internet culture

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her

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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.

Nara's meticulously staged domesticity is less an earnest embrace of tradition and more a savvy recognition of the internet's underlying logic: to succeed in the future, one must cloak themselves in remnants of the past.

Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties –... See more

“The fast shall inherit the earth.” This was previously printed in the Facebook internal book they’d give new employees. Now we can read it as “the fast will catch Elon’s attention, which will influence an army of fans to mimetically adopt the message.” Unfortunately that’s not as catchy.

Adam Kirsch, in his piece about the Amtrak residency, theorized: “Perhaps there is a certain charm in the fact that the train is an obsolete mode of transportation, much as literature sometimes suspects that it is an obsolete form of communication.”

I use technology in order to hate it more properly. –Nam June Paik https://t.co/8lJQifwyqD

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

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

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