Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Death of Casual Posting w/ Kyle Chayka

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co In the early days of the internet, social media offered a space where anyone could casually share their daily thoughts, fleeting moments, and observations about the world. Casual posting was the norm, and this extension of everyday life still felt spontaneous and personal. But lately, that culture has disappeared. It has been replaced by highly curated influencer content, manufactured viral slop, and it feels like everyone is just posting… less. Kyle Chayka is a writer at The New Yorker and he recently explored this phenomenon in a piece. He joins me to talk about the death of casual posting and what this shift says about the future of the internet. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Like as a creator, you're kind of stuck between getting ignored and doing your own thing for a tiny crowd or getting swept away on this massive tide of slop and garbage. Back in the early days of the internet, social media offered a space where anyone could casually share thoughts, fleeting moments, and observations about the world. Casual posting was the norm and the online world felt spontaneous and personal. But lately, that culture has disappeared. It's been replaced by highly curated influencer content, manufactured viral sloth. and it feels like everyone is just posting less.

Kyle Chaka is a writer at The New Yorker, and he recently explored this phenomenon in an article titled, Are You Experiencing Posting On We? He joins me to talk about the death of casual posting online and what this shift says about the future of the internet. Kyle, welcome. Thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me.

So what made you want to write this article about posting on we? And can you kind of describe this phenomenon? I mean, I wanted to write an article about posting on we, because I was feeling it myself. Posting on we is not a phrase that anyone was using in particular. This is my own sense of just being apathetic about posting, like feeling this aversion to putting stuff out there, not feeling that I was getting as much back when I did post things,

and just feeling a little bit alienated, I guess, from the normal social media feeds. And I think lately, as I've thought about posting my breakfast, or, you know, what I eat for dinner, or those kind of cliches of social media, I just have felt like there's no place for that anymore. And I wanted to explore that and see if anyone else is feeling the same thing. And it turns out they definitely are.

You know, when Twitter started, I feel like there was this whole meme of like, no one wants to see what you had for lunch. And that was used really in the late aughts and early 2010s sort of as this argument against social media, where it was like, who cares about the silly mundane aspects of your life? And it turned out a lot of people did. And I feel like for millennials, a lot of the day-to-day post

is kind of what helped birth the rise of social media. Yeah, that's what I was recalling in this piece. I mean, I was thinking back to 2009 through 2011, say, and that era when it actually felt new and different to post a photo of your lunch online. Like, as you say, that was the cliche. That was the like the aspersion that you cast. That was the insult, like, stop posting your lunch because no one else cares.

But actually that kind of mundane material and just like the everyday content of your life, that's what makes social media what it was, at least. Like, it's everyone throwing out their random thoughts and making stupid jokes and posting the funny thing that they saw or the funny thing that their pet did. And that's kind of what made it fun. I want to kind of walk through how social media changed.

So if, you know, the social media of the late aughts in early 2010s was defined by this like casual posting and documenting everything, even the like mundane aspects of your daily life, like, how did things change as the 2010s progressed? And how did how people, people use social media change. I think at first we were kind of making up a new format, right? Like, suddenly we were in this real-time feed of millions of different people posting all the time,

and we were like figuring out how to interact with other people and what might be interesting to other people. So at that point, everything felt fresh and new. Like we're doing this grand experiment together. Then I feel like over the course of the 2010s, like, let's say by the mid-2010s, that kind of fossilizes and that insult emerges, like, why are you posting photos of your lunch? No one cares. Because I think social media, it started to become more politicized in a way, like, certainly by the 2016 election. I actually want to like dig in on that year specifically because 2016 is also

when Instagram launched stories. And I feel like the rise of ephemeral content kind of weaned people off posting because you used to have to post, like, you'd have to do a hard post. You know, if you wanted to share a picture of like your lunch, like you were hard posting that on Instagram, which feels crazy now. And then I feel like there was Snapchat and Instagram stories, really in like 2015 and 2016, and you started to see like the boomerangs. And like a lot of that like posting behavior

moved to more ephemeral formats. For sure. I mean, I think to me posting in this article is like all kinds of posting. Like it is about Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram and Snapchat and that era. And I feel like as you were saying, during that time, everything was a hard post.

