Social Media Evolution

Young people are rapidly becoming dedicated fans of New York Times Games like Connections and Strands, playing them obsessively and sharing their experiences on social media platforms like TikTok. To answer the question posed in the headline: Because social media sucks, and everyone wants to escape!

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we disco... See more

Large parasocial platforms transformed the internet into a hostile and impersonal place. They feed our FOMO to keep us clicking. They exaggerate our differences for "engagement". They create engines for stardom to keep us creeping. They bait us into nutritionless and sensationalist content. Humanity cannot subsist on hype alone.

Small and sincere co... See more

Either way, what has been lost since the era of the human search engine is the joy of a distinct voice—while we can now find out almost anything automatically, the answer won’t be delivered with warmth or flair.

TikTok—one of the biggest repositories of AI slime—is exploring the possibility of releasing virtual influencers to compete for brand deals against its human influencers. Instead of a brand paying a human influencer five or six figures to flog its clothes or cars (a sum TikTok doesn’t get a cut of) the platform wants to offer brands the option of u... See more

What’s happening outside your window is real; a feed of the people and subjects algorithmically determined to validate or anger you is not. I look out mine and see my neighbor on his roof. I see him there often, like he is today, watering his plants. We can do more than touch grass—we can get outside and help something, anything, grow.

Each week, we see the emergence of a new tech wave that exposes a striking duality: on one side, a pursuit of simplicity and minimalism; on the other, a plethora of sophisticated technologies offering alternatives to the established leaders, aiming to define the future beyond smartphones.

Algorithms, or at least the ones used by social media platforms, were supposed to be about discovery. But now they’re operating more like those daytime HGTV home decorating shows. “Oh, you like horses? We turned your house into a fake stable. Your dinner table is now bales of hay.”

Now that we’re on the other side of these consequences, I can no longer kid myself. It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there.

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.