The book 1.0

And that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing, consolida

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A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

So, if the Internet has effectively become cable TV, what is the new information frontier?

To distribute content via email, message boards, blogs and social media users must act as nodes in the network, filtering feeds and pushing their own and others’ content into the network. They are the circulatory force that moves content around the network. Because of this, networks favor viral and memetic media. In this sense, network media produc... 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 real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock, ... See more

We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.