We might say, then, that the conditions of pervasive digitization have rendered the full range of human experience a text to be interpreted. Condemned to preform ever more baroque hermeneutical maneuvers we are deprived the satisfactions of a naive experience of reality. Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues ... See more

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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The inception of The Edge comes at a time when we haven’t yet found a healthy relationship with technology. Online we’re more interconnected than ever, but at what cost? The beauty of life and human nature can’t be captured in a photo or 140 characters. So why do we try? According to the Pew Research Center about a quarter of U.S. adults say they a... See more

With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, perma

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This customization made possible by our “always-online society” can also have negative effects: people have become more prone to becoming anxious when either physical or virtually disconnected from others and it puts us all in a state of mutual surveillance. So, on the one hand, there is the feeling of always wanting to be connected to somebody, an... See more

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

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I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? H... See more

“The proliferation of devices surrounding us at all times may help us “get in touch” with other people, sure, but they impede our ability to get in touch with ourselves. A “touch” screen would indeed seem to promise something tactile and real, but they leave us cold, tepid, and listless. Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order

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