tech culture

Social networks are all built around performative metrics and incentive to perform. So whether it's followers or likes or upvotes, those are the dominant engagement principles of social media. And what tends to happen is that on these platforms, the measure of success is not just how other people react, but how much response there is .

I think that

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He's putting up the facade of doing it for others because that's what the situation requires, the language of contribution without the substance. This is what tech as an industry has become known for.

Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary.... See more

The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on... See more

The insidiousness of how quickly social media immolates the creative impulse, shocks. Does it get you to “create” things? Sure, but within the bland confines of what the algorithm thinks you should create, what the algorithm “knows” will drive engagement. The mechanisms driving social media are “corrupt,” (in that their goals are not the goals of... See more

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at... See more

Stories like this are part of a pattern of experiences that show up again and again in social media. These patterns are the results of mechanisms like algorithms that optimize for engagement, concrete features that define our experience with technology.

These mechanisms, in turn, are the result of ways of thinking within technology companies.... See more

Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever. Making slop has only gotten easier with AI, but... See more