Rejecting The Machine
In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that p... See more
Drew Austin • #184: Pure Pain Sugar
As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperatel... See more
David Pierce • So Where Are We All Supposed to Go Now?
Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad a
... See moreJia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
In its most dehumanizing form, this view sees individual people as interchangeable, separate repositories of this usable time stuff: as Marx put it, “nothing more than personified labour-time.”
Jenny Odell • Saving Time
This commodification of the self accelerated with the advent of Instagram, which turned the visual trappings of our personal lives into fodder for the feed.