I’m in the midst of a media cleanse. This started before the election when I canceled my Washington Post subscription. Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants with the Washington Post, and he’s 100% correct that I don’t trust large media organizations.

After the election, I removed all news sources from Feedly except the Atlantic because I find their writing informative and compelling.

A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here. With most of my free time, I’m leveling a dragon Holy Priest in World of Warcraft. #ama

I’ve slowly retreated from all social media with the exception of LinkedIn since around the time of the first Trump presidency.

Today, my only social presence is on LinkedIn, and even there, I’m not nearly as active as I used to be.

I think it’s mainly because when I would share an article like this one with my thoughts, I’d get next to no replies to it. There’s very little incentive for me to want to share things if I’m all but guaranteed no one will see it.

On here, though? I’ll at least get an occasional message from someone who liked an article I shared. In fact, it’s way more meaningful when I do, because it always leads to a deeper conversation.

Reading blog entries and books and long-form essays like those shared on The Atlantic are like eating salad compared to the fast food that people keep trying to cram down our throats in the form of incendiary attacks on people who are different from us.

I left that conversation admiring his conviction, as well as feeling overwhelming self-consciousness that I was—I dunno, too acquiescent? Hearing him speak so confidently—his assuredness ignited envy within me. Embers that smolder to this day. The older I get, the less confident I feel about anything. The less I want to fight. The less I want to debate. I used to burn so hot. I could argue online for hours. Now, the thought of it makes my skin crawl. It's not that I don't feel strongly, but I don't feel so strongly that I want to spend my days mired in anxiety and rage trying to make people see reason.

But Sam, the older he got, the more he seemed to dig in. Why was he so willing to fight? Why wasn't I?

A heart wrenching story about two cousins who slowly drift apart due to our ever-increasing disability to have civilized, polite disagreements with one another.

Getting older brings a certain sadness with realizing the things you once thought were true and unimpeachable were actually broken all along.

And while that may be a truism, it’s how we accept and appreciate the things we have while we have them which makes life beautiful and bearable.

My brother-in-law is unabashedly into marching band competitions.

Last night, while playing cards at my house, he had the DCI World Championships playing on his phone in the background.

Competitive marching is his "thing".

He and my sister attend various competitions throughout the summer, and their goal is to make it to the finals in Indianapolis one year to witness the presentation of the Founders Trophy in person.

As a young kid, I used to have a ton of "things."

In the early 90s, it was the Minnesota Twins. In the late 90s, it was the Minnesota Vikings. Peppered throughout that decade, it included Animorphs, Power Rangers, Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Pokémon, and music.

As a high schooler, I became all too aware of people who had a "thing". When all your friends tease people because of their love for Texas Hold 'Em or pro wrestling or The Sims, you start to get self conscious.

What is my "thing" that everyone is teasing me about behind my back?

I made a choice somewhere around that time to never allow myself to be pinned down as someone who has a "thing".

In my late 30s, I occasionally find myself in this exasperating situation where I don't know what to do with my idle time.

I've been getting into small electronics repair, teaching myself soldering and fixing my old iPod. I've been playing guitar more often.

But my problem is that I don't have much idle time, because I have two small kids and a wife who I really, really enjoy being around.

And collectively, we don't have a "thing".

Growing up, our family's "thing" was attending each other's activities.

I remember being bribed by my parents with Pokémon cards so I didn't throw an absolute fit when my sister competed with her dance team at Williams Arena.

I remember getting together with the boys in the far corner of the stadium, playing 500 while my brother played a real game of football on the turf.

Every band concert, every theatre production, every softball game... that's what we did as a family.

But I don't recall having a "thing" that wasn't something we participated in.

We weren't huddled around a TV watching sports. We didn't go see shows together.

We mostly just supported each other.

That was our "thing."

The Olympics provided a great testing ground for various "things" we might adopt.

Every night for the past couple weeks, I've forced the kids to watch nearly every single sport with me.

The Olympics is a hot bed of weird, esoteric "things" that somehow get even more esoteric as the years wane on.

That's not a read, by the way: I am 100% here for competitive surfing, break dancing, underwater acrobatics, and dressage.

I can't say that we found a "thing" outright from watching the Olympics with the kids, but I learned that my son enjoys archery and my daughter enjoys hand-to-hand combat sports and track. Both of them enjoy gymnastics and soccer.

I want to find a "thing" that we, as a family, can all rally behind.

I used to assume that "things" become "things" organically, without much intentionality behind it.

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that "things" only become "things" when someone decides to expose themselves to a new experience.

I'm unsure whether our "thing" will take the form of a sports team, or something in nature, or a TV show, or a book series, or something completely unexpected.

It could be something that's dorky like competitive marching¹ or more mainstream like professional football, it doesn't really matter to me.

All I know is that I need to start actively placing my family into situations where we can experience a "thing" together.

