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How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
The stuckness doesn’t just apply to arguments about guns. It applies to our sclerotic politics more broadly: the overlapping crises from climate inaction, the constant bungling of our pandemic response, and the seemingly successful attempt to roll back abortion rights. The stuckness isn’t part of a debate about how to move forward. It is, instead,
... See moreThe Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
ubiquitous connectivity and our media environments naturally lend themselves toward an influencer-and-fandom dynamic. If the system is built to inspire more and more layers of commentary, then that system will privilege and reward people who feed it.
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
Sacasas has given me a valuable guiding question: How do we train our attention on our present and future, when so much of our life is spent ensconced in dispatches from the recent past?
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
For a technology that’s billed as an architecture of the future, crypto is powered by a discourse that’s rooted in the past. Perhaps that’s why so few cryptocurrency-based, Web3-style projects meaningfully address big, future-facing problems. Instead, they seem to want to re-create financial structures that already exist, only with new people at th... See more
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
In other words: A group of people direct their attention to something, and that changes its value. This, in turn, draws the eye of various media and attention merchants, which in turn changes the value again. Crypto hype is the purest and most logical endpoint of this phenomenon. What most people are talking about with a given crypto asset is just ... See more
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
Like the Depp-Heard coverage, the forces that Sacasas describes can be deeply cynical and destructive. They’re also almost always exhausting for those of us consuming them.
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
ubiquitous connectivity and our media environments naturally lend themselves toward an influencer-and-fandom dynamic. If the system is built to inspire more and more layers of commentary, then that system will privilege and reward people who feed it.
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
And so we fight against that futility, in part, by weighing in. And posting certainly feels like having agency.
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
“That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and ... See more