internet culture
A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement... See more
Reggie James • EDUTAINMENT, Technology Adoption, and the current Revolution
soft web poetic web
Agentic software designs for and explicitly allows user-made desire paths and folk-usages of software. People will use software in whatever informal, distributed ways that emerge from real world contexts. Folksonomies are a great example of these informal taxonomies developed by users on social sharing platforms. Tumblr tags, for example, have... See more
Agentic Computing
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
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"
If a simplistic description of AI is computers learning to be more human, then the persistence of Hawk Tuah for six months and counting is the inverse: Humans learning how it feels to be a computer—forced to remember, unable to move on, endlessly consuming and regurgitating our past output in slightly different formats—a video here, a podcast... See more
Drew Austin • The Meme Fossil Record
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
Lulu Cheng Meservey had a good take on X: the Zuck glow-up is now so overdone that it seems artificial, manufactured, inauthentic. Going on Joe Rogan last week may have been the final straw.
We can already see a backlash brewing on TikTok, accelerating by Meta rolling back moderation and by the TikTok ban being viewed as Zuckerberg puppeteering.... See more
We can already see a backlash brewing on TikTok, accelerating by Meta rolling back moderation and by the TikTok ban being viewed as Zuckerberg puppeteering.... See more
25 Predictions for 2025 (Part II)
Flattened, algorithmically-driven, risk-averse, accounting-based reboot culture continues to win despite the incredible diversity and eagerness of the creator economy and its long tail of choice and representation.
But despite a firehouse of hot takes, nothing much has changed over the years. Perhaps it’s gotten worse ?
In 2024, all of the Top 15... See more
But despite a firehouse of hot takes, nothing much has changed over the years. Perhaps it’s gotten worse ?
In 2024, all of the Top 15... See more