Fiction vs Reality: My Texts with Michael Shellenberger

Brett Scott (@brettscott)

Marshall McLuhan is famous for his observation that the form of a communication technology can shape our mind and society The age of the printed book, for example, carried with it a particular way of being. Regardless of the differing content of different books, all books required a particular mindset in which a thread is followed from the beginning to the end through an arc I feel the age of social media is like the age of a ripped up book, as if we were surrounded by torn shards and shreds of paper floating like confetti around us. We grab for them, hoping for some tiny insight, but not having any way of knowing where it fits in the overarching narrative This note is one such shard. You can toss it away now

Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them

Today, the new book by NY Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, comes out. If you’re at all interested in what went down, I can’t recommend it …

Evaluating Delusional Startups

Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

Sort By Controversial

[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…

I’m a Professional Writer Who Uses a Very Controversial Tool. It’s Not As Scary As I Thought.

I was skeptical about ChatGPT and Claude at first. Then I started to come around—and I’m glad I did.

The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey

An in-depth conversation on 10 years of tweeting, the importance of live media, and “the puddle.”

Digital Echoes and Unquiet Minds - Christopher Butler

There's a psychological burden of digital life even heavier than distraction.

» Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period The Digital Antiquarian

After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting.

Social media.

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

Andrew Sullivan: My Distraction Sickness — and Yours

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.

AI Fiction in the Wild

This website hosts anonymized ChatGPT-user conversations where users requested some form of fiction generation—including stories, novels, scripts, roleplay, hypothetical scenarios, erotic imaginings, and more. The data is drawn from WildChat and was collected voluntarily and with users’ consent between 2023 and 2024. The models were powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

AI Fiction in the Wild

This website hosts anonymized ChatGPT-user conversations where users requested some form of fiction generation—including stories, novels, scripts, roleplay, hypothetical scenarios, erotic imaginings, and more. The data is drawn from WildChat and was collected voluntarily and with users’ consent between 2023 and 2024. The models were powered by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.