the game of social media is to keep us creating assets that depreciate in hours. If they took months to depreciate, we wouldn’t use the platform as much. But because it’s hours, we “need” to spend more and more and more and more of our time on the platform for it to work for us.
The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its... See more
The main paper I've been working on for the last 3 years is out: "Value Capture"! It's about the harms of taking on external metrics and rankings as your own core values.
The argument: you're outsourcing your values. It's fast, but then your values won't be tailored to you.🧵: