internet culture

Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

Over the years, I have written a lot about commercial (and domestic) spaces becoming more “logistical.” The degraded customer experience may be worthwhile from a cost-benefit perspective—and we can at least hope to recoup our losses in other domains, such as convenience—but the plight of physical space is real. The less pleasant it is to spend time... 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

Metrics Are Poisoning You

This isn’t just about bad ideas, poor execution and apathy — it’s about the broader culture we’ve created around innovation. It’s become too hard to stop, reflect, interrogate and interject with fresh ideas, while KPIs run the show.

We’re not solving real problems; we’re searching for validation .

As marketer and author Rory... 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

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

What would it look like if, in a McLuhan-esque, medium is the message sort of way, our tools said to us:

It’s gonna take you a while.

It’s normal to take a while.

It’d be weird if you made something beautiful so quickly.

The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough.

The problem is your expectations are not realistic.

Our AI helps you slow the... See more

If technology-inflected solitarist identity makes it difficult or impossible to identify and admire heroes, saints and sages, then it will be difficult or impossible for us to learn how to live well in the digital age.