Like everything went to everyone. You kind of had to accept. that if you were going to post banal stuff, it had to sit right next to things that were really important or things that mattered. So then when Snapchat pioneered that format of the disappearing post and more posting moved to less visible spaces, let's say, then I think people got more used to hiding those banal moments or like controlling more closely how those banal moments reached people. Also, there was this concept really kind of later in the 2010s of keeping a short Instagram grid. There was like trend articles written about this, like Gen Z doesn't keep a long

Instagram grid or whatever. But it seems like people also started to sort of change their ideas around privacy and kind of like the digital footprint that they had amassed. Yeah, I wonder if that change is kind of about thinking of social media as an archive of your life and like an ongoing record and that shifting to social media being a curated picture of your life at a given moment. Like, I don't know, on Facebook in the early days, it was just kind of everything you had ever posted and every, like, relationship changed since you were 16. Like, we've kind of lost that sense of social media. And now your social media account is like your LinkedIn in a way.

It's like your lifestyle portfolio. It represents you. And so you curate it more and you worry more about what it looks like as a whole. What role do you feel like algorithmic feeds played in all of this? Because 2015, 2016 is also when we started to see like algorithmic feeds, but really, I think they've accelerated in the 2020s. Do you think part of it is also just like posting the more mundane stuff, like, that stuff just does not rank well in the algorithm and it kind of feels like pointless.

Like it's so embarrassing to post something benign, I don't know, about like your daily life or something silly and like it's like no engagement. You're like, why did I even post this? I think it has to do with how algorithmic feeds disconnect you from your audience, actually. Like before the algorithmic era, you kind of knew who you were talking to on the internet. you had a sense of who the like 100 or 200 followers who actually mattered to you were, like you knew your tweet would reach them or you knew your Instagram would be seen by your friends. And I think the gamble of algorithmic social media was just that we rely on the algorithm

to show us stuff we're interested in rather than choosing who are interested in seeing posts from. And so that means that you don't know who you're reaching. And you also don't know who you're consuming. Like in the algorithmic feed, you're getting posts from random people, from accounts you don't know. And that lack of context means you really don't care about their breakfast photos. Like, if it's not your friends, then yeah, maybe you don't want to see that kind of content. And then I think it slowly disincentivizes the posting of that kind of casual stuff. You kind of feel unsafe throwing out a random thought or you don't know that your followers will interpret it in the way that you mean it.

There's a lot more like context collapse for sure. And you don't have that like emotional bond as much, I guess. with the people that you're following. So you're just kind of like, why is someone's random sandwich in my feed? Like, I don't care or know that person. Though at the same time, like, some of that content is good. Like, I think part of the thesis of this article is that if that stuff went away entirely, social media would be bankrupt, right?

It would only be professional content. Another thing with algorithmic feeds, I feel like, is just that your content is suddenly mashed in between increasingly, like, inflammatory content, engagement bait, and just, like, horrific news. I think 2016 was this turning point for politics online. Obviously, Trump's election made people a lot more political throughout the 2010s. And you talked in your piece about, I think it was one girl saying, like, I feel kind of awkward sharing my benign, like, daily life now when there's just the whole internet is just full of atrocities. So is it just like that our world is so miserable that this stuff seems trivial?

There's now no separation between the trivial and the horrific, right? Like your breakfast photo sits right next to footage from Gaza. or news about more weapons going to Ukraine, or you name the horrible thing that's going on, the ice raids in the United States. So it does feel weird or awkward or just, like, bad to put your own random thoughts next to those things. But, I mean, feeds have been drifting that way for a long time, right?

Now there is that whole context collapse. There's no differentiation between any kind of content. It all just exists in this huge, real-time stream of multimedia. that is alienating the normal user from wanting to post their life when it has to sit next to this horrific imagery. It feels awkward and kind of insensitive almost to post. Yeah, and I did, I mean, as I was researching this article, I did just put out calls on social media just to be like, how are you feeling about posting these days? And I was actually surprised at how many people got back to me with that answer. Like, they really did feel alienated and kind of concerned and just bad.

