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What You Notice Changes What You Choose
The gap between seeing your phone and picking it up is less than a second. The gap between feeling bored and reaching for a distraction is even shorter.…
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The Algorithm That Teaches Outrage
You were not always this angry. You used to be able to disagree with someone without feeling your pulse quicken, without the immediate surge of contempt that now…
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The Comparison You Can’t Stop Making
You are not doing it on purpose. That’s the first thing to understand. You open Instagram at 8am and within forty seconds you have noted, without deciding to…
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The Consent You Never Gave
You were about nine years old when the data collection started in earnest. You did not know. Your parents probably did not think about it in a way…
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The Memory You Outsourced
The photos from your trip to Portland exist in three places: your phone’s camera roll, the cloud backup, and a shared album you made with your travel partner.…
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The Stranger Who Studied You First
Somewhere, at some point, a person opened your Instagram profile. Not to follow you. Not because they knew you. They were working. They needed money.
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Ambient Intimacy and the People You Almost Know
There is a person whose lunch you have seen every day for three years. You know they have a dog named Pepper, that they are trying to run…
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The Version of You That Lives in Someone Else’s Screenshots
There is a version of you that you will never see. It lives in people’s phones. In screenshot folders and saved conversations and the forward chain of a…
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The Boredom We Engineered Away
There is a particular quality to waiting for a bus in 2014. You stand there with nothing in your pocket that can solve the waiting. The bus is…
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The Wisdom the Algorithm Cannot Teach
You can learn almost anything online. How to code, how to cook, how to fix a leaking faucet. The information is there, free and searchable. Within hours, sometimes…