Sublime

I’m extremely wary of the cult of contemporary self-making, and the fact that it’s become an expected part of life in the attention economy for middle-class workers.

From the college essay – the first time many of us are required to tell a selling story of ourselves in the service of social capital – to the dating website to Twitter or Instagram, we... See more

The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture

A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.

By Kyle Chayka

October 30, 2024

Illustration by Ariel Davis

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In the 2010s, affiliate marketing became a dominant strain of online business models. The Wirecutte... See more

Like so many technologies that came before, it seems to be here to stay; the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.

In his new book, “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, argues that “the present situation is intolerab... See more

Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artis

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