internet culture

Nara's meticulously staged domesticity is less an earnest embrace of tradition and more a savvy recognition of the internet's underlying logic: to succeed in the future, one must cloak themselves in remnants of the past.

Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties –... See more

Matt Klein • Future Burnout: On the False Promises & Expectations of What Comes "Next"

My working thesis for the future of education is that the curation of cultures that support learning and growth is the main bottleneck right now, and scaling better cultures a promising path to give more people the opportunity to live fulfilling lives. As I wrote about in “AI tutors will be held back by culture,” most of the technical problems of... See more

Henrik Karlsson • Can We Scale Cultures That Support Learning?

If you spend a lot of time online or making things, it’s good to find a way to leave these breadcrumbs. The trail of your digital self should be interesting. If you use social media, you should ensure it makes your goals, desires, projects — if not clear, at least worth stumbling upon.

Simon Sarris • Breadcrumbs - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water

They believed, that instead of trying to change the world outside. The new radicalism should try to change what was inside people’s heads. And the way to do this, was through self-expression. Not collective action.

— Hypernormalisation

This idea clearly spread and maintained to the present day. Where putting a graphic on a hat or shirt is “impacting... See more

Reggie James • Political Expectations

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

This very email is an example of this. This theory is being shared on a private channel sent to 500 people who I... See more

Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

Adobe created PostScript in the early 1980s and licensed it to Apple, its first success. Three-plus decades later, Adobe is valued at $38 billion. PDF is a direct descendant of PostScript, and there are PDFs everywhere. In code as in life, ideas grow up inside of languages and spread with them

PAUL FORD • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world:... See more

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

Metrics Are Poisoning You

This isn’t just about bad ideas, poor execution and apathy — it’s about the broader culture we’ve created around innovation. It’s become too hard to stop, reflect, interrogate and interject with fresh ideas, while KPIs run the show.

We’re not solving real problems; we’re searching for validation .

As marketer and author Rory... See more

Matt Klein • Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit

“the internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is... i find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.”

i have also been thinking about how all the timeless classics do not do this. my heroes do not do this, at least not in their heroic works.

why... See more