internet culture

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... 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.

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

I’ve been going deep on antimemetics – or why some ideas spread slowly, or don’t spread at all. It feels like after we got social media, we came up with a bunch of principles around “virality” and “memes” and then never revisited them again.

But ideas don’t spread the same way they did in the early days of Web 2.0. Now, we sometimes deliberately... See more

Fashion implies a desire to see and be seen while affirming the need for public spaces and occasions. To the tech world, those positive externalities look suspiciously inefficient

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.

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.

“The culture” as a phrase, has been unfortunately hijacked by the artistic class to mean the byproducts of their creativity. But this is an incomplete picture of our culture. Culture is the difference between car-centricity and walkable neighborhoods. Culture is the values we place on our food system. Culture is the quality of our public goods and... See more

Web developer's oath

Before the exercises, let me remind what you promised at the end of the previous part.

Programming is hard, that is why I will use all the possible means to make it easier

• I will have my browser developer console open all the time


• I progress with small steps


• I will write lots of console.log statements to make sure I understand how

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