An internet friend sent this to me when it happened, saying, “this seems like something you’d watch.”

This was so delightful. I love these nerdy, competitive communities who all rally around joy.

This joy was noticeable when Fractal was live streaming his reaction to when Scuti got the crash. He didn’t look mad or disappointed. He looked proud, excited, and happy for his competitor.

Supremely feel good nerdy content right here.

In early 2023, an 18-year-old college student decided to make her first-ever shoegaze song. Her friend sent her a “beat,” a grungy shoegaze instrumental crafted by the producer grayskies, and she spent two hours recording herself singing over it into her phone, using her everyday Apple earbuds as a microphone. No guitars were strummed, and no reverb pedals were stepped on. The next day, she titled the song “Your Face” and uploaded a snippet of it on TikTok, posting under the artist name Wisp. The video gained 100k views overnight, so she made another. That one got 600k views. She made another. That one quickly racked up 1 million views. Soon after, “Your Face” was being streamed millions of times on Spotify, and before Wisp even released a second song, she had signed a deal with Interscope Records.

Fast-forward eight months later and “Your Face” has been streamed nearly 30 million times on Spotify, almost twice as much as My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless closer “Soon.” The official sound snippet has been used in 126k TikTok videos, almost as many as Mitski’s runaway TikTok goliath “Washing Machine Heart” (174k videos). In the real world, Wisp sold-out her first-ever show in less than a half hour, and then her second just as quickly.

Consider this article a bit of a “shot, chaser” to my previous post.

I’ve been really into shoegaze lately. This article does a fantastic job of highlighting how zoomers used TikTok to give the genre a renaissance.

It's a good reminder that social media isn’t innately awful. It warms my heart to see the children using these incredible technologies to unite under the banner of ethereal and somewhat depressing tunes.

Go check out Duster's album Stratosphere.

If you’re here in the Twin Cities and are not aware of the history of I-94, this video is a great launching point to learn about it as well as to learn what groups like Our Streets are doing to imagine a better use of this space.

By the way, I was one of the participants of CityNerd’s event here in Minneapolis a month ago, and if you look closely in this video, you can see me in the front row of the session. I signed up too late to join in the bike ride though, which really bummed me out.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

If you’ve spent much time in the same tech bubbles as me this past year, you’ve probably come across this article already.

At a bare minimum, I’m sure you’ve seen the phrase “enshittification.”

Once you understand the concept, you do start to see the pattern unfold around you constantly. ¹

While there are countless examples of this natural platform decay within our virtual world, what about the physical world?

Is enshittification simply human nature, an inescapable fate for any collaborative endeavor above a certain size?

And if enshittification is not inevitable, what are the forces that lead to it, and how can we combat them when building our own communities?

The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections.

This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes.

In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.

I saw Cal reference this article in his most recent post, and I’m glad he mentioned it because I must’ve missed it a couple years back.

I have been grossed out by TikTok’s blatant predatory behavior ever since hearing how their algorithms work.

Sure, most major social media companies have resorted to similar tactics, but there was something brazen about the way TikTok does it which feels egregious.

Cal’s analysis seems spot on to me. TikTok represents what happens when you’ve won the race to the bottom, or when the dog catches the tire.

As soon as you’ve got the thing, what else is there to do? Where else is there to go?

It’s all sizzle and no steak.

I’m sick of having my attention stolen from me under the guise of “connectedness.”¹ Real connections require compromise, empathy, and growth. Sure, I get some dopamine hits when I see a funny or enraging video, but I don’t seem to get much else.

You want some free leadership advice? You build yourself by building… by helping others. The selfless act of helping humans will teach you more about being a credible leader than any book.

Your career is not your job. It’s the humans you help along the way.

We also have an opportunity here to stop and ask ourselves what it truly means to be human, and what really matters to us in our own lives and work. Do we want to sit around being fed by robots or do we want to experience life and contribute to society in ways that are uniquely human, meaningful and rewarding?

I think we all know the answer to that question and so we need to explore how we can build lives that are rooted in the essence of what it means to be human and that people wouldn't want to replace with AI, even if it was technically possible.

When I look at the things I’ve used ChatGPT for in the past year, it tends to be one of these two categories:

1. A reference for something I’d like to know (e.g. the etymology of a phrase, learning a new skill, generate ideas for a project, etc.)
2. Doing stuff I don’t want to do myself (e.g. summarize meeting notes, write boilerplate code, debug tech problems, draw an icon)

I think most of us knowledge workers have stuff at our work that we don’t like to do, but it’s often that stuff which actually provides the value for the business.

What happens to an economy when businesses can use AI to derive that value that, to this date, only humans could provide?

And what happens to humans when we don’t have to perform meanial tasks anymore? How do we find meaning? How do we care for ourselves and each other?