ad about their own content sitting next to this terrible news that they wanted to engage with. Like, they're not ignoring the news, but they just can't see how they fit in with this whole landscape of, you know, real-time headlines about war and violence. It's funny because it feels like actually like Twitter spillover. Like that was always this sort of concern about Twitter. Like, for instance, when the Boston bombing was happening, right? And some brand would tweet and you'd be like, how could you tweet at this time, you know? And it's like, maybe now that it's,

like news has led to all these other apps. We all kind of feel that sense of nervousness. I mean, people talk to me a lot about Instagram stories. They were like, oh, Instagram stories is where your life goes, where your casual posts go. But you're still sitting right next to, you know, the publications you follow, posting news updates and links to stories and, you know, activist memes and, you know, projects from people you follow. And so that kind of mixture, like the mixture of news and personal stuff follows you everywhere. I don't think there's a safe space away from that except for maybe your own newsletter or something,

like your own totally controlled space. It feels like Instagram stories also has just become less of a place to talk about what you're doing and yourself and more to express like your ideas and beliefs. And I think like 2020 infographic culture, like also when they made it easy to reshare content from Instagram to your story, like I think that changed the dynamic. Because initially like you couldn't do that and you had to just. post, like you had to upload photos in your own content. And now I feel like so much of Instagram stories is resharing and amplifying other content. Yeah. So it becomes about curating what you're presenting to other people more so. It's like you are only doing retweets. Like you can only share the posts that already exist and you're a little bit discouraged from just making things on your

own. And yet that like we all want original content, right? Like we're we're not there just to see how many people are reposting the same meme. So it kind of feels duplicitous in a way. I also think this has followed the rampant commodification of every feed and, like, the intrusion of advertising to every single space on social media. Yeah, I feel like advertising has just made it less fun. It's ironic because we're at the same time that we're seeing this, like, Jonathan Haidt bull's like moral panic of like, like, the kids are so online and we need to get them to log off. I feel like actually a lot of people are sort of intentionally overwhelmed in logging off because they're just kind of exhausted by being bombarded with like shopping links. I mean, I saw TikTok usage was down actually year over year. And when I was talking to TikTok users, they were like, it's TikTok shop.

It's just the whole thing is like a shopping mall. Yeah, the product has gotten worse. I mean, the experience has gotten worse in all these different apps, I think, whether it's, you know, Facebook AI slop or Instagram putting ads between every story or TikTok just becoming so distracting and diffuse that you like can't get a normal feed anymore. And so if the experience is that bad, why would you want to post? Yeah, it's just like an inchification vibe everywhere. It also feels like there's a spaces to post.

Like, when you think about the early 2010s, there was so much like innovation and there was four square and there was hipstomatic and there was like, I don't know, just all these like pop-up social networks like peach and L.O. And, you know, things that just don't exist anymore. And now it feels like we also have just such a monopoly or duopoly or whatever. You know, there's just not that many places to express yourself. I mean, there's always more. Like you can always just not post on Facebook and Instagram and X.

and blue sky. Like, you can go have your own blog. You can, you know, only post on a newsletter that you run yourself. But it's like the audience still hasn't totally exited those mass spaces. Like, as a creator, you're kind of stuck between getting your ignored and doing your own thing for a tiny crowd or getting swept away in this massive tide of slop and garbage. And like, neither option is that appealing. Well, I'm curious kind of like what role content creator culture plays in all this, too. Because There are also at the same time that like average people, I agree with you, are sort of feeling posting apathy, posting less casual stuff.

Like we're also seeing the professionalization of social media. And I wanted to share some stuff from a recent event. And I was like, God, you know, I feel like I have to edit it into some cinematic reel or people are going to be like, what is this crap, you know? So like, I don't know if you talk to anybody or if they ever talked about that pressure too of just like the production quality feeling, you know, going up. I mean, I think everyone feels the not the barrier to entry really, but. just the standard of what is a good post gets higher and higher. And so it's not just a nice still photo. It's not just a good selfie. It's like a good video, a well-edited video, a well-edited video with the right soundtrack, you know, engaging with the right meme at the right time. And so it just

feels like there's more hoops to jump through and like more boxes to check to even put something out there. And I think, I mean, creator culture is a response to this in a lot of ways, I think. like in this morass of stuff, we gravitate toward individual people and voices who are professionalized and who do put out good content, and we know them and trust them. But for the rest of us, like, if you don't want to fully professionalize yourself, if you don't want to get the ringlight and the good camera and, you know, learn Capcut or whatever, like, you're kind of out of luck. It feels like we're replicating the dynamics of more traditional media or even something

like YouTube, which was always more about like consumption, like average people. I mean, YouTube has tried now more recently to get them to post through shorts. But like, I guess most entertainment platforms, like, people are there for entertainment. They're not there to express themselves. And maybe the rise of TikTok, too, is like an entertainment platform. It seems like social media is moving more towards entertainment rather than self-expression. At this point, it's not surprising that it's passive entertainment. Like, it's been passive entertainment for a few years now.

