Dose of Disorder is a collection of links about change, uncertainty, and chaos.
When does the next thing happen? – Nick Disabato
Information overload tends to predict structural collapse. Now that social media has reached its conclusion, we must find new ways to socialize that nourish us.
How we got here – RADAR
The current trends have led to misalignment, a lack of synchronicity, impermanence, and atomization. All of this leads us to feel alone and groundless. This article gives us the beginnings of a grammar to talk about the current state and why we are all feeling more “out of sync”:
Loss - we have fewer cultural touchstones and less connection with one another.
Misalignment - The way things work is out of line with how we want them to work and how we think they should.
Impermanence - everything has a 24-shelf life. We spend less time investing in everything from content to friendships. More short-term thinking.
Atomization - Our perceptions are increasingly made up of algorithmically generated bubbles. It leads to a greater separation of reality itself. When everything is separate, it’s small. And when it’s small, it lacks meaning.
The Muskening - Vanketesh Rao 🔒
A summary of the current orientation of Twitter. While Twitter may not die, Twitter, as we once knew it, is probably gone. Musk bought the platform… as joke? A political move? A tax dodge? It’s hard to say, but none of the outcomes look particularly good. A paid article, so here are a few choice quotes:
In brief, an irresistible force has met an immovable object. An entrepreneur who has never met a venture he couldn’t master has met a platform that has never met a leader who could tame it. A legendary emperor has marched into a fabled graveyard of empires.
Among what I think of as the four pillars making Twitter what it is, Discovery, Discourse, Dopamine, and Distribution, the last is the most legible, and most immediately amenable to authoritarian high-modernist redesign for yield. Pay-for-reach is a proposition everybody understands.
On Blue Checkmarks - Along the way, he managed to antagonize the old bluecheck class, and lend the revamped bluecheck feature a perception that was an unholy cocktail of undesirable attributes: a pay-to-play grifter-marketer badge, a must-display Elon-tribe gang-tattoo, and an adverse selection mechanism for people with LinkedIn-type tastes and sensibilities.
None of this is novel. Facebook and Google already got to distribution-optimized business models a few years ago. It’s not just Twitter that is headed towards a market-harvesting end-game. The entire industry is already there, and Twitter is just late to this party.
It’s going to be hard to earn back the goodwill of advertisers who have paused or fled due to the open signaling of new-owner-politics, followed by threats of “thermonuclear” name-and-shame retaliation for supposedly caving to blackmail by nefarious Woke forces (“buy ads or I’ll expose you for being a pedo-guy in the pay of George Soros” would be… an odd marketing tactic to witness).
And most importantly, it’s going to be hard to earn back the trust of users who are leaving or thinking of leaving because they think the platform is now the instrument of a purely political agenda.
The World Is Run By People No Smarter Than You - Shawn Wang
One positive outcome of the Muskening:
We never have to feel impostor syndrome ever again.