Sublime

The web hasn’t had its artisanal moment. Right now, giant, ad-based networks created by six men that everyone begrudgingly uses with diminishing emotional returns, control the vast majority of the web.

We have become conditioned to accept that viciously tearing down complete strangers online is normal and admirable, and that it is right and proper for a bad tweet from decades ago to ruin someone’s life. A new vocabulary – “doom-scrolling!” “hate-reading!” – is now necessary to capture how dysfunctional online activity has become.

Not everyone was impressed: TikToker Tamika Turner made a video saying, “Your addiction to surveillance and attention is betraying the fact that although you’re the exact demographic to call yourself ‘girl’s girls,’ your only allegiance is to your own entertainment,” pointing out the enormous personal ramifications a video like this could have on s... See more

When the press tour for Madame Web began at the start of the year, lead actress Dakota Johnson was placed under such scrutiny that it became an absurdist tale of how clicks and engagement are farmed. One of the earliest examples is a quote she gave to Entertainment Weekly about working in front of a bluescreen, in which she said, “I’ve never really... See more

Sullivan and Weiss weren’t merely the victims of some ethereal struggle between the forces of free speech and ideological censorship: they were the collateral damage of shifting media business models. And there will be lots more of them before this drama finishes.

Kelly’s vision depends on an evolution of the Internet in which the vast tangle of possible one-on-one connections partition into countless small cliques—each one a fandom or a mini community revelling in the discovery of others who share their quirks. Instead, the social-media giants effectively rerouted these connections through a small number of... See more