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What Comes After The Age of Reaction?
This Just In: We’ve fallen into a dramascroll trap that will be very difficult to climb out of, but it isn’t impossible.
Tech companies have spent nearly two decades ensuring the internet economy is built on attention. They want our eyes glued to their platforms to capture as much data on us as possible so they can sell ads that are so hyper-targeted that we swear our phones listen to our conversations. And it worked.
We trust the tech platforms’ fancy algorithms to show us The Best Stuff™ and keep us endlessly entertained. Those algorithms, needing something to judge what is popular, looked at engagement — how many people commented on or shared or reposted the content. Because if something is highly engaging, it’s clearly accurate and popular. Right?
We’re all learning the hard way about the consequences of all this. As Ryan Broderick puts it, we’ve entered “Post World:”
“Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls…
