Potemkin Lifestyle

Note: This is last month’s bonus essay for paid subscribers, and it’s arriving about a week late—sorry about that! It was quite a month.

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Most of the online platforms that serve as reliable Schelling Points (where people tend to aggregate) aren’t terribly compelling to me.

They’ve degraded in quality over the past few years as a consequence of scrambling to become more addictive and to boost their revenue, in both cases at the expense of the value produced for their users.

I’m also increasingly cognizant of the fact that social platforms make a lot of their money from the unpaid labor of the millions of people they motivate to share all sorts of stuff—that stuff serving as a magnet for more people and engagement, and all our attention and activity (those of us on these networks, making and engaging with that stuff) serving as (or secondarily producing) raw materials to be harvested and sold by these companies.

We’re told these platforms can help elevate us from the thronging masses, can boost our careers, can net us the affection, adoration, and envy of countless other users, but for most of us, most of the time, these networks kind of just make us resentful, self-conscious, and angry.