Plus: Synthetic content, crashing for clicks and participatory vicarious nostalgia
#783: The end of spoken conversation
Plus: Pandora Radio, birthday mania and the “perimenopause industrial complex”
#780: Play the banana song!
Plus: The next generation of "tradwives," babytech creep, and scrolling more socially
#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
#764: It's been a year
Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs
#784: The absurdity of the apocalypse
Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
rip.so :: the digital graveyard
A memorial to the messengers, social networks, browsers and websites the internet forgot.
Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
#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
#762: One weird trick to make new friends
Plus: Dubai influencers, cultural time and the "most uplifting corner" of the internet
Topics — Real Life
ABOUT TOPICS: Since we began Real Life in the summer of 2016, we’ve run many essays across a range of topics, with a particular focus on the personal and cultural implications of living with technology. Our aim is not to track the news cycle so much as the longstanding social issues that inform and transcend it. We wanted to make it easier to read and explore Real Life beyond our chronological archive, so we’ve created these Topics to gather in one place the work we’ve published on some key themes. More Topics will be added to this page over time.
Recognizing Vibe Coded Games | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Saving Incremental Games | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Bad Game Design - Clicker Games