internet culture

the internet is the precarious reservation onto which culture has been driven, bleak and uncanny, inhuman in scale.

Simplicio • The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

Our search for solutions should begin with the binary thinking that is at the heart of the problem. Psychologists suggest that we can mitigate binary thinking by developing cognitive flexibility — that is, engaging with the complexity and variability of real life by taking into account multiple points of view. This is part of what we call empathy.

Tim Gorichanaz • Finding Heroes In A Messy Digital World | NOEMA

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her

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

Agentic Computing

“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

Reggie James • Political Expectations

The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a... See more

rayne fisher-quann • no good alone - by rayne fisher-quann - internet princess no good alone

maybe more social media culture

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

Moxie Marlinspike • The Magic of Software; Or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization

Adam Kirsch, in his piece about the Amtrak residency, theorized: “Perhaps there is a certain charm in the fact that the train is an obsolete mode of transportation, much as literature sometimes suspects that it is an obsolete form of communication.”

Jasmine Sun • the scenic route

Coding is a culture of blurters. This can yield fast decisions, but it penalizes people who need to quietly compose their thoughts, rewarding fast-twitch thinkers who harrumph efficiently. Programmer job interviews, which often include abstract and meaningless questions that must be answered immediately on a whiteboard, typify this culture. Regular... See more