The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist.

Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement.

Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.

It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape—all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.

The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about

Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.

In December 2023, Rockstar Games dropped the trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI. In just 24 hours, it was viewed over 93 million times! In the same period, a deluge of fan content was made about the trailer and it generated 192 million views, more than double that of the official trailer. Youtube’s 2024 Fandom Survey reports that 66% of Gen Z Americans agree that “they often spend more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself.” (Youtube Culture and Trend Report 2024)

Much like the discussions and dissections populating YouTube fan channels, ancient scholarly traditions have long embraced similar practices. This dialogue between the original text and the interpretation is exemplified, for instance, in the Midrash, the collection of rabbinic exegetical writings that interprets the written and oral Torah. Midrashim “discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces. They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions”. (Gafney 2017)

The Midrash represents a form of religious para-content. It adds, amends, interprets, extends the text’s meaning in service of a faith-based community. Contemporary para-content plays a similar role in providing insights, context and fan theories surrounding cultural objects of love, oftentimes crafting new parallel narratives and helping fans insert themselves into the work.

highly expressive YouTubers perform an emotional exegesis, punctuating and highlighting the high points and key bars of the song, much like the radio DJ of yore. TikTok is now flooded with reactions to the now unforgettable “Mustard” exclamation in Kendrick’s “TV Off,” affirming to fans that this moment is a pivotal moment in the song, validating that it is culturally resonant.

Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. The concept of “horizon” originates from “reception theory” in literary theory which posits that the meaning of a text is not a fixed property inscribed by its creator but a dynamic creation that unfolds at the juncture of the text and its audience.

American economist Tyler Cowen often uses the refrain “Context is that which is scarce” to describe that while art, information and content may be abundant, understanding—the ability to situate that information within a meaningful context—remains a rare and valuable resource. Para-content thrives precisely because it claims to provide this scarce context.

As content proliferates, the challenge isn’t accessing cultural works but understanding how they fit into larger narratives and why they matter. There is simply too much content, context makes salient which deserves our attention.

Your friend’s favorite line in a song became a hook for your own appreciation of it. Seeing how people reacted to a song’s pivotal moment at a house party made clear the song’s high point. Hearing a professor rave about a shot in a movie made you lean in when you watched it. Often, you developed your own unique appreciation for something which you then shared with peers. These are all great examples of organic contextualization. Yet this scarcity of context also illuminates the dangers of para-content. When contextualizers wield disproportionate influence, there is a risk that their exegesis becomes prescriptive rather than suggestive.

The tyranny of the contextualizer online is their constant and immovable presence between the reader and the text, the listener and the music, the viewer and the film. We now reach for context before engaging with the content. When my first interaction with a song is through TikTok reactions, I no longer encounter the work as it is, on my own. It comes with context juxtaposed, pre-packaged. This removes the public’s ability to construct, even if for a moment, their own unique horizons.

Izzy recently decided to stop using X and her decision was based on the app's algorithm: "It feels like the algorithm wants you to see stuff you don't like so that you engage with it and it also shows your stuff to people who won't like it," she says, explaining that this was making her experience of using social media almost entirely negative.

"The follower is no longer a peer, they’re the audience, while the creator is more similar to a conventional, mainstream media broadcaster than to an independent creator."

Izzy agrees that this has been one of the biggest changes in her experience of using social media during the past decade: "I do think brands and influencers dominate my social media a lot more - it's constantly ads on my feed. I choose to follow my friends and often I don't see their stuff," she says.

It reflects the lack of space for genuine interaction and meaningful communities online right now, something that was once considered to be one of the main plus sides of social media.

"There aren't really niche internet jokes anymore because you have trend forecasters and people whose jobs it is to hop on these trends and make it about a brand," Izzy says adding: "The memes aren't as funny when you know they're going to be co-opted."

Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”. As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online.

during the first Trump administration, the president’s various henchmen would do something illegal or insane, a reporter would find out, cable news and newspapers would cover it nonstop, and usually that henchman would resign or, oftentimes, end up in jail

this is why the media is typically called the fourth branch of the government

This also explains why Texas is trying to pass the “Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education,” or “FURRIES” Act, based on a years-old anti-trans internet conspiracy theory. It’s why Trump’s team is targeting former President Joe Biden’s autopen-signed pardons after the idea surfaced in a viral X post shared by Libs Of TikTok. And it’s why US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is investigating random social media reports that military bases are still letting personnel list their preferred pronouns on different forms. Posts are all that matters now. And it’s likely no amount of articles can defeat them. Well, I guess we’ll find out.

When was the last time you truly felt consensus? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you — although, was it? — but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon?

Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”

unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).

