It starts, as it always does, with an ancient urge: Growth.
Then, a more modern twist: Network effects, flywheels, exponential growth.
Like fossil fuels and climate change, aggregators are equal parts ingenuity and myopia.
In questing to eliminate information scarcity, to expand connection, we’ve created an a world of abundance for admins and execs — but suffocating complexity for users and citizens.
We guard our attention against the same algorithms heralding the new economy. We strive to achieve growth by optimizing our productivity. In so doing, we both sacrifice and yearn for simplicity.
The mess of it all manifests in multides, least obvious of which being the diversion of our mental gatekeeping to feeds of a different intelligence register, content streams of chaos.
At root, this is the same primal and evolutionary growth urge, Niezche’s “will to power” — our passive, internal knowledge compass breaking through to tell us that there is indeed too much, that we must break free.
This tyranny of choice is as unsustaineble as it is entirely self-imposed.
Such is the irony, I suppose, of our own nature.