Our Times

I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look... See more

And I increasingly think our job, maybe our method of rebellion, is to be people who care, who have taste, who like and share and look for good things, who read and watch and look at those things on purpose instead of just staring slackjawed at whatever slop is placed between the ads they hope we won’t really notice.

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for... See more

This is the era of no good choices. Take schooling, for example. Keeping children home robs them of education and socialization. It scars their futures, steals their joys. It makes it impossible for their parents to work, or even to rest. But sending them to school endangers their health, and that of their teachers and their families. The argument

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Yet, smartphones are much more than an accumulation of improvements in hardware and software into a pocket-sized device that we spend too much time looking at. They represent something entirely new. When we pick up our phones, our taps and swipes engage not only a system of hardware and software, but also something much bigger—a set of

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