big and legacy media institutions are trying to control more of their own traffic and distribution online, and yet many of them publish so much content that it's hard to see how an actual normal reader navigates it, or identifies which parts of it they want to interact with... previously you could count a bit on social media and other distribution mechanisms to let your audience filter your content and decide what they want to pay attention to. Now there's more focus on bespoke apps and newsletters, which only have so much real estate...

it's hard to overemphasize this: Google and OpenAI have no plan for how or why people will generate *new, correct information* in the age of generative AI search

https://twitter.com/chaykak/status/1793626354988040394

search clickthroughs will plummet, ads will be sold on generated answers, and media licensing fees for AI models can't sustain enough new journalism to fuel the tech companies' own products

using this dying platform to talk to the remaining media biz people: the only things successful publications are going to concentrate on now are loyalty and habituation, subscriber benefits, making a consumer feel special & paid attention to it's the total opposite of platform distribution and targeted advertising. The Verge survey and new NYT products are pointing toward subscriber customization, gizmos, doodads, community features, Reddit gold, Discord chats — publications becoming the new social networks

I'll say again what I will doubtless be saying a million times in the coming years: Algorithmic feeds have pushed content creators to conform to the acceptable aesthetic and cultural average; A.I. generation will just automatically produce that average from the start And the average will entrench itself much faster because more content generation is happening, not just from "creators," but from any random user, who is probably less interesting or innovative even than an algorithmically popular creator

the new sally rooney really reminds me of james salter……..

can’t stop thinking about how life would be different if the pandemic hadn’t happened lol the pandemic does not make me feel like “the main character” as they say

Besides publishing my book, I did most of my writing this year for the @NewYorker website under Rachel Arons’s excellent editing (+ TNY’s great fact-checking and copy editing). A short thread: @NewYorker I reported a long feature about how COVID-19 is impacting the present and future of architecture, through a series of conversations with architects in the midst of the pandemic: newyorker.com/culture/dept-o…

I wrote this long reported essay for @newyorker on architecture during and after pandemic: from the legacy of modernism to redecorated apartments and improvised bacteria shields newyorker.com/culture/dept-o… @NewYorker The piece goes through domestic space, office space, and city space, talking to architects about what’s on their minds right now. As the Bauhaus architect Hannes Meyer wrote in 1926: "Each age demands its own form"

My first book, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism is on shelves today from @bloomsburypub! You can order it here: bloomsbury.com/us/the-longing… But I also wanted to do a thread of my favorite people & quotes from the book — @BloomsburyPub The book is about deconstructing the trendy minimalism of Instagram, Marie Kondo, etc, and getting back to more fundamental ideas that aren’t just about austere decorating and consuming less. Here are some of those figures: