Mark O’Connell

Tweet by Nandi showing a bizarre snowy(?!) fantasy city under a dark, cosmic sky, along with the text; "Leaked photo of heaven is going viral on social media. No wonder Christians are so determined to get there.

By far the funniest part of this insane post is that even the maniacs who believe this stuff are so media-pilled they refer to it as a 'leaked photo'. As if God, CEO of Heaven Studios, had included it in a press kit for awards season, but embargoed it til January 27th.

The Dublin Review at 100 - Dublin Book Festival The Dublin Review, Ireland’s quarterly magazine of essays, memoir, reportage and fiction, is celebrating its 100th issue. Join us for a special live broadcast of RTÉ Arena on Radio 1 in conversation w...

We'll be doing a live Arena show at @dublinbookfest.bsky.social celebrating 100 issues of @thedublinreview.bsky.social.

We'll have editor Brendan Barrington, contributors Sara Baume, @patrickfreyne.bsky.social, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and @mrkocnnll.bsky.social.

Do come, it's going to be special...

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

The War App | Mark O’Connell Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data

“It is often said that many nonfiction books should really have been magazine articles; this one feels like a LinkedIn post mercilessly stretched to nearly three hundred pages.” —Mark O’Connell on Palantir’s founder’s first book

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

Yeah man, keep being patronising snobs, that’ll get liberalism back on the road

Terrible book, terrible guy, great magazine

Yes, in the same way your thermostat suffers from the pain of burning

Exactly the effect I was going for, thrilled I pulled it off

Catholic handbags!!

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Instagram ads have gotten exponentially worse recently, right? Just an endlessly encroaching tide of slop and cheap scams

Thank you!

An Opera Takes A.I., Pronatalism and Hustle Culture to Space

The NYT talked to @jenniferwalshe.bsky.social and me about MARS, which opens tonight at Galway Arts Festival

I think that’s a solid assumption

Oo remembers lying awake after dinner at Combray for maman to give you a goodnight kiss?

Don’t tell me about a thing being “downstream of” another thing. I don’t want to hear it, and I won’t listen to it!

X post by Bryan Johnson: I'm 18 years old and have a 19 year old kid. Pretty wild.

This is an X screenshot I can get behind. No more J.K. Rowling screengrabs, just Bryan Johnson being delusional about how well his age reversal project is going

Patrick Collison here, illustrating a mindset that is, in many ways, a simple misunderstanding of life itself

It didn't strike me that it might be one of those words you don't really hear anymore

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star – podcast He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde ge...

For those of you who were simply too lazy to read my essay about MrBeast and the attention economy yourselves, here's me reading it for you www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2...

thinking again about this 2018 cover

Seems a little drastic, he could just shut them down in the normal way

(sliding out from under The Gyre on a mechanic's creeper, covered in grease) okay, bad news

Writehawks poster

This is on Thursday, and my last gig until after the Summer.

@urchinette.bsky.social @mrkocnnll.bsky.social and
@prasifcat.bsky.social

Tickets went in a couple of days but as there are frequently cancellations, @booksupstairs.bsky.social keep a wait list:

booksupstairs.ie/all-events/w...

‘Postliberalism’ is mainly books with titles like ‘The Fate of Civilisation and the Death of God at the End of the West’ by men with backgrounds as investment analysts

It’s a skeet, and you’re too cowardly to say it

I’ve had worse ideas, as you know

I worked in a hotel during a golf tournament when I was 18, and brought room service to Tiger Woods, who was sitting on a couch in his underwear watching himself play golf on tv

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star | Mark O’Connell The long read: He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of...

This essay is the best description of Mr Beast I have ever read: His oeuvre is “a Hobbesian gameshow of all against all,” and he “may not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve.”

via @mrkocnnll.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/ju...