failings of the modern internet

Escape: the perks of being unavailable

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

What they thought was a priority and what I thought was a priority diverged.

Endless-scrolling doesn’t just apply to the Internet these days. We want infinite dating options, more cash, new stuff to buy. And the more we’re given, the more ravenous our appetite grows. There’s no better time to be a glutton, to engorge yourself on media, information, and pleasure.

Jonathan Haidt is right when he talks about the sudden switch from play-based to phone-based childhoods and how it destroyed mental health—particularly for young girls. Our childhoods weren’t spent toying with risk and danger, teaching ourselves we could cope with it, learning that it’s baked into life. We had bans on play fighting. Health and safe... See more

If you go too far off the beaten path of algorithmic consistency, you risk never being heard. You may never get enough cultural momentum to exist in any meaningful way. That is a real problem. But if you're too good at algorithmic optimization, you risk building a large audience without saying anything particularly original or important. Not to men... See more

There is so much I loved in those archives. There is so much I would delight in rediscovering. But I can’t find what matters in the morass. I’ve given up on trying.

To quote Derek Sivers, "If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs."