On Information

Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy i... See more

The problem with language models is that while they are very good at giving you the information you want, they don’t tell you what to look for in the first place. You have to figure that out yourself, and you have to learn how to be good at asking for it. This is the metaskill that has become crucial over the last few decades, when our access to in... See more

Being online more than that just feels like a threat to my creativity. A therapist I interviewed recently told me that digital overconsumption interrupts one’s capacity to dream and create; not to mention, studies of phone addiction suggest that spending too much time hunting for new online trends dulls our ability to appreciate novelty in the real... See more

But what is happening now isn't just automation replacing routine tasks. We really do have a restructuring of how value is created and distributed. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily transformed physical production, AI transforms meaning-making itself, changing how we create and distribute value. The Ghibli AI trend is a perfe... See more