Om Malik:

The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce

We’ve made an entire system that rewards “motion first and judgment later”:

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.

Reminds me of this quote from Eric Gill:

We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product?

You get the sense from reading Om here that speed is not conducive to wisdom.

We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes.

The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it […] It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.

Side note: Nicholas Carr’s book Superbloom is a treatise on this exact topic: how velocity in a communication medium is everything.

today’s Silicon Valley [...] used to believe it could change the world. Now it just hopes the world won’t change its stock price.

To be fair, Apple’s mantra is “Think Different” not “Act Different” lol.