Sparks đď¸
Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content thatâs exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming... See more
How Social Media Shortens Your Life
In taming the world, we have tamed ourselves
Poetic Outlaws ⢠The Comfortable Life Is Killing You
What did Huxley believe would bring about this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot: âThe change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.â
Christine Rosen ⢠On The Death of Daydreaming
âJust as the Black Death gave way to the enlightenment in Europe I was playing with this idea that climate change could give way to the delightenment.â
Tristan Zimmermann

Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events â political, ecological, cultural â when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or... See more
Heather Havrilesky ⢠The Rise of Emotional Divestment
Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform â they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise,... See more
NOEMA ⢠All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: theyâve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus... See more