internet culture

If technology-inflected solitarist identity makes it difficult or impossible to identify and admire heroes, saints and sages, then it will be difficult or impossible for us to learn how to live well in the digital age.

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

NON NEGOTIABLES

1. Of the place

2. Less is more

3. Vibrant collaboration

4. No repeat ingredients

5. Consolidation + speed

6. Confidence + competence

7. In + out service

8. Pursuit of excellence

9. Details matter

10. Know your shit!

11. FOCUS

12. Service

13. Time

14. Not about you

15. Perfect means perfect

16. No excuses

17. Respect tradition

18. Push boundaries

19. Clean as you go

20. Break down boxes

21. Shirts perfectly pressed

22. Personal

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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

Adobe created PostScript in the early 1980s and licensed it to Apple, its first success. Three-plus decades later, Adobe is valued at $38 billion. PDF is a direct descendant of PostScript, and there are PDFs everywhere. In code as in life, ideas grow up inside of languages and spread with them

In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have... See more

Once front-running other participants in financial markets or cultural production becomes a common strategy, trends become inefficiencies – temporary blips of difference or spikes in value that are bound for correction. Being early as a meta is replaced by catching people offsides. Betting on the return to the mean.

Instead of withdrawing, I encourage my students to dive deeper, engaging with platforms as if they were close reading a work of literature. In doing so, I believe that we can not only better understand a platform's ideological premises, but also the inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of... See more

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