"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it—that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.
This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won't tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you'd figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay.
Humane (the mysterious company founded by ex-Apple executives) has finally revealed the name of the product they’re hoping to ship this year: the Humane Ai Pin.
I’m as skeptical as the next person about AI and wearables and really anything with as much hypebeast marketing as this product has received. But if I put my skepticism aside for a moment I’m able to appreciate this for what it is—a group of people trying to create a new kind of computer and computing paradigm.
There’s a bit of footage out there of the device in action, but regardless of the specifics I think it’s essential that we never stop asking ourselves what a computer could or should be.
To curate means to care, not to make a list. We like to remember those who start things, but the real work of archives and institutions is the maintenance and continuation of them. Starting something is easy, caring for it over centuries is hard.
Business—ownership—does not contribute to production. It can only earn revenue through sabotage. Without the fences, the toll booths, the armed guards, the enshitification, then owners do not earn any profits. Capitalism must constantly make things worse than they would be if we were free to produce to meet our own and each other’s needs.
Part of me suspects that 2009-19 was something of an invalidated cache of a decade, outside of the main continuity of history; a premium mediocre cul-de-sac of speculative collective existence. A decade that was all noise and fury, signifying nothing. A decade destined to be largely forgotten, much like the 90s.
This is more than a place; it’s an embodied set of personal memories. Memories that exist against the eerie backdrop of the now-ephemeral-feeling zero-interest-rate decade with all its frivolities. Memories destined, perhaps, to be lost to cultural amnesia along with the rest of that somewhat embarrassing period.
Still, it’s unsettling to be reminded that you’ve consciously chosen a life in the slow lane, marked by spectatorship, contemplation, and what looks like idleness from busier perspectives. A life filled with what seem like consolations rather than prizes when viewed from the perspective of a more intensely lived one. It’s not unpleasant to live this way, but it is certainly unsettling to be correctly seen to live this way by a thoughtful observer. I once tweeted, “you have no obligation to be interesting or useful to the world,” and I’ve certainly lived by that thought. But I guess I’m now seeing that life reflected in an honest mirror, and I’m doing a bit of a double take to understand what I’m actually looking at.
The young heroes of these shows got agency from their devices, too — the devices were representations, perhaps, of their control over their own lives and the adventures they were on, something that I desperately wanted. If you had the device, you could do anything, go anywhere.
Palm Pilots came out in 1997 and the first BlackBerry in 1999. I remember wanting one of these devices even as a 12-year-old, when I would have had no use for the kind of calendar planning and to-do list making that made up most of its functions. Boring, adult stuff! The devices were clunky, their screens were plasticky, and they used styluses. But still there was this ineffable appeal to holding a gateway to a digital world in your hand — though I don’t think I could even conceptualize getting the internet on a portable device at the time, since this was the era of dial-up.
About 25 years into the social internet era, we’ve seen weirdly little experimentation with social forms at scale. Most of our emerging networks have been driven by the workability of technical forms: chat, forums, feeds, galleries, streaming video, two or three variations on comments, and increasingly powerful (and decreasingly transparent) recommendation engines.
From Ways of Being by James Bridle:
Fungi and plants are not simple stores or servers; they too are individual life forms with their own disposition and agency. In thinking about the strange and wondrous life of other beings, we must be careful not to fall back into such reductive, anthropocentric models. Nevertheless, of network theory, and perhaps more importantly the idea the power of universal, scale-free networks, is that it allows us to appreciate these forms in ways we were incapable of doing before. This is a gift from the technological to the ecological: a way of seeing and thinking the natural world which emerges from the things we have crafted for ourselves.
One such clonal wonder is Pando, an aspen living in Fishlake National Forest in Utah. At ground level, Pando looks like a forest. They take the form of more than a hundred acres of quaking aspen trees; 47,000 tall, slender trees with white bark and black knots, whose leaves turn shades of brilliant yellow in the autumn. But in fact Pando is one individual, a single organism, in which each tree trunk is a shoot from a single root system. They are one of the largest and oldest individuals on Earth.
No wonder then that the poet Richard Brautigan was moved to imagine 'a cybernetic forest / filled with pines and electronics / where deer stroll peacefully / past computers / as if they were flowers / with spinning blossoms'.
While the machines we are constructing today might one day take on their own, undeniable form of life, more akin to the life we recognize in ourselves, to wait for them to do so is to miss out on the full implications of more-than-human personhood. They are already alive, already their own subjects, in ways that matter profoundly to us and to the planet. In the words often attributed to Marshall McLuhan (but more properly ascribed to Winston Churchill): ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. 23 We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us. Our tools have agency, and thus a claim upon the more-than-human world as well. This realization allows us to begin the core task of a technological ecology: the reintegration of advanced human craft with the nature it sprung from.
Ecological thought, once unleashed, permeates everything. It is as much movement as science, with all the motive, restless energy that word connotes. Every discipline discovers its own ecology in time, as it shifts inexorably from the walled gardens of specialized research towards a greater engagement with the wider world. As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships. Much of this book will be concerned with this particular ecological thought: that what matters resides in relationships rather than things - between us, rather than within us.
