An exploration into a new communication layer. By Gaby Goldberg & Sophie Fujiwara HISTORY OF DIGITAL SOCIALIZING To date, every iteration of the Internet has been ushered in by a technology to help us better communicate. This began with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) in 1988, and later in the 1990s, we saw the first…

“We’re in the midst of a technological revolution. We all know it, we talk about it, but we have to live it. The most difficult step is just to go for it.” — Helmut Lang, on being the first designer to unveil a collection on the Internet (1998) TL;DR: We…

Originally published on Mirror. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” — Juliet, about Romeo (Shakespeare) According to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, the way people think of the world is influenced directly by the language people use…

Originally published on Mirror. In 2013, media & technology analyst Benedict Evans presented “Mobile is eating the world,” looking at how the unprecedented scale of mobile was beginning to change the Internet and the economy at large. At the time, 56% of American adults owned a smartphone (compare that to…

Stay up-to-date with my writing by subscribing on Substack. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece called My Modern Friends and Me, as an ode to the digital-turned-physical friends I had made throughout 2020. And although so much has changed since then — I got a new job…

I am thrilled to share that I am joining the team at TCG, The Chernin Group, to focus on the firm’s investments at the intersection of consumer and crypto. I’ll be working closely with Jarrod Dicker, Jake Smilovitz, Jonathan Moore, and the rest of the TCG team to support founders…

Originally published on Mirror. In the metaverse, when we look in the mirror, who do we see? Last week, John Palmer wrote about new Internet logic. He argued that the next wave of companies built in web3 will need to build on a new “mental model” of the Internet. John…

By Gaby Goldberg and Jesse Lee. Originally published on Mirror. cūrāre: to attend to, to take care of. Introduction Last year, I published the piece Curators are the New Creators, arguing in favor of a business model centered around “good taste.” This piece expands upon that previous work by putting a…

Editor’s Note: This piece was written in partnership with the Stanford Tech History Project, which seeks to document how Stanford’s tech ecosystem has changed since 2010. The full report will be published on Monday, April 26th. To RSVP for the launch event, click here.