Stop Looking At Each Other
What’s more, nothing on social media belongs to us. Our art, our ideas and our relationships are reduced to data to be mined and exploited by tech corporations, sometimes even used to train A.I. models. We have no backups, either: Few people still keep address books or mailing lists, much less diaries or photo albums. When we lose access to social ... See more
Opinion | I Gave Up My Smartphone for a Dumbphone. You Can, Too.
ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is anti-social, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.
Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
The problem with these technologies is that our culture of celebrity worship and emphasis on living the perfect life on social media means that many of us fall into the trap of believing self-promotion is more important than self-improvement.
Jason Hemlock • Stoicism: How to Use Stoic Philosophy to Find Inner Peace and Happiness
The illusionary perception that social media has brought us closer has faded. Living a performative life for the Internet is a recipe for emptiness. What has been revealed is that we are alone. We crave connection. Wherever we end up going, we want it to be more real. This means we should probably stop supporting centralized platforms, even if they... See more
Romance is dead. You can’t wonder what your crush is up to you anymore because you can just watch their Instagram Story. You can’t wonder where they have been, what music they listen to, what their life is like; it’s all there, listed on their Facebook profile like a product description, their personality packaged into their Instagram grid. And now... See more
Freya India • Rejecting The Machine
Do you think that our lives being more visible on social media has aggravated the problem of competition in friendship? It must do, because the anonymizing makes it less real. A physical encounter with somebody can smash through projections, because you realize that a person is actually generous, or thoughtful. Or you discover they have their own f
... See moreNatasha Lunn • Conversations on Love: with Philippa Perry, Dolly Alderton, Roxane Gay, Stephen Grosz, Esther Perel, and many more
We are living through a pandemic of selfing — rampant self-celebration that mistakes applause for connection, likes for love. Social media companies are capitalizing on our native need for affirmation, exploiting our compromised immunity to manipulation at every turn: algorithms prioritizing selfies over sunflowers, algorithms amplifying the word I... See more