The relationship between creativity and power becomes so strong that it allows for two seemingly contradictory things to occur in parallel: when exercised by the managerial class, it is used to grant capital (think: the deification of the startup founder), and when exercised by the working class, it is used to deny capital (think: the frivolousness ascribed to arts education). Relatedly, the ultimate manifestation of this relationship is the creative logic of social media, wherein users create the content and platforms reap the monetary rewards.
Here is the thing: There is no good reason for the source and destination AIs to talk to each other in human language, compressed or otherwise, and people are already experimenting with prompts that dig into internal latent representations used by the models. It seems obvious to me that machines will communicate with each other in a much more expressive and efficient latent language, closer to a mind-meld than communication, and human language will be relegated to a “last-mile” artifact used primarily for communicating with humans. And the more they talk to each other for reasons other than mediating between humans, the more the internal languages involved will evolve independently. Mediating human communication is only one reason for machines to talk to each other.
So many people! So many opinions! Which opinions really matter, anyway? From which teams? A contributor may neither have relationships nor own critique agendas. And those open, visible community venues are a risky place to be vulnerable. It can seem dangerous and beyond their control.
A steward’s best response? “Leave that to me.” The steward must know how to trigger the routines and involve people who matters most.
We always design for a world that sits, sometimes just slightly, out of sight. We engage in a complex set of actors in order to move our fictions into the realm of the real. We fight against the Dark Matter to get work made.
Structure and systems don’t squash creativity and make everything look the same. They don’t squeeze efficiency and profit out of beauty and craft. They can do those things. But that’s not what they’re actually for. Structure and systems are not just a designer’s most important tools — they are, ultimately, what design is. They are what make it possible for a new idea to be understood and experienced — to be made.
The mission of a strategist is not to set or devise strategy. It is to understand how an organization’s strategy emerges and why, then constantly scrutinize and interrogate the process, identifying inconsistencies and nudging the organization to address them. In this way, strategy work is a socratic process: gradually improving the thinking hygiene of the organization.
What I could no longer ignore about these (very human) races for status, for significance, for attention, for belonging, for “success”, is that the chasing of someone else’s attention requiresall of our own.
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.
After all the agita, the energy, and the unbelievable amount of time spent toiling in the feed, what do any of us really have to show for it?
Like all social-media platforms, Twitter’s architecture is geared toward promoting engagement, which means that Twitter has optimized itself to turn shaming into a frictionless experience. Design decisions such as the quote-tweet button are potent tools for taking an idea or opinion meant for one group and directing it toward another, with commentary appended. Over time, this shaming has become foundational to Twitter’s user culture, so much so that the platform developed its own vocabulary of shaming, such as subtweeting and ratioing. “We are rooted on by our buddies to insult people outside our in-group,” O’Neil said. “It makes us feel insulated and empowered to sling shit at others and feel righteous in the process.” Shame is the grist for the mill—we direct it toward others, and we experience others directing it at us.
“This is what the lives of so many people come down to: alone in a simulation, working at a job to make money to buy things to express who they are based on the rules the media has set out for them; conditioned by and willfully complicit in a system that feeds them their worldview every day, destined to a life of having conversations about surface-level politics or economics while watching the world pass them by on a TV screen.”
humans are becoming increasingly addicted not because some mutant addict gene is flooding the pool or because alcohol or addictive chemicals and behaviors are increasingly available, but because we are becoming more disconnected from our purpose, nature, culture, and each other.
I think that we are at peak addiction, at an unprecedented and serious inflection point that will shape the future we exist in, and that the seemingly inconsequential choices each of us make right now, matter. This is an age of addiction, and that should be a constant consideration as we navigate our lives and the many choices in front of us.
Perhaps this means as a response to an unreliable and disorienting internet, or an attempt to solve the problems of a preivous era where we gave so much of our lives over to the internet, more of us might instead of doubling down on our time spent online be incentivized to spend more time in the real world, fostering real connections and actual communities, having real debates, and rediscovering the world that exists outside our phones.
From Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller:
"There is another world, but it is in this one," says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats
“How do you go on?"
It was the question I'd been asking of everyone, in a way, for my whole life. It was the reason I'd spent so many years researching David Starr Jordan's life; it was the question I'd asked my father when I was a little girl; it was why I'd been so reluctant to let go of the curly-haired man, his mesmerizing way of pulling laughter from the cold earth. That levity was the quality I wanted to be near, the substance I wanted to learn how to manufacture in myself, the recipe that, as far and wide as I searched, I seemed unable to find.
And what cognitive glitch helps you achieve grit? Positive illusions. Other studies showed that if you had positive illusions, you were less likely to experience discouragement after setbacks. And while grit is a cocktail of many traits, one of its most important ones is just that: an ability to keep going after setbacks, to keep going in the face of no evidence that what you are striving for will ever work, or, as Duckworth puts it, "maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress."
You can even find it in his essays on temperance. Why, in the end, was he so opposed to drugs? Because they allow you to feel more powerful than you are! Or, as he puts it, they "forc[e] the nervous system to lie." Alcohol, for example, lets drinkers "feel warm when they are really cold, to feel good without warrant, to feel emancipated from those restraints and reserves which constitute the essence of character building." In other words, a rosy view of yourself was anathema to self-development. A way to keep yourself stagnant, stunted, morally inchoate. A fast track to sad-sackery
A special proof of scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is to care for the hidden and insignificant.
Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?