internet culture
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.
Alex Vuocolo • Nameless Feeling — Real Life
In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that... See more
Drew Austin • #184: Pure Pain Sugar
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?
There’s a joke around “the best minds of my generation were tasked with getting people to click on ads”. At least you can attribute those ads to powering free global communications, information networks, and technical research.
I’d argue that the most creative minds of my generation were told to believe that creating yet another self-satisfying... See more
I’d argue that the most creative minds of my generation were told to believe that creating yet another self-satisfying... See more
Reggie James • Political Expectations
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,... See more
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,... See more
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
idk if this is really a ‘dark forest’ — more a gated community that means there is trust to share. the commons are too unruly to trust/are feared
Serendipity, that essential urban amenity, requires friction: If you never stop moving, and if everyone gets the hell out of your way, you’re less likely to have any unexpected encounter, although you will check off your to-do list more quickly. Paradoxically, the internet, which has eliminated so much friction from the physical world, has also... See more
Drew Austin • Halfway to a Third Place
Coding is a culture of blurters. This can yield fast decisions, but it penalizes people who need to quietly compose their thoughts, rewarding fast-twitch thinkers who harrumph efficiently. Programmer job interviews, which often include abstract and meaningless questions that must be answered immediately on a whiteboard, typify this culture. Regular... See more