And I think what struck me while writing the piece was just like, that's a huge contrast from where we were at in 2011, 2012, when the whole ideology almost was that everyone should post. Like, we should put our lives online. It'll be great. Like, we'll all share these moments and information and thoughts, and it'll lead to something amazing. And it obviously didn't, you know, that didn't totally work out. But now we also have this other hellish environments in which we all have to look perfect and act perfect and comply with algorithmic aesthetics.

And that's not fun either. That's not fun. That's not fun. feels worse. And I do feel like we've lost something by losing the casual posting. Like, can you talk about kind of that aspect of it? What have we lost? It's this beautiful dream of the amazing random tweet. Like, what I just remember is, like, some days on Twitter, the tweet of the day would just come from nowhere. It would come from an account with, like, 200 followers. And it was just someone touching the face of God, as it were, and just like coming up with the most amazing joke or thought

or observation, and then suddenly millions of people were consuming it. And that was kind of the good version of going viral. Those are some of my favorite kinds of posts where it's not someone trying to go viral. It's not someone trying to make professional content, but they just happen to hit something that's totally universal. And I think we're losing that, like, serendipity and the unpolishedness of it. And what we're moving toward is this hyper-polished, hyper-curated, hyper-optimized version of posting.

Do you think we'll ever reach this point of like posting zero where like basically average people just simply don't share their life online anymore? Like Facebook is increasingly overrun and same with Instagram with AI Slop. These platforms are all professionalizing. It seems like there's almost only downsides now to posting about yourself, whether you're revealing private data about yourself or you say the wrong thing and there's context collapse. Like it seems hard to think of the upside and there's so many other ways to connect online. Like, the only upside is if you are aspiring to become one of these public figures and trying to become a creator or, you know, influencer of some stripe. And I think a lot of people still are. Like, if you want to make a career as an artist or a writer or a musician or anything, like, you do have to play this game a little bit.

But for the average user, I just don't see the upside, as you're saying. Like, maybe you get some more attention. It's as likely to be very negative attention as it is to be positive. And I kind of wonder if that culture is just gone forever a little bit. Like, we pass through the peak iteration of sharing our lives online and making ourselves public. And now we kind of know that that's not a great idea. It exposes a lot of people. It can be dangerous.

It can be, you know, problematic and open you up to other people's judgment. And now we do have these other ways of sharing digitally and creating content, but not having it go everywhere and not having it be public. So I think it gravitates more toward those close. spaces, like a text thread. Like the new Twitter is just your group text. Yeah, there are so many things that I feel like 10 years ago I would have tweeted and now I absolutely just text them. Not even because it's like there are anything bad. It's just that no one cares. And I know the people that do care and I want to post it in my group chat. There's also just, I think, bigger and bigger group chats. Like I feel like people are just being added. I don't know if this is universal experience,

but there'll be like 50 people in a group chat where it feels like, all right, there's everyone that I could possibly want to reach about this is in this mass chat. Yeah, like the big WhatsApp chats or like a Telegram channel or a Discord. Like there are other ways to reach more curated groups of people. And I feel like I've been seeing this idea crop up more too, like not just the creation of posts, but the curation of your audience for what you are posting online. And that seems like there's a lot of pressure to curate your audience now too. Because if you don't curate your audience well, you could be texting Jeffrey Goldberg about

your war plans or whatever. How do you think the social media companies are reacting to all of this? Because they relied on people sharing all of this sort of mundane content to keep people engaged, to keep people to monetize. So, I mean, some of them obviously are pushing us all into more content creation. Like Reels has bonuses now and everyone's pressure to be a creator. But are they doing anything or making any design changes to encourage casual posting? It's a good question. I mean, I bet they will. Like, as this problem becomes more dire. Something like Be Real seemed to present a solution, right? Like, that was an invitation to post something really casual in real time. And no one was going to judge you if your Be Real was not

perfect because it was never supposed to be perfect. But that kind of petered out, obviously. I feel like what they're shifting more toward is just AI slop. Like, Mark Zuckerberg saying that, oh, you have two real friends. Like, we're going to give you 10 AI friends. And the automated content is going to fill up your feed rather than other humans posting casually because they want to share something in their life. Well, that feels like we're losing like the humanity of the internet, kind of. The robot internet has been a conspiracy theory for a while, I guess. But in social media, it's more literal, right?