In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.

video is special. It is cumbersome; it requires complex arrangements to serve it efficiently and reliably. But some of those barriers are becoming less foreboding, giving us more places to post and watch videos. It was not so long ago that YouTube was the only name in general-purpose video hosting. Yet you can now publish to most any social network. Instagram and TikTok host a different type of video but, for lots of people, they are just as relevant as YouTube. Alternatives like Rumble and X are appearing for the perpetually aggrieved set who are convinced their broadcasts would be censored elsewhere. Yet there is nothing else quite like YouTube.

Alexios Mantzarlis, the founding director of the International Fact-Checking Network, worked closely with Meta as the company set up its partnerships. He took exception on Tuesday to Zuckerberg's statement that "the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US." What Zuckerberg called bias is a reflection of the fact that the right shares more misinformation from the left, said Mantzarlis, now the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech. "He chose to ignore research that shows that politically asymmetric interventions against misinformation can result from politically asymmetric sharing of misinformation," Mantzarlis said. "He chose to ignore that a large chunk of the content fact-checkers are flagging is likely not political in nature, but low-quality spammy clickbait that his platforms have commodified. He chose to ignore research that shows Community Notes users are very much motivated by partisan motives and tend to over-target their political opponents."

while Community Notes has shown some promise on X, a former Twitter executive reminded me today that volunteer content moderation has its limits. Community Notes rarely appear on content outside the United States, and often take longer to appear on viral posts than traditional fact checks. There is also little to no empirical evidence that Community Notes are effective at harm reduction. Another wrinkle: many Community Notes currently cite as evidence fact-checks created by the fact-checking organizations that Meta just canceled all funding for.

What Zuckerberg is saying is that it will now be up to users to do what automated systems were doing before — a giant step backward for a person who prides himself on having among the world's most advanced AI systems.

"I can't tell you how much harm comes from non-illegal but harmful content," a longtime former trust and safety employee at the company told me. The classifiers that the company is now switching off meaningfully reduced the spread of hate movements on Meta's platforms, they said. "This is not the climate change debate, or pro-life vs. pro-choice. This is degrading, horrible content that leads to violence and that has the intent to harm other people."

I floated a theory of mine to Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel on this week’s episode of Panic World that content moderation, as we’ve understood, it effectively ended on January 6th, 2021. You can listen to the whole episode here, but the way I look at it is that the Insurrection was the first time Americans could truly see the radicalizing effects of algorithmic platforms like Facebook and YouTube that other parts of the world, particularly the Global South, had dealt with for years. A moment of political violence Silicon Valley could no longer ignore or obfuscate the way it had with similar incidents in countries like Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, or Brazil. And once faced with the cold, hard truth of what their platforms had been facilitating, companies like Google and Meta, at least internally, accepted that they would never be able to moderate them at scale. And so they just stopped.

After 2021, the major tech platforms we’ve relied on since the 2010s could no longer pretend that they would ever be able to properly manage the amount of users, the amount of content, the amount of influence they “need” to exist at the size they “need” to exist at to make the amount of money they “need” to exist.

Under Zuckerberg’s new “censorship”-free plan, Meta’s social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment. Which will make a fertile ground for terrorism and extremism. Scams and spam will clog comments and direct messages. And illicit content, like non-consensual sexual material, will proliferate in private corners of networks like group messages and private Groups. Algorithms will mindlessly spread this slop, boosted by the loudest, dumbest, most reactionary users on the platform, helping it evolve and metastasize into darker, stickier social movements. And the network will effectively break down. But Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice. AI profiles will like their posts, comment on them, and even make content for them. A feedback loop of nonsense and violence. Our worst, unmoderated impulses, shared by algorithm and reaffirmed by AI. Where nothing has to be true and everything is popular.

A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).

Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content.

No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.

Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans.

we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?

Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective.

Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.

in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.

What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.

the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.

what is the future of branding in the age of slop? The provocation for this particular stream of thought was a Tiktok video by brand strategist Eugene about branding in the era of brainrot. This video declares that the age of brands as stories has ended. There are no more ninety second spots that tell a tale, he argues, now there’s only vibe, something more like sentiment or affect – what's picked up in a crowded feed, two or three seconds between footage of catastrophic climate change and a monkey who’s learned to do makeup tutorials. He gives the example of a Twitch stream: it may be too hectic to read the individual posts, but you can monitor the sentiment. You can catch the vibe.

New things – brands, products, trends – are increasingly defined in relational terms to such an extent that they become devoid of any unique story, character, or essence.

Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.

When the brand is a person, an entity with a personality. The idea is that you can hone this personality in order to define your organization better and make more money out in the world. “All organizations have an identity whether they control it or not. A corporate identity programme harnesses and manages this identity in the corporate interest,” Wally Olins wrote.

Brand as story is the other conventional frame that’s been very popular, as mentioned in the Tiktok that kicked this off. This one is all about using things like narrative structure and the hero’s journey to structure the way a brand shows up and communicates, and also using stories as branding opportunities. Brand “lore” is an updated subset of brand as story.

