internet culture

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

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

In our present technological era, humans have also needed a new framework to avoid drowning in the daily firehose of entertainment, media, and information. Given this setting of increasing complexity, it becomes more appealing to use an associative concept like “vibes” as a simplifying framework for understanding or self-expression. If we can’t... See more

The World Wide Web is what I know best (I’ve coded for money in the programming languages Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Clojure, and XSLT), but the Web is only one small part of the larger world of software development. There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7... See more

This situation, where more data is the goal, means there is great collection software and terrible decision making software. We are told to star, favorite, and bookmark everything. Yet, like real life hoarders, we cannot say what exactly we collected or why. Nor can we find any of it. How many times have you spent an hour trying to find that one... See more

For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the... See more

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

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

Another few decades later, in 2024, it’s difficult to even remember the world that came before this. No Logo feels dated in 2024 because it’s a dispatch from the twilight of the (comparatively) unbranded world that has since been overwritten, the logic of branding having escaped its traditional corporate confines, now internalized by subcultures,... See more