Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Jasmine Sun, who leads core product at Substack and runs Reboot, a publication “reimagining technology for a better collective future” that includes a biannual print magazine, Kernel. She also supports Mozilla’s advocacy work on Public AI.
Jasmine hates context collapse and loves media fragmentation, has been learning about “reaction GIFs” and “LCD Soundsystem” from her Millennial coworkers, and still uses BeReal religiously. —Nick
Support media fragmentation: Subscribe to Embedded.
“My dream meet-cute is to fall in love via a long and thoughtful email reply to my newsletter.”
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
JASMINE SUN:
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
JASMINE SUN: I deleted TikTok for the fifth time a week ago and you can’t trick me into installing it again.
EMBEDDED: Do you still tweet? Why?
JASMINE SUN: Less than before! I used to use Twitter to find articles and people with interesting takes, and it’s become impossible for that. Downranking links, less freshness on the FYP, more engagement bait … the algorithm used to emphasize cool stuff in your specific scene; now every tweet has a bimodal outcome of flopping or going mega-viral. There’s also way more racism/sexism, and it makes the site genuinely unpleasant to use.
But I’m an info junkie at heart, and for now, Twitter is still where we hang out. And from a product perspective, the tweet is such an elegant construction. The fact that every single thing on the site—whether blue-check or pleb, advertiser or human—is the same 280-character shape is quite revelatory. There are a bunch of downstream effects, like a flattening of social hierarchies—a sense that you can speak to anyone and they might speak back. The (old) character limit made the feed super scrollable, forcing military concision on every take or joke. I’m quite jealous of the invention.
EMBEDDED: Have you tried any alternatives to Twitter?
JASMINE SUN: I use Substack Notes every day—it’s a way better solve for “what is everyone reading” these days. Our internal data says I scrolled a literal 5k in the last 6 months.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
JASMINE SUN: Cooking videos, DJ sets, and tiny apartment tours.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
JASMINE SUN: This might be controversial, but I don’t believe in “following the news” as a general obligation! It can be politically deactivating to be aware of events if you’re not going to do anything about it. I follow the news as it relates to things that I work on and live directly (e.g. social/media, tech policy, San Francisco), and for everything else (e.g. most national politics), I try to be honest with myself that it’s mostly a form of reality TV.
That being said: specific newsletters and podcasts; my Twitter “Following” feed; and The New York Times.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
JASMINE SUN: Goodreads, Letterboxd, newsletters, and friends.
Looking for art and media is very different from finding a tool or appliance. I don’t want a Wirecutter recommendation based on a 57-variable Excel sheet or a 4.2-of-5 star rating averaged from ten thousand people with tastes totally unlike mine. It’s much more important to identify a small group whose lens on the world you vibe with.
I also don’t mind being a sheeple! I like pop culture. I listened to brat the day it came out but seeing it take off was so fun; I’m not really a film person but will watch every new Asian American movie because I want to talk about it with my friends. The Kendrick-Drake beef had me refreshing r/hiphopheads like I was in high school again. Consuming the same stuff as everyone else is great, actually—it reminds me that I’m part of a wider community; shared culture is what it means to be alive.
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
JASMINE SUN: I work with a bunch of Millennials, so I’ve been learning about cultural cornerstones like “reaction GIFs” and “LCD Soundsystem.”
JASMINE SUN: The best way to use Substack is to pretend you’re building your own weekly magazine or daily paper. I don’t read everything I subscribe to, and you shouldn’t either. I use the app to keep my email clean, and scroll it like a feed every day. I read the titles that interest me and “Save” things from Notes to send them to my inbox. I pay for writers whose work I want to exist in the world.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
JASMINE SUN: I hate context collapse and love media fragmentation. I think it’s so fun to switch between Instagram and Twitter and Discord and Slack and Substack and Pinterest and Strava and Beli and Goodreads and Letterboxd and Strava. I still use BeReal religiously, and my friend Matthew just got me on this social to-do list app called todo mate. Every app is like its own little friend group!
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
JASMINE SUN: I’ve probably listened to 95 percent of all episodes of The Ezra Klein Show, including the Vox days. Ezra is smart, a good listener, does the reading, and asks probing questions without being rude. But more than anything, the podcast’s greatest virtue is earnestness. So much media (especially in politics) is irony-poisoned—using flippancy or tribalism as a defensive crutch against the online mob—so it’s rare to hear someone who takes their platform seriously, is willing to take firm stances, yet cares deeply about getting them right.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
JASMINE SUN: Mark Zuckerberg subscribes to Reboot but if I’m being honest, he probably doesn’t read it. (Fortunately, many cooler people do.)
