Hello discoverers!

By the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, seventeen new big things have happened on the internet. Most of them will be forgotten within the hour – including, probably, by the people who posted them. Spend 10 minutes on any feed and try to recall what you consumed. Speed turns out to be a surprisingly effective substitute for substance.

Veteran tech journalist Om Malik has a nice diagnosis for this feeling. In a recent essay, he argues that the organising principle of our information ecosystem used to be authority: you earned attention by being right, by being credible, by being worth reading. What replaced it is velocity.

“What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.”

“Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.”

It’s more of a structural argument than a moral one. In other words, nobody woke up one day deciding to make the internet worse. The platforms built incentive systems that rewarded speed above everything else, and rational people – writers, reviewers, newsrooms – responded accordingly. Malik believes that the algorithm is not some toggle you can flick off; it is the culture. (Worth noting, though: the algorithm has owners. It isn’t a force of nature.)

He uses YouTube tech reviews as a case study. When a phone embargo lifts, dozens of polished reviews drop simultaneously – same talking points, same mood lighting, same conclusions. The reviewer who spent three months actually living with the product? Mostly gone from the feed before anyone finds them.

“The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The ‘review’ at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. 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.”

This dynamic extends well beyond tech reviews:

“People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.”

The result is a culture optimised for first takes, not best takes.

To be fair, the authority-based media of the past wasn’t exactly a golden age of truth-telling – gatekeeping had its own distortions, its own capture, its own blind spots. Malik, to his credit, has no romantic attachment to the old days. What we’ve lost isn’t some pristine past, but a slower metabolism that at least gave an idea time to be wrong before it was replaced by another one.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai