digital life—digital cultures

Everyone’s posting about 2016, with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

In 2016, Instagram switched their default feed from purely reverse chronological feed to algorithmically-sorted. In retrospect, this marks the beginning of a shift towards a passive, spoon-fed internet.

Product design matters — people are hungry for digital tools that actually allow them... See more

The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.

It’s not just movies and TV, of course — we’re all aghast at how much time we spend on devices, consuming content , whatever that means. Reading and watching and posting and shopping, always shopping for things and ideas and comfort and distraction. Surely this endless marketplace will turn up something that satisfies us at some point! I complained... See more

the decline of third places means there are fewer places to just hang out and bump into each other. Other economic and social factors have surely contributed to this change, but I suspect that it’s largely due to the new third place—the one in the palm of our hands. We hang out online, which means we don’t hang out at all.

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook,... See more

It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.

Our Cringe = Sublime SEED touched on some of this — simply opting out of performance becomes an act of quiet rebellion. Going for a walk without posting about it. Writing a thought without tweeting it. Wearing an outfit without wondering how it will look on Instagram. These small acts chip away at the scaffolding of digital humiliation culture.

The result is what Moskowitz describes as a “mirror maze”. We enter social media hoping to express ourselves but instead see endless refractions – ourselves as we want to be seen, as others might perceive us, as the algorithm is training us to become.

All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under... See more

We are adrift–a culture of consumers accustomed to buying objects and building collections as the sole means of documenting our cultures–deprived of the infrastructure to do so. But our individual inability to collect and store is one I’ll lament the least.

Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship... See more