YouTube Mukbang Videos Predicted Our Current TikTok Moment | Eater
Our obsession with watching people eat giant meals on camera has now spilled over into other parts of everyday life.| Eater
Selling lemons by Frank Chimero What makes the Market for Lemons concept so appealing (and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification) is that everyone can be acting reasonably, pursuing their own interests, and things still get worse for everyone. No one has to be evil or stupid: the platform does what’s profitable, sellers […]| Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
Do you want the Internet to be an extension of your existing offline relationships, or to be separate from your offline life? I think these are two totally different modes for using the Internet, and most people are in the first group. I’ve found my relationships are healthier when I keep my offline-first relationships offline (e.g. […]| Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror th...| n+1Articles – n+1
Our obsession with watching people eat giant meals on camera has now spilled over into other parts of everyday life.| Eater
Looking out to see what’s leftIt isn’t hard to be bereftThe stuff we hoped would stick aroundIs buried deep within the groundWhile garbage that we’d scorn and jeerGrows more successful every year:Flailing wildly for attentionMaking things too crass to mentionPumping out the same old crapIn hopes it puts them on the map Watching all the […]| Hmm Daily
The notice was thoughtfully displayed on top of a writing pad next to the telephone, in our hotel in Shanghai. But no one telephones nowadays. So I didn’t see the sheet of paper, with its neatly formatted corporate logos, until my daughter brought it to me to make her a paper airplane. | Hmm Daily
I recently read Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, an exquisite historical science-fiction novel about the Italian scientist’s life. A central highlight is a story Galileo wrote in 1623 in his book The Assayer (one of the original diss tracks) that’s unlike anything he wrote before or| Yancey Strickler
Now that the Online Safety act has come into effect and the inevitable consequences are starting to play out, I decided to email my MP to try and find out what the Government intends to do to unpick the mess. Doing this felt particularly important in light of the divisive comments made by Peter Kyle MP (I feel extremely dirty agreeing with anything that Farage has said, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day). Although I didn't want my email to focus on Kyle, it is a topic which merits...| www.bentasker.co.uk
“I feel like we are nearing to the end of the times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.” – Hayao Miyazaki If you spent much time online in the closing weeks of June 2025, chances are go…| LibrarianShipwreck
A startling statistic from Google’s antitrust trial raises fears that a long-predicted decline has now begun| Platformer
In the past, I've been negative about the prospects of the world moving to decentralised social media platforms. The average person doesn't care if their data is being misused or locked in. Not enough to leave at least, they just want to have a good time. But I've always believed| Abstractionist by Keenen Charles
This is part three of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Read the introduction on “the mindset of more.”| Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster,...| n+1
In the past thirty years what it means to be an artist has dramatically changed. Before the internet being an artist meant operating in a very specific area where the gatekeepers, critics, and ways of doing things were well-structured and defined. You as the artist plugged into this system if| Yancey Strickler
How the internet has changed what it means to be an individual, and how society has changed in a result| Yancey Strickler
In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. When we look out into space, the theory goes, we’re struck by its silence. It seems like we’re the only ones here. After all, if other forms of life| Yancey Strickler
Last week, I updated my blogroll to include everyone in my RSS feed reader. While I read a lot of topical blogs and newsletters, I also follow a goodly number of interesting people I don’t know as well as acquaintances. I didn’t include these personal blogs on my blogroll before, but decided it was time to add them.| Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile he is grateful for the knowledge that female was best used as an adjective, that sexism harms men too (though not nearly to the extent that it harms women), and that certain men pretend to be feminists just to get laid.| n+1
All social media both feeds and feeds on narcissism, but Twitter’s capacity to mirror the world and its users’ neuroses in discrete verbal and visual units, at least in certain corners of the site, elevates self-regard to a formal principle. We compulsively iterate ourselves as memes, set pieces, and DIY allegorical photos, as if hoping we’ll eventually perfect the reflection.| n+1
