internet culture

Our search for solutions should begin with the binary thinking that is at the heart of the problem. Psychologists suggest that we can mitigate binary thinking by developing cognitive flexibility — that is, engaging with the complexity and variability of real life by taking into account multiple points of view. This is part of what we call empathy.

The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-... See more

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data p... See more

In our present technological era, humans have also needed a new framework to avoid drowning in the daily firehose of entertainment, media, and information. Given this setting of increasing complexity, it becomes more appealing to use an associative concept like “vibes” as a simplifying framework for understanding or self-expression. If we can’t mak... See more

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural network... See more

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as inexpl... See more

I’ve come to think there’s a Cultural Doppler Effect.What sounds right in the moment feels different and dated to a time and place later on. This is true of fashion, design, music, beliefs, literally everything.

The Cultural Doppler Effect is what makes “retro.” As past cultural waves wash over us, their context is not as they first appeared. They r... See more

Like newsletters, what’s said in podcasts is non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Sna... See more