The book 1.0

Our sense of it being effective to stick together, to do things like loan each other sugar, proactively participate in building neighborhood safety and infrastructure, or babysit each other’s children is dissolving, because in fact it is no longer effective or efficient to do many of these things.

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... See more

The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is the sense of meaninglessness that prompts some people... See more

chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

Screenshotting as one of the essential underrated tools of the digital age - the equivalent of inventing cameras for the physical world, so we can take “pictures” of everything happening around us in the digital realm, and share + discuss it

What’s the difference between what I do and content creation, or advertising myself, instead of advertising for other people? I think these lines that we draw have become so blurry that it creates a very interesting tension between what counts as serious work and not.

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.

Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of... See more