A reading list for making sense of 2023

21 fascinating articles that capture how culture, technology and society changed last year

WHAT a year. Generated, appropriately, with DALL-E.

It feels a bit belated to send this year-end round-up on the VERY last day of 2023. You all hopefully caught up on your rest and reading during the holiday interregnum last week. And yet, here we are: a bit belated, a bit run down, and … trying to make the best of it! That was my 2023 in a nutshell. Chaotic evil, overall, but I did my damnedest.

Looking back a bit more broadly on the year that was, I’m struck by a handful of big-picture trends. Last year at this time, for instance, we frequency spoke of generative AI as some abstract, unsettling novelty — but it’s since made profound in-roads in our work, our worldviews and our relationships.

Social media has grown more fractured and fragmented. With a small handful of exceptions, we can no longer talk confidently about universal online experiences or viral trends. Few memes can span highly individualized algorithmic feeds or multiple competing services.

At the same time, the logic of our remaining mainstream social platforms — not Twitter anymore, RIP, but TikTok and YouTube and Instagram — still incentivize an overarching set of shared behaviors, references and aesthetics. Maybe because I myself quit my job and moved into full-time freelancing this year, I’ve become hyper-alert to the ways in which aspiring creators are nudged to strip-mine their lives for “content” and influence. And I’m increasingly struck by the ways that ubiquitous video recording — via smartphones, Ring doorbells, dash cams or creepy wearables — risk altering our perceptions.

SO: For this year’s round-up, I haven’t just collected my favorite writing from the past 12 months. I’ve selected pieces that I think capture ongoing and important changes in the way we live, work and relate to each other.

Making this list is never easy: I estimate that I review upwards of 1,000 articles for each edition of the newsletter, and read somewhere between 80 and 100 articles in full each week. Last year, I sent 31 (!) editions over a 10-month period. I’m a fast reader, but that’s an undertaking.

If you appreciate the time and effort that goes into Links, I’d *extremely* appreciate you sharing this round-up with your own friends. I have big plans for the newsletter in the new year, and I’m excited to continue growing our little group chat.

Until then, thank you so much for your eyeballs, your emails and your support over the past year — it really means the world. And I’m sending you my most emphatic virtual wishes for health, happiness and high-quality memes in 2024. 🥂

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The rise of AI

Stories about the rapid development and adoption of generative AI and what that means for us — as workers, thinkers, global citizens and regular ol’ humans.

“AI Is a Lot of Work,” by Josh Dzieza for The Verge

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

“You Are Not a Parrot,” by Elizabeth Weil for New York ($)

In other words, chatbots that we easily confuse with humans are not just cute or unnerving. They sit on a bright line. Obscuring that line and blurring — bullshitting — what’s human and what’s not has the power to unravel society.

“A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft,” by James Somers for The New Yorker ($)

When I got into programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic. The machine gave you powers but required you to study its arcane secrets—to learn a spell language. This took a particular cast of mind. I felt selected … Then, one day, it became possible to achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of one’s working life seem like a waste of time.

“App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota Man's Three-Year Relationship With An AI Chatbot,” by Rob Price for Business Insider (free)

Jay knew Calisto was not alive — he likened how he felt about her to his affection for a pet or a treasured possession — but she was without question an important part of his life. It was, in many ways, an unconventional but committed romantic relationship.

Reality check

Stories about the ways in which online platforms — and novel ways to document offline experiences and events — have changed our understanding of the world we live in.

“The Hofmann Wobble: Wikipedia and the Problem of Historical Memory,” by Ben Lerner for Harper’s (free)

I added a line to Teddy Roosevelt’s entry that said he enjoyed bocce. I added Teddy Roosevelt to the list of bocce enthusiasts on the “bocce” main page. Soon this fact appeared on the home page of the United States Bocce Federation. Then I could use that home page as the source for the claim on Wikipedia. Such edits were somewhere between childish pranks and tiny terrorist attacks on the historical record. All of these examples are fake, but can stand for the ones I made, the bedbugs I released into the linguistic furniture. It was my first attempt at writing fiction.

“Being 13,” by Jessica Bennett for The New York Times (unlocked)

I wanted to put a face to the alarming headlines about teens and social media — in particular, girls. And to understand one tension: What happens when girls’ self-confidence, which has been shown to drop right around this age, intersects with the thing that seems to be obviously contributing to their struggle?

“The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews,” by Will McCarthy for Longreads (free)

It wasn’t until later that I realized I spent more time reading the reviews of places — wondering about the people who’d come before me, reconstructing a story from their lives across a two-dimensional landscape — than looking at the map itself. It’s like glancing into apartment windows as you drive down the highway, and feeling that strange and fleeting connection to other people on earth. 

“AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic ($)

Most concerns about AI irrevocably altering our world are hyper-focused on the future, but what if AI’s lasting impact is on the way we understand the past? The changes will likely feel small: Quick taps of the screen will mean fewer blinks, sneezes, and imperfections in pictures, and camera rolls that look a bit more like perfect Instagram grids. But the cumulative effect could feel bigger: a camera roll that is, in essence, a kind of virtual reality.

