Thought-provoking point of view on the reverse chronological view common to many platforms.
We’d probably have less walled garden dominance.
This is where we are now. Getting charged to reach your own followers on social media. The honey pot is working.
How outrage culture, dogmatism and lack of context are killing discourse.
We've been inundated with articles about the dangers of phone addiction. This one takes it a step further by linking it to stress hormone levels. Not a surprise.
I've linked to similar thoughts before but it's always worth repeating. You own your words. Why feed twitter, facebook or some other behaviour farm with them? Your personal space on the net is your archive and your place to experiment.
I've been in worse condition from a cycling crash. I'm not sure how real this is but it's positively Ballardian.
Good. More of this, please.
I was completely out of the loop with TikTok and the various allegations concerning it. This substantial take from Stratechery gave me a much clearer picture.
“Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.
Johann Hari believes we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and I definitely agree. I've felt this theft of my attention too.
Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of: You exist. You are seen.
This really hit home: Ezra Klein, echoing Marshall McLuhan, on how the medium does shape us, not just the message.
Dries Depoorter built software to scan online public cameras and link them to geotagged instagram posts from the same location. Basically finding people from a single instagram photo and potentially tracking them across any public (or not) camera out there. Technically impressive, yet disturbing.
There was a video on the page too, but it seems to have been pulled due to a copyright claim from Earthcam who, I imagine, weren't very happy about their cameras being used for this.
An interesting theory on the Sapient Paradox, the question of why civilization came to be so late in the human species' evolution. We're about 200.000 years old but civilization is closer to 20.000.
The author posits that reputation/gossip control in small groups was the limiter to growth and that the structure of civilization helped dampen this need. However, social media has brought this "gossip trap" back on a worldwide level, risking a return to government by reputation.
I doubt things can be attributed to single causes like this but it's a compelling (and long) read.
