Much online culture is industrialised rumination.

The call to actually do something is secondary to the incentives to feel, interpret, analyse and narrate. Online, our focus shifts from events to feelings about events, to how others respond to those feelings, and finally to what their response says about us. This recursive self-attention makes the self both the subject and the object of endless inquiry.

Ultimately, this is a trap, both online and offline. Insight might accumulate, but progress may not.

The validation of self-attention may become so powerful that it actively resists the possibility of change. We are not encouraged to grow, but to like and follow.