*you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement* View quoted note →

*It’s not theft by the cashier. It’s extraction by design.* View quoted note →

😑 *Barclays estimated that more than half of US GDP growth in 2025 came from AI related investment. People know that we are staking the economy on something that doesn’t really promise much other than hey :) this thing will take your job :) and it’s gonna do art now :) and maybeee make a lot of people real rich but your electricity bill (which is already flipping voters) is going to go up. And China might win. Also, it’s against the terms of service to kill yourself* Kyla Scanlon

*Confidence, optimism, and long-term thinking all require mental spaciousness. If the information environment becomes chaotic, the emotional environment will be too. And if attention is the infrastructure of democracy, that infrastructure is in disrepair.* Kyla Scanlon

*We are all collectively haunted by the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: We are all finding that it really is 10x harder to debunk lies than it is to produce them, leading to things like ragebait as a marketing and product strategy - it’s also a great way to raise a lot of venture capital money? Misinformation is a great way to build wealth: Twitter pays you a lot of money if you lie to a lot of people and make them very angry at you. People abroad are tapping into this money machine - logically! - and polluting US politics in a way that should probably be illegal?* Kyla Scanlon

*For most of human history, literacy was scarce and attention was abundant. People were what we would call “bored” most of the time, outside of work. Today, it’s the opposite - literacy is collapsing, attention is a commodity, and people are completely overloaded.* Kyla Scanlon

*The US has been drifting into a harder equilibrium for years. People have always lived through high housing costs, tight job markets, and Baumol. The difference now is that these pressures are landing on a public already stretched pretty thin cognitively and socially.* Kyla Scanlon

*we are objectively speed running a quid-pro-quo type economy, where the US, which once was a beacon of democracy, is now doing land deals with Russia, requesting that tourists give five years of social media information, threatening the independence of independent agencies, including the Fed, and ignoring anti-trust law in favor for media control.* Kyla Scanlon

*And of course, it’s going to get weirder. AI is going to make non-Baumol sectors hyper-productive. Software development, data analysis, any sort of Computer thing will become abundant and cheap, meaning that the productivity gap between scalable sectors and non-scalable sectors will becoming a gaping hole.* Kyla Scanlon View quoted note →