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The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.
“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.
The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.
the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.
For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)
American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”
in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”
When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.
On the importance of using moral rightness as a north star for pragmatic designs
“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”
·nymag.com·
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.
The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.
The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.
Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.
It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.
The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.
Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.
If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.
Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.
revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.
·nytimes.com·
You Should Seriously Read ‘Stoner’ Right Now (Published 2014)
Brat - Sherry Ning
Brat - Sherry Ning
AI: "Brat" is presented as a complex female persona that embraces both vulnerability and power, using charm, mischief, and art to navigate life's challenges while maintaining a balance between sincerity and playfulness.
Brat is asking for forgiveness instead of permission, because red lip gloss and watery eyes will get a “ok, go ahead—but just this time” out of any grumpy, middle-aged parking enforcement officer.
We’re captivated by femme fatales and Bond girls. We make muses out of women like Marilyn Monroe—her breathy “Happy birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden can make us feel embarrassed, mesmerized, or even disgusted, but one thing it can’t make us feel is angry: How can you get mad at an attractive woman for showing off what she has (without admitting your own envy or insecurity)?
Brat is wearing dark sunglasses to watch men play beach volleyball.
Brat is exchanging looks with a girl friend whenever a shirtless man walks by, synchronously swallowing a smirk that could’ve wiggled out of control, then going back to the conversation.
I care about how something is written as much as I care about the plot. That’s why commercial nonfictions are like Kleenex—to be used and discarded, if used at all.
I don’t want information; I want enchantment.
Jung said that the study of the soul begins and ends with Mercury, the pagan god of merchants, profits, and thieves. He’s the Tinder Swindler. He’s Anna Delvey. He’s a trickster and a master storyteller. He’s in the Forbes-30-under-30-to-prison pipeline. The Ancients designated a deity to mischief because it is a vice to try too hard to be sincere. You’re either sincere or you’re not; one does not try to be sincere. For example, if I say, “I’m humble,” am I actually humble? What mature person has to say, “I’m mature”?
Mercury represents a kind of detachment. I’m not saying that it’s good to lie or cheat; I’m saying that trying too hard isn’t the best way to get what you want. There’s something blatantly wrong with the pickup artist, yet, there’s something not quite right about someone who doesn’t have any game. You may be a good person, but what if you’re just not fun? If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?
Brat is a kind of transparency. It challenges hypocrisy and shakes up complacency. Brat is a splash of brandy in the cake—a little genuine fun in polite society.
Paradoxically, you need a dose of Mercury to keep things honest. It’s why the goofiest faceless accounts on Twitter are the most genuine people in real life, or why you and your close friend use the most unserious memes to describe the darkest times of your lives.
·sherryning.com·
Brat - Sherry Ning
Diary of a Lover Girl, Pt. 2
Diary of a Lover Girl, Pt. 2
Parallels between romantic love, spiritual experiences, and artistic expression
It’s Kali Uchis describing falling in love like melting like ice cream. It’s St. Teresa’s ecstasy. It’s why 18th-century German poet Ludwig Uhland said that waking up buried in his lover’s arms is like dying from love’s bliss because he “saw Heaven in her eyes.” Heaven is commonly used to describe this feeling because falling in love is like dying: Both death and falling in love are about losing a grip on reality, leaving this world and entering the ethereal. Like death, we describe a soul in love as being escorted away by angels to a better place. It’s why Cupid has wings—so he can take us from over here to over there.
Yet, when you try to articulate the deepest of your desires, you can’t find a name for it. It’s like that marvellous ache you feel when you see the Milky Way spilled across the sky—it draws you in and makes you long for more of it. This longing has the shape of the infinite. I know a love song is good when I don’t know if they’re singing about a lover or God.
Love, in its purest form, feels like mysticism, like being absorbed into something that wants you to be part of it as much as you want to join it. Some might call it a longing for happiness, but it is so much deeper. Here’s what I mean by mysticism: it’s something that grows your wonder instead of trying to solve it. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
It’s like watching fire—something that constantly moves without going anywhere. It’s “alive” in its own way. Like how God speaks through a bush that burns but is not consumed, something ineffable about music—the way it decorates time like art decorates space—speaks to us.
·sherryning.com·
Diary of a Lover Girl, Pt. 2
New Apple Stuff and the Regular People
New Apple Stuff and the Regular People
"Will it be different?" is the key question the regular people ask. They don't want there to be extra steps or new procedures. They sure as hell don't want the icons to look different or, God forbid, be moved to a new place.
These bright and capable people who will one day help you through knee replacement surgery all bought a Mac when they were college frehmen and then they never updated it. Almost all of them had the default programs still in the dock. They are regular users. You with all your fancy calendars, note taking apps and your customized terminal are an outlier. Never forget.
The majority of iPhone users and Mac owners have no idea what's coming though. They are going to wake up on Monday to an unwelcome notification that there is an update available. Many of them will ask their techie friends (like you) if there is a way to make the update notification go away. They will want to know if they have to install it.
·louplummer.lol·
New Apple Stuff and the Regular People
Dating someone with bad taste
Dating someone with bad taste
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.
·app.myshelfy.xyz·
Dating someone with bad taste
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

