Just for a second I thought I remembered you

the obvious aim of the then newly christened Meta to stake an ownership claim not only over users’ “true identities” but over all the things that populate their sensoria, replacing physical reality with virtual realities for which we would need a cascading array of subscriptions to navigate the ever-proliferating levels of differential access.

The more the world fills with slop, the more human gestures stand out and reverberate with new meaning. Accessing glib simulations of information will have become commoditized, but someone actually telling you something, anything, will seem more important than ever.

I argued before that “social media” was an alibi for injecting more TV into people’s lives to take advantage of increased network connectivity — that we had to be persuaded that it was a pro-social thing to do to carry little TVs around and watch them at every possible moment. Conflating friendship and entertainment was part of that campaign. Now c... See more