flâneur

Jenny Duan

30 followers · 20 following · 2143 views

on the atlas — 46

highlights — 52

  • It’s because you need to justify your existence. Like there’s so many ways of living life. You could be a founder. You could not be a founder. It shouldn’t be a big deal.
    The Clean-Living Kids Fueling San Francisco’s AI Gold Rush
  • The control over vast sums of wealth has always conferred enormous political clout. We know that that the bulk of foundation money goes to institutions and causes that promote the specific class interests of the givers and their family members, including education
    Foundations and the Environmental Movement - CounterPunch.org
  • should reject choice architectures that cast the future as a rigid binary—between a vision of paradise or dystopia or between a false dilemma of pursuing efficiency or ensuring equity.
    The Right Way to Regulate AI | Foreign Affairs
  • In New York, there’s this feeling like you’re never doing enough. Time is an incredibly valuable thing, and I’ve always been intentional not to waste it. So I tried to do as many things as I could. I had my day job, I DJ’d on the weekends, and I did S&R at night and in my free time
    How I turned an Instagram page into a $30 Million Dollar Business
  • People definitely notice,” said Jaeger, the hospitality director. “It’s just that they notice you more than the smell.”
    ‘Heavy Perfume Is So Obvious.’ Why the New Status Fragrance Is Watered Down. - WSJ
  • ‘Heavy Perfume Is So Obvious.’ Why the New Status Fragrance Is Watered Down.
    ‘Heavy Perfume Is So Obvious.’ Why the New Status Fragrance Is Watered Down. - WSJ
  • ‘Heavy Perfume Is So Obvious.’ Why the New Status Fragrance Is Watered Down.
    ‘Heavy Perfume Is So Obvious.’ Why the New Status Fragrance Is Watered Down. - WSJ
  • I ordered from tiktok shop
    Phlur Heavy Cream : r/FemFragLab
  • The paper assumes that boredom is a problem of desire — the objects are inadequate for sustaining pleasure. But it may be that boredom signals that drive has pre-empted desire. Entering the machine zone is entering into terminal boredom. The pressure of endless media is not to achieve interest or engagement but to achieve a kind of liberating boredom — to reach an arbitrary stopping point at which one reclaims desire, in which one can feel disappointed again.
    No flipping - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
  • What is named “boredom” is perhaps better described as an induced compulsion to consume.
    No flipping - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
  • Whether they are conscious of the movement or not, they believe they can have greater impact by maximizing earnings to donate to a cause than working for that cause.
    Why Gen Z College Students Are Seeking Tech and Finance Jobs - The New York Times
  • told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me it was common at parties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.
    Why Gen Z College Students Are Seeking Tech and Finance Jobs - The New York Times
  • people talk about how women feel pressure from men to be sexy or a perfect romantic partner - and you feel that too - but really you just feel like you want them to take you seriously. and so you become vulnerable to their desires - you arch your personality into what you think they want, you develop the boyish preferences they have. it’s less that you want them to want you for being a woman, but that you want them to respect you as though you were a boy.
    how to be respected as a teen girl - by Aella - Knowingless
  • And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind tha…
    This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) - Farnam Street
  • If you feel too sad to do these things, exercise first. If that doesn’t work, see a therapist. Consider less coffee. Consider how depressed you’ve been all your life, and how anxious. Consider waking up and forcing yourself to think I AM BEAUTIFUL. TODAY IS MY CHANCE TO GROW. If that doesn’t work, do something else. Look for more answers. DO NOT SETTLE FOR SAD. DO NOT SETTLE FOR A SOGGY LIFE. Keep trying. Make adjustments. Keep doing new things. You will find who you are. Stop looking at him and stop looking in the mirror.
    Ask Polly: How Do I Stop Being So Obsessed With My Boyfriend?
  • “When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice,” Ian writes. “That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large.
    The wrong way to study AI in college - The Atlantic
  • Doesn’t being graceful just mean not having to think? Nothing is laborious, everything is effortless, every morning Christmas morning since puberty left so many gifts. The awkward plain girl is driven, instead, to self-obsession. To make a craft of her posture, her eating habits, her odor, her laugh, why they fail her, how to improve them, the variations that make them superior and winsome in that favored someone else. The symbol of being a plain girl is a heart trying hard. Erasing, scribbling. Romanticizing her contours. Narrativizing her lack.
    My Beautiful Friend | The Point Magazine
  • Match Group and Bumble — which make up nearly the entire industry by market share — have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021
    Dating Apps Have Hit a Wall. Can They Turn Things Around? - The New York Times
  • “If I’m on a date and it’s going well and we want to stay out and go on to dinner or drinks, then it becomes a real financial choice, which I hate… I’ve definitely had to put dates on credit cards in the last few years, which I never had to do before.
    I Can’t Afford To Date Anymore
