Under authenticity, the value of a thing decreases as more and more people like it. This is clearly no longer the case.| subpixel.space
It’s said that thinkers are either foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ever since I heard about this I’ve known that I am a hedgehog. My one big idea is the idea of moral ecosystems: decentralized systems of moral belief and their relationship to our technological media environments. Since 2016 I have been exploring this idea and have made many attempts to explain it in different essays. None of these attempts have fully captured it, but I...| Subpixel Space
The terrain of American mental health is as vast and colorful as this country’s geography. I’ve been interested in exploring the landscape since 2019, when I dashed off a quick blog post on cultural differences in psychology. Backburnered for four years, the topic is now top of mind for me. My interest in the economies of cultural and spiritual production, the topic of Life After Lifestyle, led me right back to mental health and wellness. But there are many other cues that point me this d...| Subpixel Space
One of the exciting things I’m up to at Other Internet is working on a new research project with the Ethereum Foundation and Venkatesh Rao. If you haven’t heard about it yet, we’re part of a program called Summer of Protocols which hopes to promote new theories about protocols, as well as what Venkat calls “protocol literacy”: the ability to parse protocols’ conventions, usage codes, and design patterns. For everything from open source money to regulating plastic production, proto...| Subpixel Space
This essay debuted as a talk at FWB Fest in Idyllwild, California, 2022. I’ve rearranged and expanded the material for the essay version. --- It is 2018 and I am on a flight to San Francisco. I am seated next to a harried woman who pays fifty dollars for WiFi and rattles out Slack messages. She is an employee of one of the largest digital agencies, and is clearly on her way to a client presentation. I can’t help but side-eye her screen as she edits a presentation deck. “Shipt isn’t ju...| Subpixel Space
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The uneasy Web 2.0 truce between social networks, legacy media, and brands is falling apart. Once it was held together by ad tech. But advertising spends keep going up, brand content is at peak saturation, and audiences are slowly but surely evacuating the big social media companies. Can the three forces — social media, content, and commerce — find a new way relate to each other? Here enters the question of community. As high quality content and effective brand strategy move down the l...| Subpixel Space
Aaron, I’ve been reflecting on your Garden of Forking Memes essay. I’m so glad you’ve written such a comprehensive piece on this topic of subculture and history, and I’m honored you asked me to provide feedback on it. It gave me a lot of thoughts that I wanted to flesh out, so I’m responding here. I’m most interested to talk with you about something we’ve discussed a bit before, something which is left implicit in your essay: the disappearance and now reappearance of the future ...| Subpixel Space
The text renaissance we’re experiencing today isn’t just about new writing and publishing tools. It’s also about new ways of working, collaborating, and authoring. For instance, I created a simple component on my website that lets me attribute authorship of parts of text to another writer. This allowed me to collaborate with Kara, Drew, Edouard on our recent piece Premonition while maintaining our distinct voices. Using quotebacks to cite someone generously with context and linkbacks en...| Subpixel Space
Tom Critchlow and I have written a web-native quoting tool called Quotebacks, which is now available for download. Quotebacks allow you grab any piece of text from the web, and quote-tweet it in your blog without losing context, like this: Interestingness is not a fixed property, but a move in a conversation between what everyone in the audience already knows (the “assumption ground“) and the surprise reveal. Being interesting means that the audience shares, or can be made to share, the c...| Subpixel Space
Culture | Brands | Space | Entertainment | Tools | Politics | Death| subpixel.space
Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.| subpixel.space
After everything has become a lifestyle brand, the frontier of cultural creation is now faith itself.| subpixel.space
