Leaving the attention economy doesn’t mean vanishing. It means choosing to matter to fewer people, more deeply. It means owning the means of distribution. It means publishing like a human being instead of a content mill. It means you stop playing to the house odds and start building your own game.
Many things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more
They showed us a way to connect with others, widen friendships, find others in similar or different communities, and stay on top of life events and milestones. Then, they stripped it all away, stuffed everything with algorithmic sludge designed to push engagement metrics higher, and left us scrolling like the dopamine addicts we are.
"The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology." (Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism)
The future of the internet that most excites me is also, in many ways, a snapshot of its past. It’s a place where the Neil Gaimans of the world don’t need to feed their thoughts into an engagement engine, but can instead put out a virtual shingle on their own small patch of cyberspace and attract and build a more intimate community of like-minded... See more
As social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram grow larger, they skew disproportionately toward supernodes—celebrity, meme and business accounts.