  • Most of her clients are Chinese international students. Lu recalled that a mother in mainland China found her on Xiaohongshu and asked Lu to take her daughter to dinner for her 18th birthday. She was a student at a private boarding school and was very sad because she was bullied and isolated by her peers.
    Friends for hire: Young Chinese rent out their time to earn extra cash - Nikkei Asia
  • Immediately, both Amanda and Suzanne knew it was a big mistake. For one thing, the place was super ugly. "My mother said, I can't leave you here in this aesthetically demoralizing environment,'" Amanda recalls, dead serious. "When I went there and saw it, I was in shock. You should have seen the people there," Suzanne says with equal gravity. She remembers a gathering area on campus. "Never have I seen an uglier room. Broken Naugahyde on the furniture and a terrible green. It was yucky." The students were equally gross, Amanda says, recalling that many didn't shower. She didn't like the studen…
    Legally Brown | News | Phoenix | Phoenix New Times | The Leading Independent News Source in Phoenix, Arizona
  • There is a case to be made that the constant stream of phrases vying to become widely used slang exemplifies a deep appreciation for language among the extremely online, or a desire to connect over the intricacies of the human experience.
    TikTok is full of made-up slang and trendbait - Vox
  • When Ella Halikas’ doctor suggested an off-label prescription of Ozempic to manage her polycystic ovarian syndrome symptoms, her first thought wasn’t about her health.
    Curvy influencers post a lot about body positivity. But what happens when they use Ozempic?
  • Middle class-ness and predictability are very tied in the American imagination,” said Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropology professor at New York University. “Sometimes that is about security in the present, but it also means feeling secure about where life is going.”
    How Americans define the middle-class and why they can’t reach it - The Washington Post
  • I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.
    Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce
  • Today’s wars aren’t just fought on physical battlefields—they are fought online. Strategy is about perception
    Beyond Bullets and Bombs: The Rising Tide of Information War in International Affairs
  • “comfortable home for dirty money.”
    A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld | The New Yorker
  • , but even here there is the ever-present wet gloss of an influencer who has molded herself to the platform: dewy face, slick hair, gently parted lips
    What Is Erewhon? The Strange History of the L.A. Cult Grocer
  • i don’t want to harden and compensate for my loneliness through competency. i want to love and be loved. i want to settle down one day and have a family and build a home. i want to hug and kiss and talk and heal, and i want a world where that is not a fantasy, a wisp of idealism that drifts in my dreams.
    The Wilderness of Mirrors - by Victoria Ren - just renting
  • put another way, i am afraid that ambition will fossilize the rest of my identity, and i’ll become successful and skillful, yet deeply lacking because those achievements cannot replace the human desire to be loved. so i worry that desire will always be untouched, buried deep in the remains of my afterthoughts. and then i spend a lifetime deriving meaning from work, work that tries to give others love and belonging, because i secretly hope that i’ll find it for myself in the process. it doesn’t make sense but it seems to be the way i cope with this fear: i’ll get extra upset when i can’t rememb…
    The Wilderness of Mirrors - by Victoria Ren - just renting
  • i am afraid that i might have no one to love and be loved by, despite—or because of—having everything else. i am afraid that one day i might become Jo in Little Women, delivering the same wretched monologue to my mom, regretting the fact that i chose myself over companionship, even if that was the right call: Jo’s mom: “What is it?” Jo, pace quickening: “I don’t know. I’ve always been content with my family…don’t understand it.” She pauses: “Perhaps um..perhaps I was too quick in turning him down…Laurie.” Her mom: “Do you love him?” Jo: “If he asked me again, I think I would say yes. Do you th…
    The Wilderness of Mirrors - by Victoria Ren - just renting
  • After Buzzfeed announced last week that it would use ChatGPT-derived tools to “enhance” and “personalize” some of its content, its stock price immediately rose from under a $1 a share to nearly $4 — it has since dropped back to $2.
    Inspired prompts - by Rob Horning - Internal exile
  • But that doesn’t make much sense for TikTok, which never built itself up from a “social graph.” TikTok never presented itself as a main conduit for friends-and-family content.
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • Rather than offer a feed whose rationale the user can understand and appear to control, platforms impose “personalized” feeds that work to remold users into what is most profitable for the company. Ideally users will experience this remolding as a journey of self-discovery or an elaborate form of flattery — as Sophie Haighney described the potential appeal of interacting with AI: “The app tricks me into feeling seen, but really it is just me, trying once again to see myself.”
