tech culture

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

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

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

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.

The rise of the social internet made it much easier to ghost people because it lacked consequence. The internet made it easier to have undefined situationships that never leave the dms. There are so many options and escape hatches at our fingertips, why deal with inconvenience? To be inconvenienced is to be connected to people. We’ve optimized,... See more

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

—Kahneman

With more creators , more content , and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet,... See more

technology has made it easy to access the best parts of people’s lives. the part where we’re booked and busy. the part where we’re in the streets and the night is always young. the part that we want people to see. so it’s easy to assume that what we’re seeing is the truth. maybe, like me, it deters you from reaching out to people because you think... See more

Technology already takes care of the truly tedious things—a gold star to Microsoft Excel—but we’re still inventing, faster and faster than ever. The tech industry seems to have tasked itself with a mass excavation of everything “effortful”, and with every day that passes, the human hand becomes slightly more redundant.

I just don’t think this is... See more