internet culture

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

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... See more

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

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more

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

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

THE DARK MODE SHIFT I've written about the 'return of opulence,' but after watching the past few months unfold and reading Sean Monahan's (@8ghtb4ll) The Boom Boom Aesthetic, it feels more like a shift from 'light mode' to 'dark mode.' For the last 15 years, there’s been a cultural push to... See more

It is not a critical approach towards values, policy, nor the subsequent consequences of these artifacts. We experience our political landscape through the veneer of our “ discourse interfaces” (that’s a Reggie phrase) .