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • But his freewheeling speculation at least doesn’t understand media as just another marketplace in which a sovereign consumer exercises their conscious preferences and service provides cater to them accordingly. For algorithmic media especially, it seems inadequate to characterize them as entirely manipulative or straightforwardly gratifying, as either meeting user needs or altering those needs so that they can be instrumentally serviced. Content has no inherent reach or automatic appeal. Engagement sometimes signals boredom. Anxiety may be inseparable from pleasure. There is no heat death of t…
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • This helps maintain the tension in consumerism’s basic contradiction, in which individualism is recruited to motivate the ever-increasing consumption of mass-produced goods. Via mechanisms like algorithmic feeds, you become yourself by keeping up with everyone else, doing what they do and seeing what they see.
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • TikTok’s rise has often been attributed to its aggression on this front, designing its interface and affordances to foreground users’ relationship to “the Algorithm” (and thereby themselves) rather than to other users. People are encouraged to believe that the algorithm discovers something special about them and shapes their experience on the app around their proclivities. But as “heating” illustrates, it turns out that what is “For You” may have less to do with who you are and more to do with brand and creator partnerships. Not much has changed since 2020, when it was revealed that TikTok deh…
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • Ideally users will experience this remolding as a journey of self-discovery or an elaborate form of flattery — as Sophie Haighney described the potential appeal of interacting with AI: “The app tricks me into feeling seen, but really it is just me, trying once again to see myself.”
    Though the Charleston is tolerated, the twist is taboo
  • i think there is a difference between things that are sickeningly sweet and demonstrative, and i don’t believe in that rhetoric or world. but i do believe that we can be hearty and hopeful; caring and critical. and i believe we can believe those things even in the knowledge of our greatest evils, like our tendencies to be selfish, to chase status, to posture, to do all these things which don’t sound great. the past shows us that transcending—or at least aspiring to transcend—our natural state is possible, or at least a worthwhile pursuit.
    on i mess w happy people now - by Victoria Ren
  • Masculine grace and coherence in a nutshell, “Give me what I want, I beg you, so that I can spit in your face for doing it.” These days the budding porn actress is made aware of this as soon as she enters the profession: she is told repeatedly, so she isn’t under any illusion, that there will be no way back. Oh, we do like our women vulnerable, endangered, and branded. They pay a high price for having having left the straight and narrow and for having done it publicly.
    faildaughter - Gynoid
  • This phenomena is related to scope insensitivity, and it's important to me because I live in a world where sometimes the things I care about are really really numerous.
    On caring
  • If you believe your physical life has meaning, then it is hard to justify strapping into VR life. But if you are already deriving no pleasure or hope from your physical body, your family, or your friends, then the vaguely pleasant numbness of the screen world starts to look pretty good.
    When the Stagnation Goes Virtual
  • humanity is approaching a singularity where our digital selves (the version of ourselves in the metaverse) will become more important to us than our physical selves. And once this singularity is reached, she explained, we will have no problem spending real money on digital assets, because our digital lives will matter as much or more to us than our physical lives. In the metaverse, the story goes, digital ownership will no longer be a novelty. It will simply be ownership.
    When the Stagnation Goes Virtual
  • But can squads scale? Squads are first and foremost cultures, not businesses. Financial maximization is not their primary objective—squads just want to keep the vibes going. Stable revenue is a worthy accomplishment in and of itself. Instead, squads can extend themselves horizontally by inventing new aesthetics, organizational forms, and creative products that become the template for others. When squad vibes transmit they take on a life of their own. While the material value of these patterns may be limited, the significance of memeing a new bottom-up economic model into existence cannot be un…
    Squad Wealth
  • I just let my For You Page be shaped by the most important metric on the platform – how long you watch each video
    Exactly how concerned should we be about TikTok?
  • I really do believe that social media is an accelerator. … An accelerator of societal disintegration? Yes, yes, exactly.
    What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica
  • People believe that the government is simultaneously totally incompetent and also all-knowing and all-seeing and capable of pulling off a massive effort like helping Bill Gates spread the COVID vaccine through mind control via 5G technology.
    What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica
  • But it’s also just the general lack of confidence in institutions writ large
    What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica
  • One is just the death of critical thinking and the amount of evidence-free speculation that becomes the truth, small-t truth, on these platforms
    What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica
  • Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
    Quit Your Job