what is Social Media doing to us?

But if some shadowy global elite really wanted to keep a population docile, impotent, and entertained, what better tool could they ask for than the iPhone?

as much as the feeds brought me things I never would have seen or heard otherwise, my overdependence on them was also cutting me off from a different realm of experiences that I had forgotten about over the course of the decade: the encounter with scarcity rather than infinity, the process of judging and choosing for myself what I wanted to see in

... See more

I believe that we can build something that offers people a chance to participate in these new types of experiences, punctuated by silence and other opportunities for reflection. And they must be offered—because they no longer emerge naturally in the world that we live in. In other words, people don’t naturally fall into them or opt-in to them. They... See more

Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.

It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand.

The metrics don’t excite me. I don’t want ‘followers’ — which I often associate with ‘lurkers’. I much prefer readers, connections and engaged subscribers to my work. I know people with 1 million+ Instagram followers and I believe them when they tell me it doesn’t feel as good as you’d think. It’s a very shallow interaction, it doesn’t do much for... See more