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ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is anti-social, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.

Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival. Instead of fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

Tim Ferriss • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with attention instead of money. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and at first, it was!

It was like having a big party sponsored by Mazda, and all that meant was having the Mazda logo on the Solo cu... See more

Adam Mastroianni • The Slop School of Internet Success and other lies about cyberspace

some reasons why GDP figures overstated economic growth. Now we see one reason why GDP figures understate economic growth. Much of the value of the internet is experienced at the personal level and so will never show up in the productivity numbers. Buying $2 worth of bananas boosts GDP, but having $20 worth of fun cruising the Web does not, at leas

Tyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proc

ROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents

EV likes to emphasise its search for “moonshot” projects – high-impact ways of changing the world. Take, for example, Recidiviz, a criminal-justice non-profit that Cowen funded. It has helped free 70,000 parole-eligible people, using data tools, who would otherwise have remained under supervision. Yet if you browse the winning projects, it becomes ... See more

archive.ph • Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything

The Great Diminishment has several causes. (The internet, social media, apathy, etc., all play a role. I’ve written more about how “everyone is numbing out.”) But a big cause is what I’ll call the “venture capitalization” of culture, where as much cost is squeezed out of every nook and cranny as possible, while prices remain the same or higher. You... See more

Catherine Shannon • The Great Diminishment

Ultimately, the Valley attitude is an empowered anomie turbocharged by selfishness, respecting some nominal “feel-good” principals of progress or collective technological striving, but in truth pursuing a continual self-development refracted through the capitalist prism: hippies

Sublime

Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Tim Ferriss • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

Adam Mastroianni • The Slop School of Internet Success and other lies about cyberspace

Tyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

ROGERS BRUBAKER • Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents

archive.ph • Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything

Catherine Shannon • The Great Diminishment

Antonio Garcia Martinez • Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley