The internet’s lonely urban design
Remember GeoCities? I do. It’s not around anymore, but at its peak the web hosting service powered more than 38 million web pages, and most of my early-aughts experience online. Looking back, the word “GeoCities” evokes a version of the internet we’ve lost to time: a series of small-ish communities, or cities, where like-minded people share stories and ideas.
Senior software engineer at Google, Keaton Brandt, compares internet design to urban design. Over the last 20 years, the internet has coalesced around a few major megalopolises (gigantic social platforms) and we’ve lost the small-town vibe that brought many of us online in the first place. Globalized internet leads to globalized culture. We cultivate parasocial relationships with a few Important People, many of whom we will never meet, and lose touch with those who are physically close to us.
Here’s an interesting stat from Brandt’s story: “For 22 of the 52 weeks in 2023, the top song on the Billboard Hot 100 came from an artist who first topped that chart more than a decade before. The same can be said for only 3 weeks of 2013.” Large social platforms nudge us into liking the same stuff — and we keep liking it for longer. The sameness of internet culture, according to some studies, is ironically making us lonely.
How can we design an internet that helps us find our people? How can we build smaller communities that actually feel real? Brandt shares a few potential solutions, like this one: “an algorithm that recommends small groups of friends to connect with, rather than single accounts to follow. This might be akin to an algorithm that recommends Discord Servers or Subreddits, but with more of a focus on local community-building and friendship.”
What else we’re reading
Yesterday, a privately built U.S. spacecraft delivered 125 miniature Jeff Koons moon sculptures to the moon. (Koons is also selling corresponding NFTs, because of course he is.) The Koons sculptures join a long history of human artwork left on the moon, including a stamp-sized tile featuring doodles from six mid-century artists. An engineer smuggled the tile onto Apollo 12 in 1969... and left it on the moon! It’s still there, apparently.
To celebrate yesterday’s landing, here are 10 views of Earth that will make you feel insignificant in the best way. They’re curated by planetary scientist and former NASA researcher Dr. Tanya Harrison.
From the archive
Former VP of Design at Facebook, Julie Zhuo, shares counterintuitive advice for building a career — no matter what industry you’re in. Here are the takeaways:
- Your career is defined by your skills and how you’ve used them, not by any external measure of your progress.
- Treat your manager as a coach, not as a judge.
- Create a mental image of yourself mastering the skills you most want to master, and believe that that is in your future.
- You own your career, and you have more of an ability to shape it than anybody else.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Turn your negative inner monologue into a pep talk by switching to third person. Here’s why it works.
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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