My Internet: Sam Cole

Tyler Cowen’s book Create Your Own Economy observes that, as individualized social feeds have dwarfed newspapers and personalized Netflix recommendations dwarfed movie theaters, we have less of a shared substrate — less collective knowledge we all learn, less collective experiences we all share, and less collective identities we all embrace.

My current-day interaction with the internet seems to contain ever fewer of these portholes and chance encounters. If the internet is a superhighway, it feels like there are fewer exits, and you’re expected to keep traveling to the same places over and over again, based on your past behavior (and purchasing history). In fact, the highway always see

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