internet culture

Agentic software designs for and explicitly allows user-made desire paths and folk-usages of software. People will use software in whatever informal, distributed ways that emerge from real world contexts. Folksonomies are a great example of these informal taxonomies developed by users on social sharing platforms. Tumblr tags, for example, have... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement... See more