internet culture

Together, Hobart and Huber argue that bubbles are coordination mechanisms for progress: by linking collective risk to potential financial rewards, bubbles enable megaprojects beyond the capability of any single person or industry—megaprojects which, although risky, mark inflection points in technology, economics, and culture when they are... See more

Such guides go by many names—call them influencers, or content creators, or just “this one guy I follow.” Guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, they bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film.

Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a... See more

I’ve been going deep on antimemetics – or why some ideas spread slowly, or don’t spread at all. It feels like after we got social media, we came up with a bunch of principles around “virality” and “memes” and then never revisited them again.

But ideas don’t spread the same way they did in the early days of Web 2.0. Now, we sometimes deliberately... See more

Why do people construct and then give away free languages? Well, the creation of a good computer language is the work of an apex programmer. To have produced a successful language is acknowledged as a monumental effort, akin to publishing a multivolume history of a war, or fighting in one. The reward is glory.

Changing a language is like fighting... 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

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

The one thing I thought was funny about Anu’s piece is that it claims “no one owns taste” but then sort of poo-poo’s the anticipated reaction of people that views the subject of taste as their “special territory”.

You can’t have both of these things. And it’s what tech people broadly get wrong about many other intersectional dialogues. Either no... See more

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

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