We are living in his dystopian world| UnHerd
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
“This is how cyberlibertarianism works: it is not so much about party politics as it is about controlling the terms of discourse and the conversation itself. This ensures that only … Continue reading →| LibrarianShipwreck
“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
As one moves between the general and the specific, two things that vary are (1) accuracy and (2) reach. Accuracy: how well your policy, design, idea, opinion describes the real facts of reality, how few exceptions and edge cases there are. Reach: how many facts of reality or units or instances your policy, design, or idea describes or accounts for. Accuracy is related to depth and focus; reach is related to breadth and speed. Both are important, and they’re in necessary conflict. This conf...| Meta is Murder
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
I’ve been playing the game Satisfactory recently with my sister. In it, you are workers setting up mines and factories on a new planet. You don’t have the full list of everything you’re going to need to do upfront, so you build each thing as you need it… winding up with a convoluted mess once you reach a certain stage of production. Our setup had us constantly hurdling over mazes of conveyor belts (because we hadn’t realized yet it was possible to elevate them). In the game, it’s ...| Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
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
I feel at times that I still live in the never-ending 20th century, that I’m stuck here, that maybe everyone is stuck here, even people born too late to have seen it happen. True, there are smartphones now, and new types of ugly buildings. Images are sharper, even when you zoom in. You can tell that time has passed because unremarkable things like Sweetheart Jazz cups have acquired the status of fetish objects.| n+1
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