These stories tend to coalesce around a charismatic founder (Tesla and Elon), a social cause (Patagonia and the environment), even a countercultural position (SST records and punk rock). The depth of the lore is directly correlated to brand value. Consumers can become pay-to-play characters of the story.

Brand as pattern is about creating something that shows up iteratively in the world, rather than repeating messages rotely. This has classic examples, like Absolut ads, and more mimetic ones, where users take on the pattern and create the brand themselves

Memes are an advanced form of this practice – everything from Pepe to Brat makes use of this repetition to create flexible and iterative meaning.  Brands that rely heavily on UGC are often related to brand-as-pattern.

Then there’s brand as world, the less eggheaded, more contemporary version of brand as story. Worldbuilding as a brand activity feels intuitively more digital and immersive, less linear than straight narrative.  Many luxury brands employ this practice to help us imagine a world of accessible wealth where people are more beautiful, more free, more actualized. Disney offers an accessible, albeit more fanciful version of this practice – creating an actual destination with its own culture and characters. In either case, the brand is a portal that gives you partial access to an alternative reality.

Brand as coherence is another more philosophical way of looking at brands, one that Nemesis-friend Michael Rock of 2x4 talks about a lot. In this world the brand is the je ne sais quois or x factor that makes everything fit together. It’s the systematic principle itself.  This coherence can be emotional… “When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, have the knack for using design to produce an emotional coherence that spans from content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you it's working.” (Michael Rock, Hooked on a Feeling) Or technical… “I know that [branding] is an incredibly distasteful term in cultural and academic organizations, but like it or not branding has become one of the major organizing principles of the world as we know it right now. States have brands, corporations have brands, people have brands, institutions have brands — everyone’s talking about that, and when they talk about brand, they may all be talking about different things, but I think it’s a way of thinking about this idea of assembly…I would say maybe that branding is this act of assemblage that creates seemingly coherent entities.” (Michael Rock, Berkeley design lecture)

there’s the brand as vibes. These are not just brands that have us asking what the there-there is. They’re also brands like Marc Jacobs’ Heaven, which has brought together disparate objects that fit a sort of dreamy Gen Z moodboard to great effect, creating new life for what was quickly becoming a legacy brand. Then there’s A24, perhaps one of the greatest vibe brands of them all.

vibes are something we feel, and have something to do with a sense of recognition or belonging.

In a sense, vibes are procedurally generated, created by following resonant patterns and associations rather than by directly expressing new ideas or unique sentiments. The value assigned to brands built on vibes is similarly transitive – if you like X you will probably like Y.  In the best cases, a brand can create and embody its own ineffable vibe that imbues all of its products and endeavors with a sense of magical value. Seeing the new A24 film is more about experiencing a new iteration of the brand than it is about the movie’s actual plot, cast, or story. Fans want to see a particular sensibility applied to the world around it.

When a brand is a person, you have an emotional connection with them (they also have rights: see Citizens United). When it's a story, it entertains you and holds your attention. When a brand is a world, there's immersion and escape. When it's a pattern, you can replicate it and play with it.

With all this in mind, the key to successful brands after vibes may be in creating... something dense and irrefutable: a brand that flaunts itself as proof of work, that makes clear the amount of real information and human effort that went into creating it, that can’t become blurry. The brand is labor itself, a direct expression of the work that produces it. something exceptionally simple – logo only, that is, just one coordination point…or better yet, a ticker, a single letter, a point of pure speculative energy. Something so singular it can’t be spun off into iterations, but due to its singularity, can freely attach to and feed itself by anything and everything. The brand is an atom, a particle, a single-cell organism. something like dazzle, the makeup that helps a face escape facial recognition software: something so incoherent it can't be read by the model or algorithm, something that cannot be expressed as or compressed into a vibe.  In  this case, the brand is noise, something rule breaking that jams an orderly system of meaning / value.

increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.

Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.

Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.

Through this strategy, Dotdash Meredith allegedly identifies small sites that have cemented themselves in Google results for a specific (and valuable) term or in a specific topic, with the goal of pushing them down the rankings by publishing vast amounts of content of their own.

“IAC’s vision for Dotdash Meredith — to be a flywheel for generating advertising and commerce revenue — is finally starting to pan out.  […] More than 80% of Dotdash Meredith’s traffic and digital revenue come from its core sites, such as Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and Southern Living, that deliver a form of what one might think of as commerce-related service journalism.” — Allison Schiff, managing editor of AdExchanger

To give the pet insurance affiliate section of Forbes the best chance to succeed, the Forbes Advisor team pumped out A LOT of content about pets and built A LOT of links around the topic with statistics round-ups designed to obfuscate the original sources in order to increase the chances of people linking to Forbes.com when using the stats

All this hard work paid off in the form of an estimated 1.1 million visitors each month to the pet insurance section of Forbes Advisor

This happened at the expense of every site that has produced content about dogs, cats, and other pets for many years before Forbes.com decided to cash in on pet insurance affiliate money.  They successfully replicated this model again and again and again across the huge variety of topics that Forbes covers today.

