failings of the modern internet

most social networks suffer from the weight of objectives

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See more

Shuherk cast the rise of curatorial accounts like his as a failure of the legacy-media ecosystem. The job of providing well-informed recommendations once belonged to professional critics employed by newspapers and magazines. As media companies have struggled to adjust to the digital age, the number of full-time criticism jobs has dwindled, leaving ... See more

Echo chambers lack that friction. So do “filter bubbles,” which are essentially the digital incarnation of echo chambers. In his book Filterworld , Kyle Chayka explores how personalized searching, algorithms, and online behavior flatten our culture by continually offering us more of what we’ve already consumed, shrinking our digital worlds.

We live in an aggressive media environment. Everything we see advertises for our attention. Information is constantly pushed onto us.

As the torrent increases, it devalues more and more information that comes our way. All social media is advertising. Even my posts are essentially ads for my work and point of view. Newsletters have become overwhelmi... See more

THIS is the kind of information I want from the internet. The sharing of unpolished “here’s what worked for me” anecdotes and napkin sketches.

In his view, everything society now produced—including science and technology—served industry, not humanity, and thus was increasingly being purposed not to enrich our lives but to psychologically condition us so we wouldn’t resist what was being done to us and to the earth.

On TikTok or Instagram, you don’t truly control your relationship with the people who care about your work: the platforms do. They can take away those audiences at any time, or change something in the algorithm that prevents you from reaching them, or put things in front of them that you would never want them to see. Those places are great for find... See more

My latest column at The New Yorker is about the revenge of homepages: Why we're turning toward individual websites as the platform era of the internet continues to disintegrate.

I started working on this piece because I've found myself going to homepages more often. It's a way to get a controlled, curated look at what a publication offers, and a ch... See more