The internet once encouraged us to build entire identities around our weirdest, deepest fascinations. Then metrics and distribution flattened those obsessions into fungible content.
How social media is fueling an intense form of romantic obsession
The digital world is primed to fuel episodes of profound infatuation known as limerence.
Field Notes: The Architecture of Rationalization - Aaron Ross Powell
Marginalia on the internet turning bad, platform extraction, and existential restlessness.
Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell
Communities are different online and off, and pluralism that thrives in the real world can turn toxic in the digital world.
How Social Media Tricks our Brains — and Destroys our Politics - Aaron Ross Powell's Blog
Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity
U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement”—serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users watching videos or scrolling through their feeds—for radicalizing users or strengthening their partisanship. Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff15 even argues that “surveillance capitalism” uses optimized algorithmic feedback for “automated behavioral modification” at scale, writing the “music” that users then “dance” to.
Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity
U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement”—serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users watching videos or scrolling through their feeds—for radicalizing users or strengthening their partisanship. Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff15 even argues that “surveillance capitalism” uses optimized algorithmic feedback for “automated behavioral modification” at scale, writing the “music” that users then “dance” to.
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
This crowd-curated digital movement is one of the most pertinent and explicit reactions to our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism.
Elena Rossini 🌈 (@_elena@mastodon.social)
SCOOP: #WSocial is doctoring metrics on its homepage, inflating the number of comments on posts by prominent people on its network. I suppose a more accurate tagline for them should be "Trust your feed?" My article about it: "W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data" 🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/w-social-fictional-metrics-and-the-beauty-of-open-data/ #blog #BigTech #EUBigTech #TEP #TrustedEuropeanPlatforms #TrustYourFeed
We Needn't Have a One True Platform - Aaron Ross Powell
On Bluesky, user numbers, and the silliness of endless growth.
The Everything Account - augment
I’ve been thinking a lot about our accounts lately. We all have an ever-growing pile of digital identities scattered across the web, many forgotten after a b…
W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data
W Social's tagline is "Trust Your Feed" but the company's landing page displays inflated engagement metrics - a misrepresentation that contradicts its own promise.
Sense of abundance
Expansive, curious, open, unfearful, unhurried. The opposite of Scarcity mindset .NoteLink.Active { background-color: rgba(10, 132, 255, 0.15); } .
When it comes to our digital lives, too many people care about bigness and an imagined potential to achieve their own bigness, and too few care about connections and the potential to achieve meaningful connections.
Your Internet Doesn't Need to Be Big
www.aaronrosspowell.comThe internet has evolved to foster a fatal expectation: that the things we depend on every day are free. They aren't, but we're allowed to pretend they are with the help of ad-driven business models. The real cost is substantial, and can be measured in time, money, relationships, health, and more.
Fund Your Internet
fundyourinternet.orgThe Internet, and how we've developed with it
Not "doomscrolling has killed our lives". But how, looking back, our enjoyment of the internet has shaped our experience of life.
We can have a different web
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
VC&G | » My memories of what life was like before the Internet
Habbo Hotel Memories - Sneer Campaign
blogs.loc.gov
My old SoundCloud page is a time capsule
