internet culture

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

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.

Put through that process, reality usually hits like a truck. Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor... See more

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

In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that... 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

Serendipity, that essential urban amenity, requires friction: If you never stop moving, and if everyone gets the hell out of your way, you’re less likely to have any unexpected encounter, although you will check off your to-do list more quickly. Paradoxically, the internet, which has eliminated so much friction from the physical world, has also... See more

We’re seeing the progressive unbundling of human agency in memory creation, and I think it’s happening in clear phases.

The first phase started a very long time ago. Cameras, voice recorders, and digital notebooks were primitive tools for documentation. Sure, each of these tools were enhanced by technology. We chose what to capture and the tools... See more