internet culture

Let’s start with the reality that this idea of satiating the internal of an individual is also deeply embedded in the philosophy of internet technologies. That Ayn Rand was, and maintains to be, a philosophical hero that helped to invent the mythos of the self-made Silicon Valley hero that many founders strive to be.

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

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as... See more

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

I’ve come to think there’s a Cultural Doppler Effect.What sounds right in the moment feels different and dated to a time and place later on. This is true of fashion, design, music, beliefs, literally everything.

The Cultural Doppler Effect is what makes “retro.” As past cultural waves wash over us, their context is not as they first appeared. They... 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.

New Anthropic research: How university students use Claude. We ran a privacy-preserving analysis of a million education-related conversations with Claude to produce our first Education Report. https://t.co/apwAqH1ol3

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