Social media

I know people who get angry just from hearing the word authenticity . They insist it doesn’t exist. It never existed. It can’t possibly exist.

And maybe in their lives, as digitally constructed, it doesn’t.

This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. ... See more

Anyway, I sent him Bill Clinton above. Yes, Bill’s being self-serving. He did rather a lot of that. Still does. But what he says is also devastatingly right. The media sits at the centre of discussion — between protagonists of different positions.

I wrote a whole article on this and how fundamental it is for those institutions that convene spaces f... See more

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest,... See more

When your ideas, interests, and even daily meals are largely inspired by whatever was already approved, already done, already voted on and liked, you’re only experiencing life as an echo of the masses (or the machines, if personalized based on historic preference). And in this echo chamber, genuine discovery is rare, even radical.

We’ve never had more freedom, more choices. But in reality, most people are subtly funneled into the same streams, the same pools of ‘socially approved’ culture, cuisine and ideas. Remixes and memes abound, but almost no one shares anything weird, original or different. People wake up, perhaps with ambitions to make unique choices they believe are ... See more