love in the age of algorithm

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 old Greek legends tell of Narcissus, a youth so handsome he became besotted by his own reflection. Unable to look away from his image in the surface of the waters, he fell still forever, and was transformed by the gods into a flower. Similarly, as influencers glimpse their idealized online personas reflected back at them on screens, they too... See more

Building something new would be “a worldmaking project, aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than the mere critique of ones we already have.” In other words, we can’t just rearrange the furniture inside rooms we don’t like the shape of; we have to build entirely new rooms in better shapes.

Some may worry about whether powerful new neural-network models for generating text and images will replace workers and artists. But this can be true only if beauty and creativity are measurable by one-dimensional metrics, if art and human endeavors are static forms whose rules and objectives do not change, if we reject the possibility of meaning... See more

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... See more

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... 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

Let me answer your implicit complaint: “The Turing Test will be eventually passed.” That’s right (in some settings, Turing’s original prediction has been already achieved), but the truth is that any human relationship — even digital ones, even those not especially intimate like the ones between writers and readers (I love you, though) — requires... 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... See more