Media & Culture

The stasis debate is actually just about two specific topics: (1) whether 21st century culture offers the feeling of artistic progress, where new styles/practices devalue previous ones, thereby creating clear chapters in the historical timeline, and (2) whether there are new techniques in symbolic activity that expand how we perceive the world and... See more

Your Spotify Wrapped for 2024 is the weight of all these things, whether we want to deal with it or not. AI-powered podcasts are the result of expunging the lives of the real humans who built these ideas, replacing them with a facsimile of human connection. Your data feeds into Google, and it builds you the idea of a friend in return. Artists will... See more

Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt.

In writing this history of the 21st century, Blank Space, I noticed that one important marker of our era is the cultural success of widely loathed people , such as Paris Hilton, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. They all figured out a powerful media hack for which there is no known antidote: Sociopathic behavior spurs the media to write lots of... See more

The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re... See more

Inherent in the concept of moral contagion, then, is the idea that moral-emotion expressions are among the most powerful signals to the self and others about one’s identity. As such, they may be among the most functionally relevant forms of expressions in the context of moral and political discourse online, where moral and political identities are... See more

Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.

While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more

One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.

we define moral-emotion expression in social-media text as representational expressions of affect that reliably signal, either to others or to the self, that something is relevant to the interests or good of society, as defined by the conceptual knowledge of the expresser.