Sparks 👁️

The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of... See more

Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s 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

the Overlord Effect—a Godlike attitude emerging from a feeling that we have mastered the universe and colonized space.

I like to use that word now, soul . I prefer using soul to mind , not that they’re the same concept at all. “Mind” automatically seems to evoke “versus body” in the minds of everyone, including myself, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many times we’ve noticed that the brain is an organ of the body and that the human mind emerges from the... See more

I personally think that an AI needs to die.

but whether parasocial content is desirable or not, it points to a growing crisis on the internet: So much of what we encounter online just doesn’t matter , and even worse, offers no mechanism for us to start caring about it. The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their... See more

That is, we’ve traded our craftsmenship for management. We now are less immersed in the exact pieces we’re putting together and more interested in the outcome of the work. To us, programming has now become a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.