Like, there's more AI bots. There's more automated content. There's more just dry corporate stuff on there. And so you are losing that person-to-person connection. and it's going to places like substack or a Discord chat. How do you think this is affecting people's mental health or perception of the world? Because I do think, like, one thing that I loved about early social media

was this, like, peak into people's lives that wasn't so curated. It wasn't the day in my life videos. It wasn't the, like, super, like, formatted content. And I think we're just getting a lot less of that now, obviously. So I'm wondering what you think the ripple effects are on the users. Yeah, it's interesting. feel more real, I guess, or less curated a decade ago. And I think, and what I miss in this

scenario is not just people casually posting their lives, but like intellectual people casually having conversations in public, like the academics, the researchers, the policy people were all chattering out loud in a much less guarded way back in the day. And now it's just like weaponized almost and very rigid and pre-designed in your group chat. And then everyone goes out in public with the same ideas. So I don't know, for the end user, it just feels like the experience is worse and the overall content is worse. I mean, it's good if what you want to consume is like clips of Sabrina Carpenter and posts from Vogue or something. But it's the intimacy that social media once promised is gone, I think. I mean, it's, it's vanishing in front of us.

I mean, people always hated on Mark Zuckerberg for being like, I think it's a beautiful thing. The internet can connect to the world or whatever, because it's like, okay, well, now you've just connected, you know, Nazis to each other or whatever. But I do believe that, like, a more connected world is a better world overall. Like, it seems like a net positive that we can find people that are interested in the same things that we're interested in. Or, like, you said, I mean, I think, like, when we talk about the death of casual posting, it's important to remember that it wasn't just sandwiches.

It was, like, casual intellectual conversations and casual, like, expression of ideas. And now, I mean, I guess we still have that casual expression. It's just that like the worst ideas are the ones. Yeah. It's like fascist, casual ideas or what's, you know. Cryptocurrency schemes. Like, I mean, if you think about where the major social networks have gone, like Facebook is bad, as we've said, like, four times. Instagram is really crowded and commodified.

X is literally full of Nazis to the point that like the AI chatbot became a Nazi. I find more of that intellectual conversation and like casual post. on Blue Sky, but it's a small place. And maybe if you want that and you like that flavor of posting, you might go there and engage with it. But that's still not the promise of Twitter in 2012 or something. I had some nostalgia and just like rememories from that era writing this piece. And there were points where if your Amtrak train stopped,

or if you saw an accident happen, or if literally anything in the world was happening, you could search it on Twitter, and someone's, someone somewhere was posting about it. And that is not the case anymore. You can't rely on this idea that someone somewhere is posting about something all the time. You know, you mentioned Blue Sky, which somebody described one time of like methadone for like millennial Twitter addicts or something. And I'm on there too, but it's like you're sort of trying to reclaim like the glory days of what once was. And you mentioned Be Real earlier too, but like we really haven't seen

aside from these sort of flash in the pans like apps that come and go, like, Do you think that we'll ever see a social network that could get people to post casually again or that could sort of incentivize that sort of connection? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think people want to post. Like, I believe in the fundamental desire. The people yearn. The people yearn to post.

And we also yearn to consume that, like, you know, the best joke. The writer's drum of a million people, someone's going to come up with the most amazing joke. Encouraging that behavior has to do with design choices. Like, you want to protect your self. you know, when things go too viral, or you want to know that your audience understands your context. And so, I don't know. I mean, I think newsletters do do that in some way, like they encourage intellectual discussion and encourage specific communities to develop.

I know there are some interesting apps for, like, sharing photos of your baby who you don't want to post on social media. And it's like a little newsletter that goes out to your 100 friends and family. That's not the public consumption social media. Yeah, that's just like back to the private communities thing. After writing the sillyest, I was kind of like, okay, that kind of public user-generated social media is dying. Like, maybe for good, like, both permanently and for the best, for many people. And I guess social media just becomes more like TV where there's a high bar to clear and you're more or less professionalized.