Step one: buy the site. Step two: fire staff. Step three: revamp the content strategy to drive new monetizable traffic from Google

“As a journalist, all of this depresses me,” wrote Brian Merchant, the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times. He continued, “If journalists are outraged at the rise of AI and its use in editorial operations and newsrooms, they should be outraged not because it’s a sign that they’re about to be replaced but because management has such little regard for the work being done by journalists that it’s willing to prioritize the automatic production of slop.”

Here’s a recap so far: Digital media conglomerates are developing SEO content strategies designed to out-publish high-ranking specialist independent publishers. Legacy media brands are building in-house SEO content teams that tie content creation to affiliate marketing revenue in topics that have nothing to do with their original areas of expertise. Newly created digital media companies are buying once successful and influential blogs with the goal of driving traffic to casino sites. Private equity firms are partnering with companies like AdVon to publish large amounts of AI-generated content edited by SEO-focused people across their portfolio of media brands. And here’s the worst part: Google’s algorithm encourages all of them to rinse and repeat the same strategies by allowing their websites to rank in top positions for SEO-fueled articles about any topic imaginable. Even in cases when the articles have been written by AI and published under fake authors.

I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the internet encourages you to look outward. A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message.

Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted.

Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, their expression can be as varied as every individual human.

My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.

the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better?

we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?

A starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but I wasn’t in “Picks of the Week.” A mention from Entertainment Weekly, but last on a click-through list.

There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers.

What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

In a nightmarish dispatch in Esquire on how hard it is for authors to find readers, Kate Dwyer argues that all authors must function like influencers now, which means a fire sale on your “private” life. As internet theorist Kyle Chayka puts it to Dwyer: “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.”

what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience.

We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.

When we scroll, what are we looking for?

While other fast fashion brands wait for high-end houses to produce designs they can replicate cheaply, Shein has completely eclipsed the runway, using AI to trawl social media for cues on what to produce next. Shein’s site operates like a casino game, using “dark patterns”—a countdown clock puts a timer on an offer, pop-ups say there’s only one item left in stock, and the scroll of outfits never ends—so you buy now, ask if you want it later. Shein’s model is dystopic: countless reports detail how it puts its workers in obscene poverty in order to sell a reprieve to consumers who are also moneyless—a saturated plush world lasting as long as the seams in one of their dresses. Yet the day to day of Shein’s target shopper is so bleak, we strain our moral character to cosplay a life of plenty.

(Unsplash) Technology The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life? BY THEA LIM Updated 17:52, Sep. 20, 2024 | Published 6:30, Sep. 17, 2024 W HEN I WAS TWELVE, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating. Y EARS AGO, I worked in the backroom of a Tower Records. Every few hours, my face-pierced, gunk-haired co-workers would line up by my workstation, waiting to clock in or out. When we typed in our staff number at 8:59 p.m., we were off time, returned to ourselves, free like smoke. There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.” Wait—Is ChatGPT Even Legal? AI Is a False God How Israel Is Using AI as a Weapon of War Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly, precisely by using our internal meter to determine the criteria for success or failure. Find the best route home—not the one that optimizes cost per minute but the one that offers time enough to hear an album from start to finish. Plant a window garden, and if the plants are half dead, try again. My brother-in-law found a toy loom in his neighbour’s garbage, and nightly he weaves tiny technicolour rugs. We do these activities for the sake of doing them, and their value can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. It would be nonsensical to treat them as comparable and rank them from one to five. We can assess them only by privately and carefully attending to what they contain and, on our own, concluding their merit. And so artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram. First, the value of an artwork is internal—how well does it fulfill the vision that inspired it? Second, a piece of art is its own end. Third, a piece of art is, by definition, rare, one of a kind, nonfungible. Yet the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better? I GREW UP a Catholic, a faithful, an anachronism to my friends. I carried my faith until my twenties, when it finally broke. Once I couldn’t gain comfort from religion anymore, I got it from writing. Sitting and building stories, side by side with millions of other storytellers who have endeavoured since the dawn of existence to forge meaning even as reality proves endlessly senseless, is the nearest thing to what it felt like back when I was a believer. I spent my thirties writing a novel and paying the bills as low-paid part-time faculty at three different colleges. I could’ve studied law or learned to code. Instead, I manufactured sentences. Looking back, it baffles me that I had the wherewithal to commit to a project with no guaranteed financial value, as if I was under an enchantment. Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it. As the publication date advanced, I was awash with extrinsic measures. Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. U

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.