The Medium Partnership program motivates writers to write for writers

When I first started to dig into how to become a content creator, it was very much a slog to dig through all the legitimate tips and tricks from the ones that lure you into thinking they can give you a way out of the 9-to-5 living into the passive income, fast cars, big houses, live how you want without working ploys. The former provides insight into how the industry and the algorithms work so that you can plan your work and start the climb. The latter focuses on selling…

The use of symbols in modern times almost seems like a given, like a natural part of the world around us. There are icons on every screen, logos on every device, the colorful geometry of street signs, emojis in our texts. Their ubiquity makes it seem like it could be no other way, yet we have to remember that it is part of a visual language we’ve learned through the process of decomposition and recombination.

Let’s step back for a second and first look at abstraction. Of all the symbols in our daily lives, the one that carries with it…

I recently finished reading Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, the first book in a sci-fi trilogy written by a Chinese author. It is very much a Chinese story that takes place against the history of the Cultural Revolution with distinctly Chinese backdrops. It was constantly brought up as one of the top books to read in recent times, and I thought I’d finally give it a try. I was glad I did. Typically I don’t read a lot of genre fiction. Something about the language and the types of storylines don’t seem to appeal to me. …

Simulation theory has gained a lot of traction lately thanks to the spread of more conspiratorial thinking, and a rich billionaire with a wide audience and a wild imagination. Statistically given a few possible trajectories of humankind, the most likely outcome is that computation has advanced so far that we are a result of that advancement. We are simulated beings in a wider simulation. At least, that’s how the general argument goes.

A lot of the anecdotal arguments come from the advancements in video game technology. The way Musk puts it is that we’ve come from the square ball of…

Everything we do is about building bridges, making connections that weren’t previously there. These bridges allow people to cross over to places that would have been nearly impossible otherwise. It allows people to explore new territory, expand their views, and let separate worlds meet. There are bridges we build every day in small and large ways. Like when we say hi to a stranger, or ask our friends how they’re doing. Or when we go to work to keep the machinery of the world running. …

The crackdown against hate speech and hate groups have finally begun, including silencing the former president himself. The amount of fury built up over the last few years culminated in revolt against the very ideals the United States stands for. It required literal destruction and death at the doorstep of their own federal government for the big tech to finally respond in kind. Yet, even then, their motivations seem less about altruism — to reign in the unsettling chaos — and more about self-preservation. The reason that bans have finally been implemented, accounts lifted, databases withdrawn is because it is…

It is part of the human condition to fret over and regret things we have done. Our minds often seem like it is tormenting us with memories from a past long ago, as if it’s reminding us that there is no escape. This is who you are. These are the mistakes you’ve made. These are the consequences. These are your failures. And often the events we would most like to forget, the ones that caused the greatest amount of pain, are the ones that hang on the longest — a quiet alarm in the underpinnings of our conscious selves trying…

As 2020 draws to an end, there is mounting evidence and pressure on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to face the rise of fake news, hate speech, and conspiracy, amplifying the divide between online communities. The propagation of individualized content in feeds and advertisements fuels the continual fragmentation of information on the web. Aside from the massive amounts of users numbering in the billions and the amount of political and commercial power that entails, these tech companies hold within them the power to shape the subjective realities of entire civilizations. Their detailed profiling and predictive algorithms have been…