Monday - May 19, 2025
#40 | An antidote for human loneliness
Help your people find you. Help the machines help you.
Below is a selected excerpt of my daily Chrome browsing history. For a while now, I've been trying to figure out what to work on next. I wanted to leverage #atproto and also attack human loneliness. In 2023, the Surgeon General of the United States declared America to be amidst a "loneliness epidemic". Suffering loneliness is equivalent to "smoking a pack of cigarettes a day" and everywhere I looked, it felt like people were struggling to find their people. (Which is bad for many reasons. ☹️)

This site's source is open and freely available for mix/reuse. 👍 I have a working a theory that "stated preferences" are nearly useless and that "revealed preferences" are much more representative, especially over a sufficient longtitude of time. Moving forward, I hope more and more people will share their browsing history. (And once the Meta Raybans go mainstream, their life history!!) Nowadays, we all lead such rich and fulfilling interior lives. YouTube, Kindle, Spotify, and an endless stream of worthwhile pursuits and diversions are available via our magic rectangles. Since we all spend so much time online, sharing that digital trail is, I believe, the highest-signal way of how others can discover you. Increasingly, we'll make friends less and less IRL first. Rather, I think we'll increasingly meet online first and then translate our most promising relationships that start virtually into IRL relationships as a second step.

Be algorithmically legible. We're at the precipice of a new era where Very Online People are about to inherit the earth. And the people who opted out (for very valid privacy concerns) are honestly, IMHO, all about to be unceremoniously left behind. If the agents and algorithms can't see you, then they can't hire you. They can't connect you. They can't help you. And everything is seriously about to goto agents 24/7. Because the sheer tsunami of content that's en route is about to go crazy-asymptotic. We're seriously only in the opening innings and society's about to rift hard between the algorithmically-advantaged and the algorithmically-disadvantaged.

Help your people find you.

Help the machines help you.

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