The book 1.0

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.

People pay to see others believe in themselves.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more

Simply put, we don’t know what is important until many years later.

Has anyone wrote anything good on the technological effects on human affectivity? The ability of humans to feel?

but continued a love affair with language and meaning as texture and material.

Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience,... See more

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving