love in the age of algorithm

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

What effect internet performance and self-branding has on our psyches, not to mention our society and our economy, may be one of the most essential questions of our time.

The significance of the shift from “generalized media” to “personalized media” cannot be overstated. Our digital worlds will soon be tailored to our interests in unfathomable ways. On the one hand, personalized experiences are likely to make marketing more effective. Brands have a precious opportunity to make us all feel “known” in our every intera... See more

“I found a piece you wrote in the footnote of a book that I admire.” In other words, it took effort for us to find each other. And much like an inefficient light bulb gives off heat, folk search algorithms have the byproduct of context.

In the end, maybe that’s the only definition of authenticity that doesn’t fall apart under close inspection: not a... See more

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data p... See more

Six months ago, I looked up how to humanely euthanize a sick fish on Reddit. I found a method and now my fish is dead.

Since then, Reddit has sent an email every week with novel ways to kill fish of all sizes.

The algorithm must think I’m a fish mass murderer. It won’t stop.

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more