The Internet You Missed: A Last 2025 Snapshot
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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John F. Kennedy
17 min read
The article directly compares JFK's 1935 Harvard admissions essay to a modern one, using Kennedy as a symbol of how elite American education and selection criteria have changed over nearly a century
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Predictive coding
1 min read
The article's discussion of why people perceive strange lights in the sky explicitly references 'predictive processing' as a neuroscientific framework for understanding perception and misperception of ambiguous stimuli
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Mass psychogenic illness
17 min read
The article discusses social contagion and mass outbreaks of behavior (like spontaneous dancing) to explain the drone sighting phenomenon, directly relating to the scientific study of how psychological symptoms spread through populations
There are many internets. There are internets that are bright and clean and whistling fast, like the trains in Tokyo. There are internets filled with self-serious people pretending they’re in the halls of power, there are internets of gossip and heart emojis, and there are internets of clowns. There are internets you can only enter through a hole under your bed, an orifice into which you writhe.
Every year, paid subscribers of The Intrinsic Perspective submit their writing, and I curate and share the results. As usual, I’m impressed by the talent on display.
This is Part 2. I shared Part 1 months back, and while I normally do pace installments out, their rather lengthy separation this year was not my fault, you see. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, time itself has sped up in 2025—in 2024 time, it’s only late September. As scientists will likely show any day now, this is a function of our consciousnesses rapidly shrinking in qualia volume, thanks to a “temporal squeezing” effect triggered by neural downsampling after watching even the tiniest amount of AI slop from the corner of your eye.
Still, the quality was truly exceptional this year, so I’m happy I got to read these, and choose some excerpts to share. Please note that:
I cannot fact check each piece, nor is including it an endorsement of its contents or arguments.
Descriptions of each piece, in italics, were written by the authors themselves, not me (but sometimes adapted for readability). I’m just the curator here.
I personally pulled the excerpts and images from each piece after some thought, to give a sense of them.
So here is their internet, or our internet, or at least, the shutter-click frozen image of one possible internet.
1. “JFK vs. Jeffrey Wang” by Samuel Kao.
Comparing two Harvard admissions essays, one from 1935 and the other from 2014, and showing how the American elite has changed for the worse.
...For whatever reason I started thinking about an essay that AI startup entrepreneur Jeffrey Wang had written about studying at McDonald’s, which he used to apply successfully to several elite universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in 2014….
I also remembered John F. Kennedy’s admissions essay to Harvard, which went viral some time ago for its risible—to a 21st century reader—brevity, and I thought Kennedy’s work was a useful counterpoint to Wang’s. Taken
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.