The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.

But the rapid, ample, and aggressively evolving feedback that the internet provides to the social reward circuits is new.

The creation of a new reality is centered on three tenets: narrative, curation, and repetition. A story is how we navigate the ambiguity of our environment, how we make sense of the world. It’s the promised land, a vision worth aspiring to, or a reading of the world worth attaching to. A story either inspires us to make a future destination our hom... See more

The internet drastically increases the ease of finding and fulfilling one’s preferred phenomenological feedback loop, whether that be righteous anger, a sense of shared victimhood, or any other appealing gradient.

1. Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.


2. Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.


3. What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of

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we are, in a way, going back to the pre-20th century, where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other, and that we maybe will never have anything like monoculture ever again.