The book 1.0

In my new book, I came up with the word “Filterworld” to describe our interwoven environment of algorithms. These equations have become inescapable, influencing the vast majority of what we consume online — and thus what kinds of culture we consume, period. I use “filter” because algorithmic recommendations are ultimately filters that sort content.... See more

Social knowledge is thus more epistemically fraught than personal knowledge. However, it is critical to our ability to function and coordinate and, furthermore, it is what gives that ever elusive quality of “meaning” to our lives.

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

André has the excitement of someone who is traversing new ground, but he’s also serious about the work.

way of reaching understandings of what is going on , i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.