Aside from all these decision-making conversations, you have hundreds of organizational changes happening that quietly shape the feed, but that are never documented anywhere.
what if public libraries were open late every night and we could engage in public life there instead of having to choose between drinking at the bar and domestic isolation
For the past year or more, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how the primary challenge we face, as people living in a modern western society, is not surviving in a resource scarce environment, but is instead managing to not gorge ourselves to death, literally/physically or figuratively/spiritually.
If you asked me what the true danger about social media is, I’d say it’s much more subtle. It’s the problem of time—and becoming stuck in the present. It’s the relentless pressure of reverse chron.
As a member of the Substack economy, I’d like to be able to take some credit for these successes, and I no doubt make some small contribution. But the larger truth is that I was in the right place at the right time—Substack is taking off because audiences are hungry for something more than clickable diversion in 10-second installments.
If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism and turn up the sense of common humanity
The shocking revelation was that in almost every single case, more than 99% of cases, if you looked at something interesting, like a car, for example, or a butterfly or a bird or whatever it might be, if you go back in its history and you look at what were the steps that led to that thing, the steps look nothing like it at some point back. Right be... See more