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How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
“I think it also has to do with the proportion of one’s daily experience to dispatches from the past,” Sacasas said. Pre-internet, “the totality of my day wasn't enclosed by this experience of media artifacts coming to me.”
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
This depressing observation struck me as one outcome of living on an internet that is stuck in the past. It might seem the other way around: that our fleeting attention is the result of an internet that’s unrelentingly feeding us the now. But my hunch is that people feel stuck or move on because online, these events feel like things that have happe... See more
The Atlantic • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
“As we layer on these events, it becomes difficult for anything to break through. You’re trying to enter the information environment and the debate, and you find layer upon layer of abstraction over the initial point of conflict. You find yourself talking about what people are saying about the thing, instead of talking about the thing. We’re caking... See more
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
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
When it comes to the internet and our media ecosystems, it is easy to hurl vague, blanket critiques like Social media is making everything feel worse. That is mostly true, by the way—but it’s obvious. Which is why I was drawn to a recent idea from writer and technology theorist L.M. Sacasas: The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not... See more
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
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.