internet culture

This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.

This very email is an example of this. This theory is being shared on a private channel sent to 500 people who I kno... See more

The one thing I thought was funny about Anu’s piece is that it claims “no one owns taste” but then sort of poo-poo’s the anticipated reaction of people that views the subject of taste as their “special territory”.

You can’t have both of these things. And it’s what tech people broadly get wrong about many other intersectional dialogues. Either no on... See more

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural network... See more

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as inexpl... See more

What would it look like if, in a McLuhan-esque, medium is the message sort of way, our tools said to us:

It’s gonna take you a while.

It’s normal to take a while.

It’d be weird if you made something beautiful so quickly.

The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough.

The problem is your expectations are not realistic.

Our AI helps you slow the ... See more

I’ve come to think there’s a Cultural Doppler Effect.What sounds right in the moment feels different and dated to a time and place later on. This is true of fashion, design, music, beliefs, literally everything.

The Cultural Doppler Effect is what makes “retro.” As past cultural waves wash over us, their context is not as they first appeared. They r... See more

Like newsletters, what’s said in podcasts is non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Sna... See more