First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us

What we can try to do—and what only human curation, so far, can make possible—is to find creative ways out of our house of mirrors. “Leave the door open on your way out” is one of our commandments, and it is an invitation to bring parallel worlds and universes, antagonists and dissidents, renegades and rebels into our beautiful bubble, and to engag... See more

You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the ... See more

Let me phrase what I’ve been saying in this essay in a slightly different way. What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.