Invoke the brat as your muse, it seems, and she’ll dilute the politics of your book down to a mix of provocativeness and uncertainty. Something like “The system is gross, but the people who want to resist or improve it are cringe. And some aspects of the system, like online shopping and racism and fatphobia, might actually be OK? Just kidding! Unle... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

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The internet is still so young that it’s still momentous to see a social network of some scale and lifespan suddenly lose its vitality. The regime change to Elon and his brain trust and the drastic changes they’ve made constitute a natural experiment we don’t see often. Usually, social networks are killed off by something exogenous, usually another... See more

As a venue for interaction I view the current social landscape as an online version of WWE. A lot of what I see (maybe it’s my algorithm) are people playing characters that are extensions of their true self, triumphs and tragedies serve as storylines in this never ending soap opera.

that while grief is persistent and cannot be diminished, it can be carried together.

I’m drawn to the idea of an art of living much more so than to the compulsive search for life hacks, regimens of self-improvement, or self-optimization schemes. These too often feel like a doubling down on the insistence that we can always do more if only we apply the right technique. They also suggest that the path to happiness involves the discov... See more

The marketplace of attention was supposed to solve this problem; we were told that the good channels would be elevated by the platforms and that people would stop watching the bad channels. But the marketplace of attention cares only about attention

Billions use it, including me, but it feels like the dying Rust Belt city of the internet