dreaming of a better internet

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

The Sunlight caressed my skin, sending goosebumps all over. I love the Sun, but the colour I couldn’t stand. The yellow of hay, the red of wine, the dreamy white that reminded me of paper. I tend to look at the Sun through some sort of filters: camera lenses, windowpanes, leaves, as it stretched the street, flirted with the flowers, bathed the... See more

I’m personally hopeful for a “de-globalized” internet of the future—one where we’re all a bit more siloed off from each other, like we are in real life. Think of little internet neighborhoods. This is my hope, if for no other reason than our mental health. We just can’t seem to handle an internet more broad than that, spiritually speaking.

“I think a lot about the difference between what in my head is the push internet and the pull internet... the internet where things are pushed at you and the internet where you have to do some work… you have to pull it towards you.”

—Ezra Klein

As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided. Now Facebook and Twitter are seen as... See more