Crescer sem as redes sociais

But as seen from the macro view, a diverse, bottom-up media ecosystem is in fact

not thriving

.

Instead, the inverse is happening.

Homogeneity is winning.

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

It’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content. In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content.

The question is not whether algorithms can ever foster greatness—they cannot. Their design is fundamentally at odds with the qualities that define great art: depth, complexity, and the capacity to provoke discomfort or transformation. The question is whether we, as creators and consumers, are willing to resist their influence.

Resistance does not... See more

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are engines of distraction and cultural rot. They stand in front of the more difficult but more rewarding aspects of life: deep work, intimate connections with friends and loved ones, focused attention for hobbies with intrinsic rewards. By training users to crave constant novelty and the immediate approval of... See more

Social media has also proven to simply not be that efficient in terms of matching high quality content with a relevant audience. Just because people can easily distribute content to their friends or friends of friends doesn’t mean that that content will be interesting or relevant to the consumer. This is why, over time, social networks have started... See more

With or without social media, I have things to say, wisdom to share, and plenty to teach! But how do I disentangle all that from the problems I see with the influencer-slash-content-creator business model?

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