Sublime

The internet was not yet an enormous public stage, not yet the automatic place for people to share and overshare. Posting unpolished personal stuff felt weird.

“Social media favors the bitty over the meaty, the cutting over the considered. It prizes emotionalism over reason,”

Short, crisp, punchy = memorable, clear, smart.

The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying m

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is