sari
- The internet doesn’t have to demand our presence the way it currently does. It shouldn’t be something we have to look at all time. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d finally be free to hang out. The first time I ever heard about Facebook, back in 2004, was from someone proudly declaring that she had just spent four hours using it. At the time, it was outrage... See more
from It's Time to Lie Down and Be Counted by Drew Austin
- Our modest goal with Substack is to help accelerate and amplify the advent of the culture future through a better media system. Culture is not just about getting what you want; it is about learning what to want. It shapes our values, beliefs, identity, taste, and how we relate to other people. And in turn, we shape it, when we choose what to pay at... See more
from The two futures of media
the world is a surprisingly malleable place and has reconfigured itself around compelling visions many times before
- Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many pe... See morevis Molly White
- instead of seeking to maximize status — which some of us still do — more of us find ourselves seeking safety and context online instead.
from The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual by Yancey Strickler
the next era of the Internet
- for nearly fourteen years afterwards, I stared at a smartphone every single day. Five thousand days, all in all. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done with the same level of commitment. There have been days where I’ve had nothing to eat or drink and there have been nights when I didn’t sleep. But until very recently, I never once went twenty-fou... See more
via Sam Kriss
- The URL bar is perhaps the most fundamental part of browsing the internet, and yet it’s something I haven’t thought about in at least five years. That’s because I’m often just going to one of four sites that autocomplete the moment I type the first letter, and because I’m a Chrome user, the URL bar is interchangeable with the search bar, so when I ... See more
from Bring back websites by kate lindsay
- We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use.
Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds, loot boxes, compulsion loops, gang gang yes yes yes ice cream so good. You’re caught in a feedback loop with the algorithm, and you are the squishiest part of that loop.
Ritual technology operates on... See morefrom Ritual Technology by Gordon Brander
- “The infoverse may be infinite, but our allotment of days is not.” We ought to be conscious of how far and how quickly we move through the internet. But without a physical way to observe our time spent online, we risk scrolling, skimming, and hyperlinking ourselves to oblivion.
from On observing time /╲/╲/╲ by Jon Gacnik
YES. I don’t want to read everything, I just want to return to the best things over and over again. Or, like Oprah once said: “I don’t have any new lessons. But I often think that it’s not the new lessons as much as it is, really, learning the old ones again and again.”