AI Summary: > This article challenges the common advice to "surround yourself with smarter people," arguing that it's logically flawed and potentially harmful. Instead, the author proposes seeking out "differently free" individuals who can provide non-sequiturs and unexpected perspectives, keeping one engaged in an "infinite game" of continuous learning and growth.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.
Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.
This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.
it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.
My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.
·archive.is·
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy
Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.
A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?
Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.
The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.
The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.
you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.
Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.
Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.
Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.
Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.
·archive.is·
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure. It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly. You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.
·sherryning.com·
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
The fact that she’s having an affair with an intern from her own company, risking everything that she’s built, is part of the turn-on. The spark plug of Kidman’s performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together. She’s caught up in an erotic fever, but it’s one that’s laced with agony.
·variety.com·
‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Mr. Musk had largely come to peace with a price of $100 a year for Blue. But during one meeting to discuss pricing, his top assistant, Jehn Balajadia, felt compelled to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who can’t even buy gas right now,” she said, according to two people in attendance. It was hard to see how any of those people would pony up $100 on the spot for a social media status symbol. Mr. Musk paused to think. “You know, like, what do people pay for Starbucks?” he asked. “Like $8?” Before anyone could raise objections, he whipped out his phone to set his word in stone. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he tweeted on Nov. 1. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
·nytimes.com·
How Elon Musk Got Tangled Up in Blue
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
·archive.ph·
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors

AI summary: An experienced video editor is experiencing burnout and seeking advice from others who have transitioned out of or reduced their work in the editing field, exploring alternative career paths or ways to balance editing with other pursuits.

  1. Industry challenges:

    • The post suggests that career progression and financial growth in editing may be stagnating
    • There's an indication that the editing field might not be as rewarding or sustainable as it once was
  2. Digital fatigue:

    • The mention of "computer burnout" points to a growing issue of digital exhaustion in tech-heavy professions
    • This reflects a broader trend of professionals seeking balance in the digital age
  3. Shift in career values:

    • There's a noticeable desire for tangible, physical work, suggesting a potential pushback against purely digital careers
    • This could indicate a broader trend of reevaluating career satisfaction beyond traditional metrics of success
  4. Gig economy pressures:

    • The consideration of part-time work combined with freelancing hints at the challenges of stability in the gig economy
    • It suggests that full-time roles in editing might be less available or less appealing
  5. Community support importance:

    • Reaching out to peers for advice highlights the value of professional communities in navigating career challenges
    • This reflects a broader trend of using online platforms for career guidance and support
  6. Work-life balance concerns:

    • The post indicates a growing prioritization of lifestyle and well-being over traditional career paths
    • This aligns with wider discussions about work-life balance, especially post-pandemic
  7. Adaptability and multi-skilling:

    • Considering diverse career options suggests a need for adaptability in the current job market
    • It points to a trend of professionals looking to diversify their skills and income streams
·reddit.com·
Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
through technological intervention in human biology, not by improving the collective conditions of human life. If he was serious about wanting to extend people’s lifespans by 10 years, he wouldn’t be looking at sci-fi fantasies, but at the policies that can deliver those benefits and how to get the US political system to move them forward
It’s not just that the United States is very economically unequal, but one of the consequences of that is that the rich live, on average, 10 to 15 years longer than the poor.
No tech company is going to roll out some new digital service or AI-powered platform that is going to make any significant dent in the factors that are causing such a disparity in the number of years poor and rich Americans — or Americans and citizens of other countries — actually live.
billionaires in Silicon Valley, many of whom want us to believe they’re on our side, have no real interest in the policies and political action that would be necessary to close that gap. Instead, they want to hoard as much wealth as possible so they can pretend they’re building the sci-fi visions they spent their youths reading about.
We can see many examples through history where the rollout of new technologies has improved our quality of life and increased our lifespans. But when tech billionaires use that term, they actually means letting VC-funded tech companies deploy whatever they want on an unsuspecting public with little regulation and no threat of accountability when things go wrong.
·disconnect.blog·
Sam Altman doesn’t care about you
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content

AI Summary: A new trend is emerging among content creators on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where they are moving away from heavily edited videos to more raw, unedited content. This shift is driven by audience fatigue with overstimulating, retention-edited videos and a desire for more authentic, relatable content. Creators like Dan Hentschel and Sam Sulek have gained large followings by posting unedited videos, finding that this approach saves time, money, and resonates better with viewers. The trend is seen as a reaction to the oversaturation of highly produced content, with even top creators like MrBeast acknowledging the benefits of a more stripped-down approach. Industry experts and creators alike report that unedited content often outperforms edited videos in terms of views and engagement, as it creates a sense of intimacy and authenticity that audiences crave in the current social media landscape.

See also [[companionship content]]

WHEN DAN HENTSCHEL, a 28-year-old comedic YouTuber, goes to make a video, he props his phone up on the dashboard of his car, talks for up to 40 minutes uninterrupted, and posts it.
social media users are getting fatigued by the overstimulating, brain-rot style of videos, where graphics and sounds appear every 1.5 seconds. No-edit creators, he says, are building deeper relationships with their followers.
“The no-edit format feels more intimate. It’s as if you’re hanging out with your friend at the gym, going for a car ride, or just hanging out at home. These no-edit creators, in particular, replicate face-to-face communication, which creates a sense of intimacy. They speak directly into the camera as if they’re looking at you directly.”
Adam Meskouri, who negotiates content and licensing partnerships with creators and runs the Instagram page @baai, which posts viral content, says that he’s seen no-edit content take off in the past couple of months. “The videos that perform the best are videos that don’t have text overlays, or cuts, or special effects,” he says. “They’re usually just continuous clips.”
·rollingstone.com·
Why Creators Have Stopped Editing Their Content