On Attention and the Internet

There was an interesting note in Alexander Obenauer’s lab notes about notifications, and this line stuck out to me: “fundamentally, the way notifications work in modern OSes is backwards: someone else decides when (and how often) my device wakes up to interrupt what I’m doing.” In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the... See more

Yeah, I think taste almost can move in two directions. There is that internal sense of what am I feeling when I experience a work of art? What is happening in my own brain, in my soul when I listen to this music?

And then there’s this external idea of it, which is being super self-conscious about what other people are consuming, how they’re... See more

everything is hyper engineered to make you addicted https://t.co/J7WvnjoAdQ

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

The difference between schools and libraries

From John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (via Austin Kleon):

To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do

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One such protection would be a Social Accountability Act stipulating that every corporation be graded according to an index of social worthiness, to be compiled by panels of randomly selected citizens, the equivalent of juries, chosen from a diverse pool of stakeholders: the company’s customers, members of the communities it affects, and so on. If... See more

Privacy might be the digital spinach: something you know that’s good for you, beloved by regulators, but not a primary driver for anyone but the most extreme health consumers.

What we have long called the creator economy is evolving to become more of a “meaning economy,” where the creators and brands and experiences that engage us will do so through story, craft, and a deeper and more sophisticated sense of meaning. The creator economy was ultimately driven by content (enabled by ubiquitous access to content creation and... See more