Wikipedia article about the friendship recession: the documented decline in close friendships and social connections, particularly among Americans since the 1990s. Data shows people have fewer close friends and spend less time socializing than previous generations.

Possible causes

• Bad urban planning which led to the destruction of inexpensive third places.
• Economic factors: as the value of wages have stagnated, people may choose to focus on work instead of investing time in friendships.
• Increased technology and social media usage: there are links between heavy social media and internet use and fewer friends and time spent with others.
• The COVID-19 pandemic: people were forced to limit their physical contact with their friends and could have lost touch.

The article also touches on the heavy health impact of loneliness. Interestingly enough, the article is rather light on details and has only been translated to one other language.

Guillaume Slizewicz and mosaic restorer Françoise Lombaers created physical mosaics using four different algorithms: mycelium networks, minimum spanning trees, cellular automata, and wave propagation. They used square tiles as pixels to translate computational patterns into traditional mosaic craft, finding ways to represent organic movement through geometric constraints.

The data sonification studio Loud Numbers created a sonification machine that create music based on various real-time data sources such as temperature, human/bot ratio on the internet, or current cloud cover.

From Loud Numbers' own Sonification Machine page:

What does a cloudless sky on a warm day sound like? What about a rainy night, with the international space station passing overhead, and an internet full of bots? The Sonification Machine suggests an answer, allowing us to hear the physical and digital environment that surrounds us. Eight different soundscapes are created by live streams of data captured by global sensors.

The sonification machine creation takes root in Yuri Suzuki's Ambient Machine. Yuri Suzuki being himself inspired by the work of Brian Eno.

The Ambient Machine is an instrument for shaping the sonic atmosphere of our daily lives — an exploration of how sound influences mood, perception, and presence. It transforms background noise into an intentional composition, allowing users to design their own evolving soundscapes through a simple, tactile interface.

Born from a time when we became acutely aware of our immediate surroundings, the Ambient Machine responds to the need for both escape and grounding. White noise masks intrusive sounds, natural ambiences transport us elsewhere, and rhythmic patterns provide a sense of structure and calm. Inspired by Erik Satie’s concept of "furniture music" and the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno, this piece merges chance with control, creating an ever-shifting dialogue between user and environment.

What happens when virtue signaling is taken to the extreme? Purity spirals: the phenomenon where groups become increasingly extreme as members compete to demonstrate ideological purity. The concept describes how communities can radicalize themselves through escalating demands for conformity to their core beliefs.

I watched that video multiple times and can't get bored of the first 5 minutes. The filming, editing, and riding are incredible.