The problem isn’t the screens, it’s what's behind them. What screens have enabled is a gradual shifting of our locus of entertainment from internal to external. From entertainment being something we generate to something generated for us. And as a consequence, we’re losing the ability to entertain ourselves, relying on increasingly stimulating sources as our entertainment muscles continue to atrophy. 

So rather than having to curate your own feeds, you just land on a single site and have the “best” content presented to you.

The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence

Latency

Netflix’s algorithms will ‘watch’ a scene with blue skies and decide that, if a viewer’s internet speed drops, 500 different shades of blue can be simplified to 200, or 50, or 25. The streamer’s analytics even do this on a contextual basis — recognizing that scenes of dialogue can tolerate more compression than those of faster-paced action. This is multipass encoding

After all, these kids were very young when their parents gave them iPhones and tablets—they’ve never known a self that wasn’t subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by “authentic” here isn’t the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive.

That securing this blue check requires incessant and frequently extreme self-disclosure, that it encourages likability, brand-friendliness, and a willingness to conform to one’s audience—none of this is mentioned. Because these influencers are laboring in a system that asks them to create themselves in full view of the public, all of the calisthenics of the body are willingly displayed for their viewers.

Epistemologically, this is where we are as a country: when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness.

“When I was younger,” Brandon, who is nineteen, says, “I didn’t have this much perspective on the world. I didn’t get to see everyone’s opinions on things. What was it? Just the news? Facebook? As a kid, I didn’t have a TikTok. I wasn’t an eight-year-old kid with a TikTok seeing what everyone else is seeing. Now everyone feels like they have a voice, and I think that’s what people are afraid of.”

Some frantic googling later that day will reveal that this supposed Nazi initiative—apparently called the Borghild Project, whereby German troops were given collapsible plastic dolls in their infantry backpacks that could be inflated and used (so to speak) in lieu of visiting prostitutes—is a hoax, one that was summarily debunked back in the early 2000s. Obviously, this has regained traction, though, in the unregulated wilderness of TikTok.

Honestly, man, this happens all the time. They all have ADHD. They haven’t been in school in like four years, and they haven’t had responsibilities, so their brains are fucking mush, bro. . . . It’s just like we pick teams for fun all the time.

the collab-house phenomenon will be the model for brands moving forward and that someday all major businesses will have their own influencer residences—the McDonald’s collab house, the Jeep Wrangler collab house, or even, god forbid, the Viagra collab house. How long before other industries will be forced to embrace this trend? How long before newspapers have collab houses? How long before universities get their own influencer mansions, with professors made to compete for students’ attention, blending course material with sad TikTok dances?

For instance, Christopher Romero just did a TikTok video for a Louisiana-based chicken franchise called Raising Cane’s,2 for which he and his girlfriend, Madi, were paid $14,000 and $60,000, respectively

The previous semester, for instance, during a class on creative non-fiction, twenty-four of my twenty-six students wrote about self-harm or suicidal ideation. Several of them had been hospitalized for anxiety or depression, and my office hours were now less occasions to discuss course concepts—James Baldwin’s narrative persona, say, or Joan Didion’s use of imagery—than they were de facto counseling sessions. Even students who seemed happy and neurologically stable—Abercrombie-clad, toting a pencil case and immaculate planner—nevertheless displayed unsettling in-class behavior: snacking incessantly during lectures, showing Victorian levels of repression. The number of emotional-support service animals had skyrocketed on campus. It seemed like every third person had a Fido in tow, and had you wandered into my lecture hall when we were still holding in-person classes, you might have assumed that my lessons were on obedience training or the virtues of dog-park etiquette. And while it seems clichéd even to mention it, the students were inexorably—compulsively—on their phones.

From a certain vantage, then, these influencers aren’t so much celebrities as they are prototypes of laborers in the new passion economy, a glittering premonition of where the world seems to be heading.

When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature is just a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are bitcoins. The list goes on.

In addition to identifying success from the developer perspective, you want to know how it looks in your product. What signs do you have that someone has moved from tire-kicking to actual usage? It might be repeated logins, volume of API calls, or the amount of data stored in their account. When you identify it, you can measure it.

We call it the framework of intention. My brother and I designed it during the lockdown. We were gardening a lot, and we learned some lessons from nature. Those lessons became the framework, and it has just three steps. The first step is “slow down”. You have to slow down when communicating so your reaction isn’t a knee jerk one. The second step is to “give gratitude”. For me, I ask myself, “What am I grateful for about this person?” It helps with balance. Then the last step is “take responsibility”. Before pointing out what your partner hasn’t done right, take responsibility for the part you played in that disagreement, be vocal about it, and do better. We’ve found that these three steps have been instrumental in reducing the level of conflicts we have. 

Most people are bad at time management. We are terrible at estimating how much time tasks will take, and we have a tendency to overcommit our future selves.

If you don't control your schedule, it will control you.

When this happens, Blackness—or what is perceived as Black identity—thrives outside of context. It's diluted and remixed to a dizzying degree. Black people lose control over how their humanity is presented.

“At the end of the day, clout is still clout—whether it's good clout or bad clout,” she says, waving a finger in and out of the frame. “Because through the good clout you're always going to have haters, and if you got bad clout you're always going to have supporters. So either way you win.”

