The Brazilianization of the Internet

When institutions die now, they rarely give us the closure of ceasing to exist—they live on in zombie form, and we learn to tolerate the gradually worsening conditions they impose.

I don’t know that this is new. The haunting of long dead institutions still holds sway on culture.

The red badge notification used to be one of the most reliable indicators of signal amid the noise, but even that has degraded, thanks to proliferating groupchats as well as the feature’s exploitation by legacy platforms. Now you have to come up with your own system, or brace yourself for an onslaught of meaningless alerts.

Growl was great because it was novel and opt-in. Notifications as a first class primitive of the operating system is a burden because it’s opt-out.