Archive • Connectivity by Justin Pot • Buttondown

The internet doesn't have to be like this

August 30, 2024

Living online can feel...numbing. Bo Burnham perhaps captured that best with That Funny Feeling, a song made up of various unrelated phrases that simulate...

Small ways to feel like yourself

August 22, 2024

I've been freelancing as a journalist full time for two and a half years now, which feels great. I am occasionally exhausted, and sometimes miss the...

You're doing great.

I've been exhausted lately, wondering why I'm not getting more done. Then I reviewed my invoices for the year. It turns out I've written almost as much this...

A few links and such

Hi! I hope you've been enjoying the summer. I have, which is why I haven't put out a newsletter lately, but I have been doing some writing. Here's a few...

Tech is cool; business is boring.

I love technology. I've spent most of my career writing about it and I don't want to do anything else. But there's a negative tone that runs through my...

Watch me attend three meetings at once

You can be forgiven if you have the impression that I hate AI. I do have profound concerns with the ways the technology is being rolled out, sure, but I'm...

Garbage in garbage out

Google put a box of AI-generated text at the top of their search results. If you don't know what that means, I'm talking about the slow-loading colorful text...

"Number go up" isn't everything (why "3 body problem" is bad)

I have no idea how many people read my articles. I love it. This hasn't always been true. When I worked at a culty tech company, I was forced to obsess over...

I refuse to apologize

Hello! This is the space where I traditionally apologize for not writing a newsletter lately. I could hypothetically mention that travelled recently, and...

The life changing magic of shutting up

Here’s a secret the people who run social media networks don’t want you to know—the one thing you can do to mess up their entire plan. You can, if you want...

Hi. I've been writing.

Hello! It's good to see you again. I've been busy. I started writing at Lifehacker around a month ago and am having a lot of fun with it. I thought I'd...

use technology to do things

December 30, 2023

It feels a little ridiculous to say my writing has a core theme. I'm just a guy who writes technology tutorials—step-by-step guides to doing specific things....

Are the tech bros, like...okay?

I was scrolling through Product Hunt the other day because I was in a good mood. I've been satisfied with my life lately, which means I'm not writing...

Build community outside of work

January 19, 2023

A couple of months ago I decided to quiet quit the social network, meaning I don't scroll the site anymore and only post links to my own work. I thought I...

An AI bro tried to recruit me and I did not react well

December 19, 2022

I am somewhat of a hot commodity in the world of content marketing in spite of my best efforts. Which means startup CEOs occasionally email me asking if I’ll...

I'm quiet quitting Twitter.

November 22, 2022

Three weeks ago I, for no particular reason, decided to re-examine my relationship with Twitter. I decided that I'm done(ish). I uninstalled the app from my...

Drifting into monoculture

November 2, 2022

directives:[] I'm reviewing cloud backup and services for work and am feeling the same way I do every time I do a bunch of reviews of software in the same...

When the grass actually is greener on the other side

October 12, 2022

The grass is always greener on the other side. It's a simple saying that's supposed to teach a simple lesson—namely, that you are always going to want what...

Never apologize for being offline.

September 28, 2022

The average human lifespan in the United States is 77, according the CDC. That works out to 4015 weeks, which is obviously wrong, or 28,105 days, which is...

I don't like metrics.

September 7, 2022

I deleted my time tracking software. It’s such a relief. The idea behind using the software, for me, was that if I knew how much time I wasting each day on...

Learning the wrong lessons.

August 24, 2022

Mira, my cat, would like to be on the table right now. She is not allowed to be on the table. She presumably wants to be there because she wants to be in my...

Let's save the world by making social media harder to use

August 10, 2022

directives:[] Let's save the world by making social media harder to use I think about Bo Burnham's Inside all the time. This Netflix comedy special, if you...

How to save money on steaming

Streaming is the new cable, or so the common wisdom goes. It's easy to spend more on streaming services now than the average cable bill was 20 years ago,...

Thanks, asshole commenters!

I’m thankful for asshole commenters. That’s not a joke. I learned to write online in the late 2000’s and early 2010s, when comment sections with loyal...

loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and loops and

We all live in loops. There's the obvious examples: the seasons, day following night. The planet you live in is traveling in a loop in space, which causes...

Twitter is not real life.

Here are a few tips for dealing with a Twitter mob directed at you by the comms team of a venture backed technology company, in case that sort of thing...

on catching COVID in 2022

I have COVID. I found out on Wednesday, when two lines showed up on one of the tests Joe Biden mailed me. One line means you don’t have COVID, two lines...

hi you should talk to your friends maybe

Slang from the 1920s fascinates me. Why are good things “the bee’s knees” or “the cat’s pajamas”? Why is a drunken bender “a toot?” The past is a world I...

There's no such thing as trolls.

"Fuck you." That's what the notification says. Dozens more just like it follow. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and so on and so forth, all from the...

your friendships are not a corporate asset.

This newsletter is brought to you by the feeling of relief you get by uninstalling Instagram, even if you’re just uninstalling it temporarily. Uninstalling:...

replacing algorithms with humans (music edition)

Lately I’m trying to replace the algorithms in my life with human curators. I’m starting with music. Spotify is very good at noticing what music you’re...

This Place Is Full of It: Towards an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale is the actual title of a paper published in Psychological Reports back in late...

Tech is not the underdog.

Tech companies, and tech people, spend a lot of time trying to project an idea that they are Not The Man. That they are, in some meaningful way, underdogs....

hello and welcome to my brain

This week I witnessed Kathy, my wife, watch a webinar on her laptop while simultaneously listening to a meeting on her phone. She can do that sort of...