“There were little white girls slicking their edges and drawing their eyebrows all weird,” Roberts says. “They would wrap tape around their fingers to be their fake nails. They'd put hoops on. When you call them out, it's, ‘Anyone of any race can be a Hot Cheeto Girl.’ No sweetheart, we know what you're doing. We know that the Hot Cheeto Girl is just a derivative of the ghetto girl, the hood rat, the Shanaynay that people used to call Black and Latinx women.”

The most effective videos come down to one factor: how well a creator grabs hold of our attention. That is to say, how deftly they make what we watch theirs. Blackness is a proven attention getter. Its adoption is racism, custom-fit.

the tenets of minstrel performance remain alive today in television, movies, music, and, in its most advanced iteration, on the internet.

In a video uploaded to TikTok last December, a white teen saunters through an airport terminal, roller suitcase in hand. As he passes the check-in counter for Spirit—the notoriously awful low-cost airline—a look of mild irritation crosses his face. He glances left, then right. “Whew chile, the ghetto,” he says, elongating the o in ghetto. Only it's not the young man's voice we hear. It's that of reality diva NeNe Leakes, whose audio was pulled, edited, and resynchronized for the eight-second clip.

As Blackmon puts it, “Be clear: Without Black culture, TikTok wouldn't even be a thing.”

TikTok, it turned out, was reminiscent of Vine in more ways than one. The common denominator of many of its viral moments is an unspoken partiality to Black cultural expression

I have a theory that time scarcity is also linked to something I'll call time scatteredness. This happens when you really have no idea how long it takes us to complete tasks, and this skews how much time you think you have or need.

it’s a wise idea to begin tracking your time in order to get a more realistic handle on how long specific projects and tasks take you. That’ll override your optimism bias and keep your expectations for your own productivity in check.

Pushing a deadline back once is one thing. Needing to do it over and over again will make it appear as if you don’t know how to manage your own workload.

See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

Time management is more about a system that works and less about a tool or just a method

first-order cybernetics is “the science of observed systems,” while second-order cybernetics is “the science of observing systems.

If shared conceptual models applicable to solving problems in many sciences could be found, then “by agreeing on the usefulness of these models, we get glimpses of a new lingua franca of science....

Most people think of their impact as their intention, but those two things are actually quite different. Here’s how: Intention is personal to you and your team, and what you hope to achieve. Impact is how what you make is lived and experienced in the real world in actual communities. Intent does not undo impact!

if dominant culture is used as the norm from which we create and design, then we will undoubtedly end up excluding everyone else.

The pilot’s checklist isn’t just about order of operations—instead, it’s a way of thinking about preparation, accountability, and teamwork.

DESIGN is the creation of a plan to build an object, system, or human interaction. DIVERSITY is quantitative. It’s the composition of different people represented in what you make, and the decision makers on your team. INCLUSION speaks to the quality of the experience you’ve designed for these diverse folks, so they experience themselves as leaders and decision makers. EQUITY lives in how we design our systems and processes; the way we work, and who we work with, so we are upholding our commitment to diversity and inclusion. FRAMEWORKS are the basic structures that enable complex systems to function. MISREPRESENTED COMMUNITIES are communities that have been defined by dominant culture, denied the ability to define themselves on their own terms, and are therefore falsely or narrowly represented. We use this instead of “underrepresented” or “marginalized,” because those identifiers again center the POV of dominant culture.

Be bold and provide concise suggestions on moving projects forward instead of letting them sit in limbo. Bold writing will win you the reputation of an un-blocker and problem solver.

The strange focus of state-sponsored Depression-era propaganda on consumption becomes understandable in this light. As a consequence, the 20th century citizens of the U.S. didn’t embark on consumption as mere personal indulgence—but as a pro-social and patriotic duty

A peacetime alternative for sustaining a technology is to make it necessary for participation in society and in everyday life

But no society can wage war forever, even if wartime is the origin of much of technology

The rapid spread of the state-mandated Prussian model of education as an aid in economic development owes as much to preparing workers for a lifetime of such discipline as it does to loftier goals like imparting literacy.

An invention does not achieve adoption because of its mere existence, but only when it has found a stable socioeconomic niche

Not taking breaks leads to decision fatigue, where we make simplistic choices because we lack the mental energy to ponder our options properly.

By deciding you will write a short note about everything you read, you will naturally slow down and reduce your content consumption levels.

Anytime you struggle to write about something you just read, watched, or listen, make sure to take the time to understand properly. The fact that you’re struggling to express it in your own words often means you haven’t completely grasped the new idea.

Last, but not least, a skillset can be rare and valuable if you specialise in it before it becomes clear that it is valuable.

A skillset can also be rare and valuable if the skillset is unattractive but valuable.

A skillset can be rare and valuable if the path to your unique combination of valuable skills is opaque.

Piaget’s research establishes that when a toddler is learning to walk, they build a mental model of their body in their brains. (This mental model is sometimes referred to as ‘embodiedness’, and explains things like the phantom limb phenomenon in amputees).

“An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.”

… Flashing differs from exploding or disploding in not being accompanied with a loud report. To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew.

You’ll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you’ve seen. “2. To convey as by a flash… as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind.” In the juxtaposition of those two examples — a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind — is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: “to flash conviction on the mind.” This is in a dictionary, for God’s sake.

There’s actually this great history of how he almost singlehandedly invented the very idea of American English, defining the native tongue of the new republic, “rescuing” it from “the clamour of pedantry” imposed by the Brits.

Webster’s dictionary took him 26 years to finish. It ended up having 70,000 words. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was plagued by debt to fund the project; he had to mortgage his home.