alice smith

I’m curious about the way it’s impacting our inner monologues. The constant self-analysis, the picking-apart, the internal work . In collusion with capitalism and social media and the digital panopticon, seeing ourselves through a therapized lens means regarding the self as the ultimate project. It’s easy to forget there are other ways to live.

In the last ten years, pattern recognition has become a cultural activity. You see that on the bad end, like QAnon, and on the more fun end with the pervasiveness of trend forecasting.

“We’re moving away from the need to say, ‘These items put together are an aesthetic,’ and moving towards a more fluid state,” Panzoni says. Instead of “grabbing” an aesthetic as a whole, consumers can take elements and incorporate them into their own style. “This shift is why we haven’t seen a micro-trend pop in a little bit,” she says.

I don’t think the tools themselves are the problem; it’s how the entirety of human culture has been digested and regurgitated by them.

Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

For thousands of years, Earth’s resources have been extracted by bodies, most of whom were not free. But now it’s our bodies and ourselves being extracted.

- Hans Ulrich Olbrist

Brands are just tools for consumers to describe their personality. If your personality is flat, then you wear obvious things.

“I realized that internet policy-makers and internet artists have similar interests, but different skill sets. Internet artists make work that questions themes of data extraction, surveillance, provenance, identity, and this open display creates a cultural shift that then provides enough momentum for a policy shift. Then once it moves into that

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