intellectualizing the internet

Cultural stagnation does not spring solely from Silicon Valley’s manipulation of our habits of thought and action. It reflects much deeper issues at work in politics, the economy, social mores, and demographics

Culture today is an endless repackaging of tested tropes into the technological equivalent of chaff, mere filler to keep the grazing consumer content.

Contradictions abound; those of us who consume and participate in culture today—with our wallets, our words, our eyeballs, and our sneers—are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison.

Big Tech’s only concept of creative value is a quantifiable one: What’s good is what “does numbers,” generating likes, views, shares, reactions. “Engage, engage, engage” is the mantra of platform capitalism, where so much of what passes for culture is designed for the snap judgment, the jolt of dopamine, and the hyperemic rush rather than the... See more

If my husband’s social feed is different from mine, we will literally be experiencing two different realities in waking life. Which brings up a bigger question: we keep talking about AI, social media, and culture, but we rarely stop to ask, How do our brains construct reality in the first place? Contrary to what you might believe (or maybe just... See more

The Stagnation Generation (anyone under 30, let’s say) is simultaneously overpoliced and unbound from almost all the taboos that shackled its generational predecessors.

Life expectancy and birth rates are falling; our governing institutions are as leaky and unreliable as the New York City subway; cheap rent, the historic precondition of artistic adventure, has all but disappeared from the country’s major urban centers; productivity growth is stuck in first gear; and for all the blather about “de-risking” and the... See more