Molly
@mollyjbarth
Molly
“For the youth of today,” she said in closing, “the developmental experience has been polluted; it’s been cheapened. ‘Who am I?’ becomes ‘How do I appear?’”
Now in College, Luddite Teens Still Don’t Want Your Likes
“But then you get used to it all, is the problem,” she continued. “I feel like I’m not trying as hard anymore. When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it’s easy to do things. I guess I still don’t like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn’t figure out how to go... See more
Now in College, Luddite Teens Still Don’t Want Your Likes
Soothing and Social Media Evolution
Everything is easy, nothing is hard. We’re no longer accustomed to doing the hard things
But it is deeply wounding to feel your industry get squeezed into a misshapen lump of clay. Something could be rebuilt from this material, but it’s going to require innovative thinking and people willing to provide the capital for the future of journalism. I see this in the television and film industry, too. The music business. Anywhere creativity ... See more
Ten Years In A Crumbling Industry
In his first press briefing back in the White House, President Trump, who has long been criticized for an “empathy gap,” quickly moves from mourning the victims to political attacks. He assails former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a disaster,” blaming him for diversity objectives at the F.A.A. The inference is that diversity by defini... See more
Live Updates: No Survivors After Plane and Helicopter Crash Near Washington, Officials Say
The notion that everything that ever has been and ever will be on the internet will always be there — potentially to haunt us — feels less true in an era when data is constantly disappearing.
s.e. smith • What happens when the internet disappears?
Changing FB name for college applications
This is, at times, how the internet feels right now. We are being slowly erased, but instead of passing peacefully into the vale with the ebb and flow of soothing waves, we are being actively replaced by garbage.
s.e. smith • What happens when the internet disappears?
AI Garbage
Historical content can be an incredibly informative resource, telling us how people lived and thought. But we must remember that it’s a small fraction of contemporaneous material that survives, even as we hope, of course, that it’s our own existence that is ultimately memorialized. Sometimes it is through the gaps that we read history or are forced... See more
s.e. smith • What happens when the internet disappears?
History is written by the victors
While scary, there’s something beautiful in having only the memories left behind Not having every minuscule detail captured and distilled into content Is this for current me or future me That just like us, one day our content will die too
We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which things should be allowed to disappear into the wa... See more
s.e. smith • What happens when the internet disappears?
The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into an easy go.