What ties seemingly contradictory factions together in today's post-national, post-traditional-faction environment, is a concept known as Attention Realism - where ideological enemies utilize the exact same tools, platforms, and viral vectors (channels, people, etc.) to advance completely different agendas.
It is a perfectly closed economic and psychological loop. No grand, shadowy room of conspirators is required. Instead, a loose coalition of tech platforms, media grifters, financial speculators, and foreign state algorithms have all realized that amplifying the exact same voices and messages serves their individual, highly profitable agendas. Attention Realism is the advertising logic exploded to its absolute extremity. In this ecosystem, the commodity being bought, sold, and hyper-targeted isn't a product - it's geopolitical reality and public consciousness itself. The global information ecosystem is a giant, decentralized, hyper-financialized, real-time auction for human attention - "Programmatic Reality".
In other news, I've finally reached escape velocity on the Chinese socials. The reach and depth of engagement is beyond anything I've ever experienced on western nets. Half a million views this week across 7 posts. 20k likes etc. It's a new online world.
We’ve all heard that “DARPA invented the Internet.” But few have heard of BBN, the contractor that did the most work to bring the ARPAnet into existence. Today’s piece dives into the history of BBN and the firm’s unique structure. A firm like BBN winning the main portion of the ARPAnet project was a pivotal reason the ARPAnet project went so smoothly. BBN embodied the “middle ground between academia and the commercial world.” BBN’s early operating model provides an ideal management framework for anyone looking to deploy researchers on ambitious research projects within the structure of a firm. With BBN’s structure, many difficult projects become possible.
For centuries, the essence of great cities was shaped by offline experience: places, walks, noise, presence. Then came online-everything. What’s left barely holds memory.
