Archive
Culture
Taste in the Age of Machines
AI can generate infinite content, but it can’t decide what should exist. Taste, built through exposure, discernment, and intent, is the real edge in the AI age.
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Culture
A Field Guide to Antimemetics
Nadia Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading”, explores the latent power of ideas that are engineered to disappear.
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Technology
In Defense of Recommendation Algorithms
The feed is everyone’s favorite villain. The alternative was an unsorted firehose, and we forget how fast we begged for the algorithm back.
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Philosophy
You Don’t Get to Choose
You don’t control what gets built, and it arrives whether you vote for it or not. A reading of Ellul for anyone who still thinks opting out is on the table.
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Philosophy
AI Is Striking Gold for Infovores
The internet promised to democratize knowledge and mostly delivered noise. For the genuinely curious, AI is the first tool that actually pays out.
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Society
Why Is Luddism Making a Comeback?
Smashing looms looks irrational until you ask who the machines were actually for. The new Luddites aren’t scared of technology; they’re asking the original question again.
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Culture
The Case for Letting Teenagers Online
Everyone agrees kids should be kept off the internet. Everyone is a little wrong, and the messy version of growing up online is worth defending.
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Technology
Your Data Isn’t Worth What You Think
The “data is the new oil” panic assumes your clicks are treasure someone is stealing. Individually they’re worth a fraction of a cent, and the real asset was never you.
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Technology
Software Isn’t Free
The largest public-goods experiment in history is paid for by advertising and resented most by the people who benefit most from it.
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History
The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics
Novels, radio, comics, video games: each was going to ruin a generation. Each panic forgot the last, and we keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill.
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Culture
The Phones Aren’t Doing It to You
Envy, narcissism, and loneliness are things technology amplifies, not things it creates. The fentanyl analogy for social media is worse than useless.
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Society
We Built the Panopticon Ourselves
It wasn’t Big Tech that turned the world into surveillance. It was us, phones already up the second anything happens.
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Philosophy
Rational Optimism Is Always the Way Out
Despair is intellectually cheap and almost always wrong. Progress has run on one stubborn bet: that problems get solved by people willing to solve them.
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Technology
Your Phone Isn’t Listening to You
The targeted-ad coincidence feels like proof your microphone is always on. The truth is more boring and more unsettling: nobody needs to listen to know.
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Culture
Technological Progress Is Not Inevitable
We treat progress as the default setting of history. It isn’t, and the conditions that produce it are far easier to dismantle than to build.
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History
The Great Man Theory of Technology
Historians spent a century insisting no single person moves the world. Then you read the record of invention, and the heresy starts to look like data.
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