TikTok on the menu

Here’s an a slightly amusing take on how TikTok and Instagram are transforming restaurant menus.

I think this is meant to be a piece in the moral crisis genre, but this is something that I find more interesting than problematic. Now that everyone has a camera on them all the time, and most people like sharing images, we’re going to start reshaping our physical world accordingly.

This process of technology causing changes to how we think and then the physical world is ancient. I was reading a theory that the invention of writing is what created the abhidhamma (a sort of Buddhist logic that tried to systematize the vast oral literature of the earliest strands of Buddhism). Similarly, it’s hard to imagine Protestantism without the printing press — sola scripture doesn’t really work without access to cheap Bibles.

I live on and island that was a giant fresh-water lake a mere quarter century ago. A century before that, the freshwater lake was a saltwater bay.

I’m fascinated by how our minds are shaped by our physical environment but then how are environment is shaped by our minds, and then the tools we make to tame our environments end up affecting us in unforeseen ways.