EMBEDDED: How would you describe Tumblr’s legacy?
JASMINE SUN: I think the early 2010s bifurcated between “Reddit teens” and “Tumblr teens” and, unfortunately for me and my personality, I was a Reddit teen.
EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, Slack, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?
JASMINE SUN: Besides Reboot’s private Discord, probably the Ettingermentum Substack Chat. It has fully broken our site before and they are constantly making fun of the devs and joking about going January 6th on Substack HQ. But there’s nowhere I get faster and funnier election memes so we fixed it for them anyway.
EMBEDDED: How has using LinkedIn benefitted you, if at all?
JASMINE SUN: No!
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or another chat tool for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
JASMINE SUN: I check Substack’s Slack like another social media feed and literally have to add a Screen Time limit when I go on vacation.
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
JASMINE SUN: Oh man, so many thoughts!
First, not every image/text made with AI is art, just like not every photo on my camera roll is art. Most uses of generative AI treat it more as a tool or a toy. I mostly use ChatGPT to look up synonyms or make funny pictures for my friends. The phrase “art generator” doesn’t make sense because every medium (photo, paint, etc.) can be used in artistic and non-artistic ways.
But AI can be an artistic medium, despite what some critics say. My artist friend Kelin Carolyn Zhang describes it well here: hallucinations, unpredictability, and the non-deterministic nature of AI’s outputs can be seen not as flaws, but special properties of the material itself.
Obviously there are people making slop with AI, but there are people making slop with crayons and Photoshop and 24-carat gold. And there are people creating amazing art from literal trash, dirt, pollution, and waste. One of my favorite pieces I saw this year was arguably just a mound of dirt—“El abrazo” by Delcy Morales at the Dia Chelsea.
Art is defined by intentionality, and we ought to view “AI art” as an interaction between humans and machines versus ascribing to a computer agency that does not exist.
Where AI differs is its interaction with data and rights. Unlike coding assistants trained on open-source software, most commercial image generation tools are trained on copyrighted work. It’s a non-consensual, extractive practice in an already-precarious industry. It’s always hard to put the tech genie back in the box, but I think this is a case where we should. Some good ideas here: universal opt-out requirements, as well as smaller models built on “clean data” like Creative Commons work or artist-made datasets.
EMBEDDED: Are you currently playing any console, computer, or phone games?
JASMINE SUN: I’m not a gamer because I don’t want to experience extra stress and competition in my leisure time. My hobbies are all things you can’t win or lose at—reading, writing, cooking, jogging.
EMBEDDED: Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share? What’s something that recently inspired debate in the chat?
JASMINE SUN: My beloved writing group chat is called “writers in residence(s)” because we just hang out in each others’ living rooms and work on projects while munching on pastries and fruit. You can follow some of their newsletters here: nikhil, john d. zhang, daniel bashir, Celine Nguyen.
Our last argument was about whether it’s valid to look up to podcasters as role models. (Yes and fight me.)
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
JASMINE SUN: 😭 is beautifully all-purpose (excited, cute, sad, confused) but I worry it’s going to be millennial-coded soon. ☹️—the big frown—is my new favorite.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
JASMINE SUN: If you send me a voice note I will literally never open it.
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
JASMINE SUN: Readwise is the best piece of software I use on a daily basis. It’s like Superhuman for people who read a lot. You can highlight and annotate articles in-situ; then save everything—webpages, Kindle books, PDFs, tweets—to one giant searchable database, on any device, online and off. The keyboard shortcuts are really fast. And the team is incredibly kind and responsive. They just build things that users want.
During the pandemic, I got really into Seek: a plant/animal identification app, and the single use of AI that has brought me the most joy. I learned about it in Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing. Even walking the same path 100 times over becomes fascinating when you know the names of every species that you’re looking at!
EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?
JASMINE SUN: I still don’t love most tech criticism I read. It’s too hype-y, or too cynical, or gets the basic facts wrong about how things work. It fails to differentiate between machine-made harms versus those rooted in our own flawed psyches and institutions; it often exaggerates tech’s power or invents false bogeymans in attempts at critique. It locates—and thus abdicates—the power to shape technology in a few big companies, missing the ways that smaller communities appropriate tools for their own goals. And some of my favorite outlets, like Real Life Mag, are gone!
I want more tech writing that balances specific and technically accurate descriptions with structure-and-systems-level analysis. I want criticism that makes me more attentive, intelligent, and discerning about the technologies around us. I want a Pitchfork for software. I want weird rabbit-hole investigations. I want more manifestos because I believe we can actually make the things that we want to see.
If this is your thing, please pitch Reboot. We pay!
EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?
