co:llected

Increasingly, instead of foraging for information out on the open web, people often begin and end with Facebook, where news is served up buffet-style in timelines also peppered with baby photos, political gripes, and other personalized missives from friends and family. What people outside of the media industry may not realize is that Facebook drives an enormous amount of traffic to news sites, more than 40 percent of it for many big publishers, making media companies heavily reliant on the tech giant for the kind of attention that ostensibly gets converted into ad dollars. Given the fact that Facebook isn’t just a news site, it’s reasonable to assume it would fare just fine if major publishers stopped posting content to the site. In a crowded journalistic field where traffic from Facebook is broadly seen as essential, such a move would arguably only hurt those publishers.

Every dimension of declining American dynamism is connected. The slowdown in most areas’ business development comes from a shifting tide in American migration. For 100 years, population flowed from poor areas to rich areas. Now the trend has reversed. Land-use policies prevent more middle-class families from living in productive areas, because housing becomes too expensive. Meanwhile, the rich can afford to cluster in a handful of metros where entrepreneurship is a norm, while business dynamism falls in the rest of the country. There used to be too much land to settle. Now there’s not enough land to share.

Most services associated with the gig economy didn’t exist just a few years ago. So this report indeed confirms that they’ve grown. But the Pew study serves as a useful reminder: If you’re young, urban and wealthy, these services might seem ubiquitous. But there are vast expanses of the country and many walks of life where they have yet to make inroads.

As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

What determines people’s preferences is a fuzzy, hard-to-pin-down process, but Tom Vanderbilt takes a stab at it in his new book, You May Also Like. He examines the broad collection of likes and dislikes that make up “taste,” and how they come to be. Sometimes, people just prefer the familiar. Sometimes they like what their friends like. Sometimes they pretend to like movies they never really watch or music they don’t actually listen to. A lot of the time, they can’t say why they like something, they just know that they do.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.

Recently Y Combinator commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of their anonymized application data. What they found is super cool.

If software, indeed, is eating the world, this “world” surely also includes car companies, banks, hotels, newspapers. How likely is it they will have the cash to keep on advertising – and do so using the very platforms that are actually eating them alive? Especially when even the most technology-savvy of investors’ darlings – BuzzFeed has just posted missed revenue targets – are losing money, while platforms such as Facebook are thriving?

I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic. But it's not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them. Nothing could be less materialistic, or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. (Laughter)Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital.

The empathy economy is booming. Facts are out, feelings are in. This is attributed, at least in part, to a kind of brand mania that asserts that everything from your razor blade to your public library to the I.R.S. needs to have a relatable personality. Everyone is in the business of brand management: artists, designers, businesses, celebrities, politicians, museums, universities, armies, nations. Branding is supposedly not about what something says, or what it means, but how it makes us feel. A brand is a promise. It’s the putative guarantee of the emotional payoff on an investment in a particular product, place or individual. So the new handbag makes us feel chic and knowing; the laptop, savvy and contemporary; the vodka, suave and sophisticated; the museum, refined and sensitive. When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, successfully use design to produce an emotional coherence that spans content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you it’s working.

Twitter’s troubles are due to something deeper yet simpler, so commonplace it has become invisible. It is, in a very real sense, a victim of its own blindness.

I’ve been studying the psychology of online connectivity for more than 30 years. For the past five, I’ve had a special focus: What has happened to face-to-face conversation in a world where so many people say they would rather text than talk? I’ve looked at families, friendships and romance. I’ve studied schools, universities and workplaces. When college students explain to me how dividing their attention plays out in the dining hall, some refer to a “rule of three.” In a conversation among five or six people at dinner, you have to check that three people are paying attention — heads up — before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds, but with different people having their heads up at different times. The effect is what you would expect: Conversation is kept relatively light, on topics where people feel they can drop in and out.

With the oldest members of this cohort barely out of high school, these tweens and teens of today are primed to become the dominant youth influencers of tomorrow. Flush with billions in spending power, they promise untold riches to marketers who can find the master key to their psyche.

Now information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. Most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy. Without government decisions over what it is, and who can own it and on what terms, the new economy could not exist.