SpaceXponential

One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply. The attention that undergirds... See more

Now, though, I realize that this confusion stems from making the same mistake I did in that old analysis of Facebook: I was looking to the real world as a guide to understanding the Internet, when it was in fact inevitable that the Internet would, over time, come to impact the real world. Some of that impact will be fleeting, like many of the prote... See more

The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, distinguishes two kinds of cryptoeconomic systems: objective and subjective. In an objective system, the protocol’s operation and consensus can be maintained at all times using solely nodes, knowing nothing but the rules of the protocol itself. Subjective systems, on the other hand, require more additional k... See more

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in ... See more

We want a platform where we can swim in curiosity, where we can feel like our contributions amount to more and more over time, where we are encouraged to seek out the most arcane pieces of information and to juxtapose those pieces of information with current events in order to re-orient ourselves.

Above all, we want to be able to  play  wi

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In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece o

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