Severin Matusek

It's the perfect crystallization of what America has become: the world's most powerful content creator.

There is a competition going on for authority online — not just authority in a particular subject matter, like politics or finance, but the authority to provide a comprehensive view of what matters on the internet, pointing out what to pay to attention to.

4/ The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple — some say parallel — realities.

As you can tell from my attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.

The TV show The Wire had a phrase about how people navigate the risk of failure inside more traditional institutions: “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” In the tech world, the logic reverses. The drawbacks of a collective fallacy are smaller than not participating in the next innovation, so the rule becomes, “You only lose if you don’t play.”

“I’ve used ChatGPT a handful of times,” writes Hsu, “and on one occasion it accomplished a scheduling task so quickly that I began to understand the intoxication of hyper-efficiency.”

Joanne McNeil provides context to the evolution of communities online connection to the platforms that enable it.