#764: It's been a year

#762: One weird trick to make new friends

Plus: Dubai influencers, cultural time and the "most uplifting corner" of the internet

#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines

Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"

#769: Nothing you see online is true

Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups

Internet Phone Book – Back in stock!

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators. Published since 2025.

#782: I saw this and I thought of you

Plus: Group chats, unsent love letters and optimization

#766: An AI company you can wear without socks

Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America

Online travel recommendations are broken

(And where you can still find them).

Jacky's homepage on the DARPA-created, commerically-available Web. - Jacky Alciné

In your Web browser, of course. And not all of me; that'd be weird! You're using Firefox, right? You can catch up by email with 112 other folks, on a social network in the Meta, commonly known as Facebook, Threads, Blacksky in the Atmosphere or X, commonly known as Twitter as I continue to share and work on all things towards history, open digital technology, culture — and everything in between. I write essays of varying length; most recently I wrote "On the Notion of Shutting the Fuck up". I keep notes weekly and (near) daily links. Here's what I use on the regular.

The Nightmare of Eternal Spring: Why Social Media Can't Survive on "Niceness" Alone - Nightflight

Hike, Bike, Drive Offline – Navigate with Privacy

Discover more of your journey - Powered by the community

No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior

Electronic media present us with a collage of experiences from everyplace. We eat dinner at home while watching starving children thousands of miles away reach out to us for food. From our easy chairs, we stare at blindfolded hostages, and coolly

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

ben guo 🏇 on Twitter / X

i gave this talk last night at @southpkcommons about why the personal computing revolution never happened, and what we can do about it. pumped about the feedback afterwards: "it's giving early tumblr", "you guys are like punk apple", "i want more early internet mixtape vibes" pic.twitter.com/0Lwz3CaWBX— ben guo 🏇 (@0thernet) November 6, 2025