Derek Thompson

Make number go up.

It might as well be the four-word mantra of the modern world.

If you think about it, it's actually somewhat difficult to name any corner of our lives that isn't drenched in external metrics.

To take two personal examples, I wear an Oura ring, and I use social media.

Oura quantifies how I spend my day.

Social media quantifies everything I say.

When I talk to the people in the office or at home or at a bar, nobody is scoring the cleverness of my repartee.

But when I move talking from the physical world to the digital world, I move conversation from a realm with no real-time scores to a realm that is nothing but scores.

Views on TikTok, likes on Instagram, retweets and likes on Twitter, upvotes on Reddit.

These digital conversations take on a different character.

We are different.

We talk differently on the internet because people on the internet aren't talking just to talk.

They are talking to make number go up.

What do we call this extraordinary force for bulldozing something inside of us, our values, and replacing it with something outside of us, something synthetic, bureaucratic, inauthentic?

Let's call it the machine.

If you become a philosopher to discover the meaning of life, but only work on the papers that you think will end up in journals scored highly by a bureaucracy that you'll never see, that's the machine.

If you're a podcaster who wants to answer the most compelling questions in the world, but you end up just focusing on rage bait political bullshit because that's what all the YouTube fingers are clicking on, that's the machine.

What is the opposite of the machine?

It's something a little different than success.

It's success plus the ability to hold our values in the face of external systems that are trying to crush them.