If you know to look, you can feel the difference between software crafted with care for its users and systems of vacuous tradition that just happen to be good at producing the vapid fodder of convenience.

Identity is contextual and, if we are to live, breathe, and grow, it has to remain contextual. The Internet of the “authentic self” — a loathsome, aberrant idea if there ever was one — is an exercise in slowly getting strangled by your past selves.

2. On the internet, all actions are inscriptions.

Structuration is a process of reciprocal interaction between human actors and the structural features of organisations, including organisations defined by technology. Human actions are both enabled and constrained by organisational structures; and those structures are the result of previous interactions.

These trends work together to keep us stuck in a permanent past because they make it harder to follow different trajectories, to see meaning, to grow as people. It’s a world that rewards predicting over inventing.

As we have seen in the previous theses, our digital environment:

Regulates our lives towards a smaller number of paths purposely designed by others rather than trails more fortuitous and exploratory.

Builds up a monolithic authentic self rather than a lush set of mutually-enriching contextual identities.

Is heavily focused on categorising people,

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Instead of building rooted, meaningful communities what we have is a worldwide eternal mosh pit. You can log out any time you like — but you can never leave.

7. On the internet, the past is a black hole sucking the future into itself.

4. On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.