internet culture

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

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

“The culture” as a phrase, has been unfortunately hijacked by the artistic class to mean the byproducts of their creativity. But this is an incomplete picture of our culture. Culture is the difference between car-centricity and walkable neighborhoods. Culture is the values we place on our food system. Culture is the quality of our public goods and... 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

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

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

My working thesis for the future of education is that the curation of cultures that support learning and growth is the main bottleneck right now, and scaling better cultures a promising path to give more people the opportunity to live fulfilling lives. As I wrote about in “AI tutors will be held back by culture,” most of the technical problems of... See more

Here in 2025, however, Blueprint appears to be humming along and building an ever-growing following.

Two years in, the mainstream critiques of Johnson’s health regimen remain the same, simple and amusing. It’s either that he’s too rich or too exacting in his lifestyle for any regular person to emulate and/or that he’s doing so much to his body in an... See more