The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
I think it’s the same with social networks like Facebook and Instagram, everything. At the level of scale that they’re at now, the status game and the sense of progression is going to be way different than it was when they were just starting out.
Eugene Wei • Status Games: Engineering Scarcity in a World of Abundance
In our conversation, Nadia mentioned the classic piece “Status as a service” by Eugene Wei that details how Twitter functions (or functioned) as a giant status-seeking engine. This piece, Nadia proposed, crystalized the era of the internet when people were optimizing for likes and cultural cache in a game that felt novel and exciting. Something ess... See more
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual
our current anxieties of income inequality and work dissatisfaction are only amplified in the digital commons. There is always someone else in our network having more fun, making more money, or getting more psychic value out of those connections.