№ 425. The Social Media Coliseum

The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. Grandstanders tend to “trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.” Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents—and sometimes even their friends—for the potential to evoke public outrage. Context collapses. The speaker’s intent is ignored.

Christoph Niemann

№ 351. Social Media = Drug

Social Media

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators – me, Mark [Zuckerberg], Kevin Systrom on Instagram, all of these people – understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

№ 326. Design of the Decades

His proposals:

1. Transparency
2. Accountability
3. Rethink / Redesign

№ 107. A little good news....

№ 60. Scale Me Up, Scotty!

Again, old, time-tested principles are given new lives in tech and biz insights.

Light bulbs!

№ 30. Animated Saturday

They're art born from relatively new and still evolving media. But the processes, I can imagine, require almost the same mindful creativity, vortex of resources, obsessive reach for perfection and marrow-seeping tedium as the genius behind Sistine Chapel.



Sometimes, just seeing the result, without the necessary but painful process, makes us forget of what it takes to create a gem. Is pain a necessary assumption for genius? Will art be denied its fruition without the fuel of misery? Is it really true that the boost of agony or the burn of acid at the seams of the tortured soul may propel the next breach in the limits of quantum physics? Should creators and their kind be unhappy? Otherwise, no art. Nada.

Well, assuming they already have the gift of genius, why else should they have access to a torrid sex life, right? Or at least a gum-pink healthy love life? What more do they need?

№ 20. Can You Be My Friend?

Bento: Thanks S for posting on Facebook.