tech culture

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

“The Instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory.”

—Kahneman

I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It's too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention. I've tried switching to old-school black and white phones before, but always begrudgingly returned to using a smartphone due to the utility of it. The problem, however, is that it comes with too many... See more

I could depend on my Twitter timeline to deliver a cross-section of what I was interested in, a feed that I hand-curated over more than a decade that had become something like a mental appendage. It was a community of people all thinking out loud at once, together, creating a pure distillation of the zeitgeist. Of course, under Elon Musk’s... See more

The Offline Escape trend is no longer niche, but representative of a mass craving to return to IRL experiences. Unlike the hyper-sensory experiences previously popular, which required high production value and major financial investment all for the benefit of creating social content, the desire here is rooted in simplicity, personal interaction,... See more

And maybe we're all just tired. While the internet is forever, forever is exhausting. Sometimes you want your content to end. Sometimes you want to hold something real.