SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
And maybe there never was. But at least we maintained the illusion better before. We used to be told how to live, provided lore that outlined where the lines were drawn between right and wrong, and granted something resembling safety and stability in exchange.** Yes, I’m talking about the glue of society: religion. **“Literally false but metaphoric... See more
Molly Mielke • callings
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Charles Broskoski on Self-Discovery That Happens Upon Revisiting Things You’ve Accumulated Over Time
The Creative Independentthecreativeindependent.com Attention is a finite resource, and how we choose to spend our attention online is, in some ways, a direct reflection of where human culture has gone in an era where access to information is basically unlimited. We are very much in our teenage years—that is, we suddenly have all these new capabilities and it’s really easy to just run wild. Bu... See more
thecreativeindependent.com • Charles Broskoski on Self-Discovery That Happens Upon Revisiting Things You’ve Accumulated Over Time
This image appears in two channels, Sublime and Feeling Futuristic . You can probably start to guess what these two channels are getting at, but it takes visiting both of them to understand the nuances of their content. While Feeling Futuristic often feels like some combination of wonderment, apocolyptic visions, and specul
... See moreCharles Broskoski • Information Systems
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
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Context Omission and Trust are fundamental ingredients in the creation of facts, and both depend completely on subjective judgment. Facts are not “indivisible atoms of truth” — instead, they seem impossible to define with the objectivity we’ve come to expect from them.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal s... See more