Thomas

‘Yeah, TikTok is for three things: learning stuff and feeling good about yourself, stalking people, and brain rot.’

In this way, brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of... See more

"If your grocery store has a "health food section", what does that make the rest of the store?"

Borrowing from Mark Twain, who borrowed from Josh Billings, the difference between getting this right and getting it almost right is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.

When you wake up each morning, do you think: what apps do I want to use?

Or do you wonder instead: what goals do I want to achieve?

For the last decade, our smartphones — the most important computers in our lives — have forced us to think about life in a pretty specific way. “There’s an app for that!” Apple proclaimed, as they laid out the very... See more

“Productivity is most important for things you don’t want to be doing. Most people want to increase productivity so they can spend less time on the task.

But before you worry about being more productive, think about being more selective. Rather than focusing on increasing productivity, it may be worth asking, “What would I be delighted to spend time... See more

‘Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.’ – Iain McGilchrist