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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Adam Aleksic
Read between
November 18 - November 27, 2025
Whenever you learn a new word, you can think of it as coming into contact with a parasite. Either your guard is up and you reject the word, or it breaks through your defenses and you become a “host,” using and replicating the word for it to reach a larger population.
Knowing how to capture attention is far more important than knowing the algorithm;
It feels good to criticize something when it makes us feel better about ourselves.
In 1971, the Nobel Prize–winning political scientist Herbert A. Simon coined the phrase “attention economy” to describe this phenomenon. In his view, attention was a limited resource to be allocated among competing stimuli in an information-rich environment.
No matter how interesting I find the etymology of the word “concept,” I know that a video on “skibidi toilet” will do better, because of the way that the algorithm amplifies trends.
If a post is shared 20 percent less, it’s going to be seen not by 20 percent fewer people but by 90 percent fewer, because fewer people will even be given the chance to share it in the first place.[6]
doesn’t it feel great to be a part of something? You might even feel surprised at how well the algorithm “knows you.” In reality, though, the algorithm helped to create your identity.
Words can also get entrenched when popularized by new technology. “Hello” wasn’t a popular interjection before the advent of the telephone, but simply happened to be a trending fad greeting when phones were being implemented throughout the country. Because it was the right word at the right time, “hello” became standardized as the word to say when answering a call, which is why we still say it today.
engagement doesn’t mean “good.” We very often engage with things that are bad for us but nevertheless reel us in.
a 2022 study showed that politicians are engaging in greater online incivility than before because civil content garners less engagement.[6]
Goodhart’s law, which warns that “as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” By optimizing for engagement to keep viewers online, social media platforms turned engagement into a target, eventually resulting in engagement-maximizing content that nobody actually wanted.
algorithms simultaneously homogenize and diversify us depending on the needs of the tech company. If it’s something that helps drive engagement across the platform, like an attentional tactic or widely relatable trend, it will be pushed to everyone. If it’s something that helps personalize the experience for you, it will be pushed to the niche community that you’re a part of.
Identity is inherently built as you experience things and form opinions about them. As the algorithm gives you content to experience, you do end up building part of your identity around that,
If only 50 percent of people reposting a meme credit its origin, then only 25 percent will credit it in the second round of sharing, and so on.
Even though African American English is constantly scrutinized, it’s also constantly sought after. The very words being dismissed by the English teacher became popular because they were dismissed by the establishment, and therefore “cool”
Spotify’s algorithms don’t even need to create and name genres in order to function: They can identify communities by just grouping common data patterns. Names are then ways for humans to understand what the algorithm did,
Scarcity isn’t a problem in the digital age;
The more ways you can be categorized using specific, newly created microlabels, the more ways you can be commodified.
There’s a reason “cottagecore” is more popular than other potential keywords like “bucolic.”
Nor do you make your own decisions. Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they’re engineered to make platforms as much money as possible.
torn over app-wide dramas that held no relevance in the real world. Few online references ever do;
When everybody was walking around in togas and tunics, there was no need to distinguish goths and punks, but now that fashion and social media have created more options, we can even distinguish between pastel goths and vampire goths.
Beyond the word “lore,” younger people will often talk about themselves as if they were the “main characters” in some kind of show. We do things “for the plot”; we go through “canon events”; we have “character arcs” and “eras.” Deviations from the storyline are written off as “sidequests,” while tangential characters in our lives are dismissed as “NPCs.”
“Categories” are just stories we tell ourselves about how we’re similar to or different from each other,
If everybody’s the “main character,” then nobody is.
