Author: Sam Allcock

Monica Dwyer works as a financial advisor. She offers clients advice on self-control, postponing gratification, and playing the long game. She is more aware than most of the lifetime costs associated with impulsive spending. And none of that expertise shielded her when Facebook’s algorithm discovered that she was also an avid calligrapher with a special fondness for elegant pens. She told Reuters, “Facebook has my number,” in a tone reminiscent of someone who has lost a battle they ought to have won. “They put the most intriguing and alluring items to purchase in front of me. I was a total…

The world had spent the entirety of human history organizing itself around darkness until Thomas Edison introduced the electric light bulb, some 140 years ago. The hours after sunset were controlled by fire, candlelight, and the straightforward truth that there wasn’t much worth doing once the light went out before that invention made its way into everyday homes. In that setting, sleep was the inevitable result of a world that went dark, not a productivity trick or a wellness practice. Among many other things, the longest and least talked-about contraction in human biological history began when Edison’s lightbulb became widely…

There used to be a scene that would consistently occur on a seasonal basis in multiplexes all over America. Opening weekend, a massive franchise movie, lines forming before the doors opened, the kind of general excitement that permeated Monday morning conversations in school hallways and offices. The opening weekend event and the blockbuster’s role as a cultural explosion served as the foundation for the studios’ entire business strategy. It feels different to walk through those same multiplexes on most weekends these days. There is less noise in the lobby areas. Large-scale releases have comparable screen counts, but the atmosphere surrounding…

When was the last time a large number of people watched the same thing at the same time? They watched it live, together, in real time instead of scrolling past a clip of it later, seeing the highlights in a YouTube compilation the next morning, or having it explained to them by an algorithm that assumed they’d be interested. That experience is now genuinely uncommon for the majority of entertainment. It still occurs remarkably frequently in live sports, and that fact has subtly emerged as the most valuable asset in the media sector. The monoculture that dominated media for the…

Most people have a graveyard somewhere in the back of their bathroom cabinets. A promising-smelling viral serum that did nothing. After seeing someone appear incredibly sculpted on a phone screen, I bought a contour stick at midnight. At least one TikTok creator with a quarter of a million views claims that a concealer that came in a cute box caused cystic acne. The goods accumulate. The drawers cease to close. At some point, presumably in early 2023, a critical mass of people decided they were tired of being sold things and began publicly expressing their disapproval. Like any viral trend,…

Over the past year or so, a specific type of meeting has become more common in venture capital offices and marketing firms. A slide deck is pulled up by someone. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are the topics of discussion in the room. Then Roblox is brought up. A few people grin. “Isn’t that the kids’ game?” someone asks. And the discussion continues. Repeated in thousands of boardrooms, that smirk is gradually turning into one of the more costly errors in digital strategy. Roblox isn’t a game. It never was, at least not in any significant sense. More precisely,…

Al Quoz is not what most people think of as Dubai. This place is devoid of shiny skyscrapers, opera-style fountains, and hotel lobby chandeliers the size of tiny airplanes. It’s an industrial area with delivery trucks, low-rise warehouses, and the odd art gallery nestled between loading docks. Nevertheless, a simple café called Julith is charging $980 for a single cup of coffee inside one of those warehouses. Four hundred of them were to be sold. It’s worth pausing to consider that detail. The cup in question is made from Panamanian Geisha beans, which are so uncommon and highly traded among…

Imagine a waiting room in any mid-sized American city, complete with people seated three seats apart even when the room is almost empty, plastic chairs bolted together in rows, and a television in the corner showing cable news. No one says anything. Everybody’s eyes are fixed on a phone. It seems typical. It feels quite natural now. And that is part of a crisis severe enough to necessitate a formal government advisory—twice in a row, according to the nation’s top public health official. The title of a report published in 2023 by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy was clear:…

Watch what happens if you ask an adolescent to watch a two-hour movie without using their phone. The majority won’t survive past the first act. It’s not because they’re impolite, indolent, or particularly lacking in self-control; rather, it’s because their attention architecture has changed in ways that are genuinely hard to undo. Video games, television, or even early social media did not cause this. Thanks to fifteen-second videos and an algorithm that is so well-tuned to human psychology that it has effectively turned dopamine into a design element, it happened with remarkable speed and accuracy. In the late 2010s, when…

There is a common late-night ritual that occurs in bedrooms and on couches all over the world, even though most people won’t acknowledge it. The phone is removed from the nightstand “just for a second.” The thumb begins to move. After twenty or thirty minutes, you’re reading about a terrible incident that occurred somewhere, your chest feeling a little more constricted than before, and your sleep has been subtly disturbed. This is not how you intended to feel. You had no intention of staying this long. And yet, here you are once more. The doom loop is this. It’s an…