Tara McMullin

Status and Relatedness are stress/reward triggers and Attachment is a core human need. The exclusive "we" may reward Status for the ingroup members, but it threatens Status for the outgroup – especially those that want to belong. For outgroup members, the exclusive "we" meddles with the sense of Relatedness and creates insecure Attachment. Those... See more

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.... See more

The thing that makes “influencer” such an attractive option in those surveys is precisely this idea that it names the outcome rather than the actual work. We don’t actually have a good word for what it means to do that work. Partly this is because there are big differences between platforms (and within platforms, for that matter), and there is no... See more

Though histories of capitalism tend to distinguish between three stages (market, monopoly, late), its story can be retold as one of an ongoing dematerialization of value that begins when an “ordinary, sensuous thing”—a table, say—is transformed into a commodity.[31] Value performs an acrobatic feat, leaping from the ligneous form of the... See more

I’ve spent the last year and a half telling everyone that TikTok saved my career. But that’s not true. What saved my career was writing a great fucking book.

This sort of collapsed, derelict condition can appear around any disintegrating dimension of being.

‘The internet is forever’ has long been the refrain of neurotics who wring their hands over privacy. But, back in the earliest days of online interaction, we couldn’t conceptualise what forever meant for digital experiences. They seemed ephemeral, intimate. We were blissfully unaware that our little exchanges might one day be part of ‘Big Data’ to... See more

In the context of political discourse online, moralized content containing moral-emotion expression is consistently associated with increased sharing across various topics, among laypeople and political leaders, and during consequential political events. We call this phenomenon moral contagion .