This is your brain. This is tech dependence. This is your brain on tech dependence.
Drugs might be addictive but they've got nothing on the tech fumes people are smoking these days. No one is safe, because unlike drugs where maybe a couple friends tried to suck you in, nearly everyone you know is buying into the same narrative about tech and parroting it daily. Drug distributors wish they could hit this level of evangelism. We're living in a time where a dangerous number of people believe that not only is what the tech industry wants inevitable, but we must participate or die.
Last week, The Ankler published a story about whether or not we're at "peak newsletter." The concern that newsletters are a dying medium has been with us for a couple years. It's mostly propagated by outlet-employed journalists who live in a state of panic that their window to start a Substack is closing. The experts they turn to for advice are a mix of the guys running the newsletter platforms, newsletter consultants and sceney Substackers. It's a narrow view on what's actually a massive, diverse space and there's never a satisfactory answer.
Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz opens the article with a quote saying "Newsletters are cooked." Her belief is that AI will make them obsolete in five years.