Toby Shorin's Blog
It’s said that thinkers are either foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ever since I heard about this I’ve known that I am a hedgehog. My one big idea is the idea of moral ecosystems: decentralized systems of moral belief and their relationship to our technological media environments. Since 2016 I have been exploring this idea and have made many…
The terrain of American mental health is as vast and colorful as this country’s geography. I’ve been interested in exploring the landscape since 2019, when I dashed off a quick blog post on cultural differences in psychology . Backburnered for four years, the topic is now top of mind for me. My interest in the economies of cultural and spiritual production, the topic of Life After Lifestyle , led…
One of the exciting things I’m up to at Other Internet is working on a new research project with the Ethereum Foundation and Venkatesh Rao. If you haven’t heard about it yet, we’re part of a program called Summer of Protocols which hopes to promote new theories about protocols, as well as what Venkat calls “protocol literacy”: the ability to parse protocols’ conventions, usage codes, and design…
This essay debuted as a talk at FWB Fest in Idyllwild, California, 2022. I’ve rearranged and expanded the material for the essay version. It is 2018 and I am on a flight to San Francisco. I am seated next to a harried woman who pays fifty dollars for WiFi and rattles out Slack messages. She is an employee of one of the largest digital agencies, and is clearly on her way to a client presentation. I…
The uneasy Web 2.0 truce between social networks, legacy media, and brands is falling apart. Once it was held together by ad tech. But advertising spends keep going up, brand content is at peak saturation, and audiences are slowly but surely evacuating the big social media companies. Can the three forces — social media, content, and commerce — find a new way relate to each other? Here enters the…
Aaron, I’ve been reflecting on your Garden of Forking Memes essay. I’m so glad you’ve written such a comprehensive piece on this topic of subculture and history, and I’m honored you asked me to provide feedback on it. It gave me a lot of thoughts that I wanted to flesh out, so I’m responding here. I’m most interested to talk with you about something we’ve discussed a bit before, something which is…
The text renaissance we’re experiencing today isn’t just about new writing and publishing tools. It’s also about new ways of working, collaborating, and authoring. For instance, I created a simple component on my website that lets me attribute authorship of parts of text to another writer. This allowed me to collaborate with Kara, Drew, Edouard on our recent piece Premonition while maintaining our…
Tom Critchlow and I have written a web-native quoting tool called Quotebacks , which is now available for download. Quotebacks allow you grab any piece of text from the web, and quote-tweet it in your blog without losing context, like this: Interestingness is not a fixed property, but a move in a conversation between what everyone in the audience already knows (the “ assumption ground “) and the…
For three weeks, I have wondered: how much of what I’ve thought and written about on this site is even relevant now? Everyone who thinks about culture must ask themselves this on a regular basis. But these circumstances call for a more serious reevaluation. The pandemic has fractured the discourse, exposing how many layers of assumptions formed the bedrock. Access to goods. Mobility. A functioning…