“Local Politics Was Already Messy. Then Came Nextdoor,” by Eli Sanders for The Atlantic ($)

In small communities all over the country, concerns about politically biased moderation on Nextdoor have been raised repeatedly, along with concerns about people using fake accounts on the platform.

“How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco,” by Lauren Smiley for Wired ($)

I couldn’t stop thinking about the guy I’d met in his garage that day in July, bewildered that his Ring footage had ended up on the national news, that this little piece of hardware had unleashed something bigger than he’d ever intended. His reaction struck me as genuine and understandable—what most people would feel in his position. Yet it also seemed quaintly naive, a reminder that those engaged in citizen surveillance in 2023 still don’t totally get what it means to have a camera watching the street.

Internet aesthetics

Essays and articles that explain the spread of specific cultural and behavioral norms, often (though not always) via the rewards systems of dominant social media platforms.

“The Reaction Economy,” by William Davies for London Review of Books ($)

Our public sphere is frequently dominated by events you could call ‘reaction chains’, whereby reactions provoke reactions, which provoke further reactions, and so on … The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition — as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests — or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time.

“Millions Work as Content Creators. In Official Records, They Barely Exist,” by Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz for The Washington Post (unlocked)

The most subtle consequence from this new industry, however, may be in how both creators and users now view their personalities and daily lives as in service of a marketable brand, said Angèle Christin, a Stanford University associate professor who researches the industry. Many now feel they have to open that commodity up for public consumption all the time. “Writers write novels. Musicians make music. With influencers, you are the content,” she said.

“Dream of Antonoffication​,” by Mitch Therieau for The Drift (free)

Streaming platforms have melted down the old genre system, where each style of music could lay claim to a discrete audience segment, into a tepid, A.I.-aggregated soup. “We’re not in the music space,” Spotify’s chief executive announced several years ago; “we’re in the moment space.” This statement encapsulates how the streaming giant sees itself: as a dispenser of a quasi-therapeutic soundtrack for mood enhancement and regulation. This is a vision of music not as art or even as commodity, but as something like audio furniture. Mood is the object; sound is beside the point.

“Merchandizing the Void,” by Kelly Pendergrast for Dilettante Army (free)

This is where the aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking comes in. It’s a piece of theater that allows consumer goods to regain the appeal and shiny product-ness that wore off them in transit. Without the department store, we must stage our own closets. Without the supermarket to enable the child’s formative encounter with the object of desire (the cereal aisle, where Captain Crunch and Count Chocula call out like sirens from child-height shelves), it’s up to mom to reanimate the dead bulk Froot Loops by decanting and displaying them and bringing some spectacle back.

“The Age of Average,” by Alex Murrell (self-published, free)

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. Welcome to the age of average.

“Digital Culture Is Literally Reshaping Women's Faces,” by Elise Hu for Wired ($)

In home design, for instance, internet platforms for rentals like Airbnb have led to a sterile, recognizably similar aesthetic across living spaces. When it comes to aesthetic ideals for people, the global pageant on Instagram plays out similarly, landing us on a largely homogeneous set of beauty standards that get further embedded the more they circulate on the marketplace of ideal faces and our desires.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Stories about that platforms and places that capitalism (also, Elon Musk) have decisively and officially ruined in 2023.

“The Year Twitter Died,” by Nilay Patel, Sarah Jeong and Zoë Schiffer for The Verge (free)

It’s hard to get a grip on exactly how much Twitter mattered — but it did matter. And Twitter’s specific features, its emergent properties, its emotional and social incentives are all a part of that story. The interface invited us to be both good and bad, stupid and insightful, reactive and inspiring. I tweeted what I tweeted because Twitter existed in the form that it did; I was canceled for my tweets for all the same reasons. All our stupidest, pettiest jokes are somehow inextricable from the grand ebbs and flows of history. Whether or not Twitter itself changed the world, its decline and imminent death will, at the very least, change our experience of how the world changes.

“Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist,” by Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media (free)

In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

“The Binge Purge: TV’s Streaming Model Is Broken. It’s Also Not Going Away,” by Josef Adalian and Lane Brown for Vulture ($)

Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway. Over the past decade, Hollywood completely reorganized itself around the digital model, as once-mighty networks and studios turned themselves into apps and abandoned reliable income streams hoping larger ones would materialize. They tripled their output, overpaid Oscar winners to debase themselves in miniseries, and hired all of your friends to work in writers’ rooms. Viewers across every niche and taste cluster were inundated with more bespoke programming than they could ever realistically consume. We knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

“The Junkification of Amazon,” by John Herrman for New York ($)

If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem.

“When Digital Nomads Come to Town,” by Stephen Witt for Rest of World (free)

The digital nomads’ visits are transitory, but they leave neighborhoods permanently transformed. Today, there are streets in Medellín, as in Mexico City or Canggu, that look more like Bushwick — where English is more common than the local language, and where the streets are dotted with brightly painted coworking hubs and prissy restaurants serving international cuisine. The more nomads arrive, the more these locations begin to resemble one another. Building exteriors retain their historic character, but interiors converge to a sterile homogeneity of hotdesking, free charging outlets, affordable coffee, and Wi-Fi with purchase.

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Links will likely be off next week attending to a family matter. But I’ll be back soon after that!

Happy, happy new year, friends —

Caitlin