And it's just less diverse and less interesting. Yeah, I think if we would ever want to get back to the point where to, like, mass, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are sharing casually about their lives, like, we would need to reclaim a level of optimism about technology and the internet that is, frankly, unwarranted, you know? Like, we're not hopeful for the best at this point. And I think there are ways you could design a better system. I mean, there's a platform like Blue Sky or like Arena, which is a kind of Pinterest, like a hyper-curated Pinterest. Like those enable really cool content to be created. It's just not at the same scale, and it's not going to appeal to the same mess audience as it did before. One thing that I think is kind of interesting, though,

is I've been making a video about people filming in public. I think I talked to it for it too. And I feel like people are capturing a lot of like B-roll of their life still, or they're capturing these moments, and they're just keeping it on their camera role. Or they're maybe like they're getting it together to package in a year-end, you know, video or whatever. It doesn't seem like we've stopped documenting things. Like, people, I think,

like, if you make a nice meal, you still feel that urge. Maybe this is a millennial trait to, like, take a picture of it. But we just don't share it. Do you think that that will eventually stop, too? I mean, it is really funny, as you're saying, like, documentation is going up, even as, like, posting is going down in a way, because we just have this thirst to document, almost even more so than to share. Like, I still take photos of everything, even though I don't post that much on Instagram. And I kind of enjoy, like, scrolling through my own Google Photos archive and being like, oh, what happened to me on December 3rd, 2021? And that's, like, an interesting record of your own life. So I think that urge to document doesn't go away. But I do wonder what

form it takes in the future. Like, is it AI curated montages of your life that you then share with your friends or, like, send out as a Christmas card, essentially? I think of this moment. back in 2012 when Facebook rolled out timeline, which so many young people are really too young to even remember, but before timeline, it was actually really hard to like scroll back. There was no like memories feature, like you couldn't really like view your past content easily. And Facebook completely redesigned their app in order to make it easier to kind of like mine your past. And this is also when they started to resurface old memories to you. And I wonder if as we're just like documenting more in private that like I photo will do that. We already do get like on this day,

you know, so-and-so, like on Google Photos and ICloud. But just with the rise of AI, it seems like we could get a lot more kind of like specific, curated memory moments, I guess. Memories of our own life, shown back to us. I mean, that is like a piece of wholesome content in a way. It is interesting to see what you documented about your own life. But then the creepiness of AI doing that, like, I would immediately be scared that it was making up my own life or like, you know, showing me things that didn't happen or whatever.

It would be weird. Hopefully it would only use your own content and not be making up AI generated content of your life. But I do think that like the way that AI recasts content is interesting and can change kind of the narrative of how you viewed things. I mean, we all are familiar with like the apps, like bring you back a photo of your ex or something. You're like, that was actually a terrible memory or like someone died. But I was thinking of this recently where I had moved to Baltimore. The Google Photos made me one of those like videos or whatever. And it was such a happy video.

And it was such a stressful move and it was kind of miserable, but re-consuming it, like, kind of changed my memory of it almost. And so I just do wonder, like, what role technology will play. Like, as we're documenting more and more, especially with like meta-smart classes and all these other things, like, how we'll sort of re-see our life. It feels like that Black Mirror episode.

Yeah, well, I mean, in an interesting way, social media was about packaging your life. Like, it was about assembling images and clips and, like, presenting a view of your life to the world. And now you can have AI do that for yourself. And I don't know, maybe you would share that. Maybe there's like timelines of that kind of stuff. But I don't know, it feels something about it feels like narcissistic. I'm like the interesting thing about sharing random moments on Instagram or Twitter was that like there was a limit. Like there was a frame to fill. There was a

context in which other people were doing the same thing. And I think until we have that, until we have that like communal experience, we won't all jump into doing it again. Remember all the moral panic, though, in the 2010s about how, like, social media is leading to narcissism and, like, millennials can't stop posting. Well, now people have stopped posting. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for joining me to chat about all this stuff. Yes, this was fun. We'll have to see where social media goes next if it's not our own random life moments.

I think we should bring back casual posting, maybe. We claim it. I think we should. Yeah, we need to all do it. and be the post the kind of post you want to see in the world, as Gandhi or whoever said. All right, that's it for the show. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag.

That's Usermag.com, where I write about all of this stuff and more. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next week.