AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background. ​ AirPods, then, express a more complete embrace of our simultaneous existence in physical and digital space, taking for granted that we’re frequently splitting our mental energy between the two. ​ AirPods have externalities — penalizing non-wearers while confining the value they generate to their individual users. ​ Once everyone has earbuds that are always in, physical proximity will no longer confer a social expectation of shared experience. ​ subordinate our in-person sociality to the privatized infrastructure of networked communication ​ Now, the kind of space that suffices instead is a pleasant backdrop for solitary device usage, a relatively blank slate that doesn’t compete with the phone’s foreground — conditions that places like Sweetgreen and Equinox supply. ​ A dominant aural information platform could have a similar effect, fostering a world where we might as well leave our headphones on because there’s nothing around us worth hearing.

Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline My hunch is that digital writing evolves to be more responsive to measurable engagement, so there's an ever-present incentive to optimize what's written for utility (why internet content also gravitates toward self-helpyness)

“@vgr The assumed consensus becomes its own reality - a position others can respond to. It doesn't actually need to accurately describe what's happening, the narrative can just live its entire life in the medium where it was created”