Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

Having successfully mined the words, pictures, and thoughts of their current users for profit, the platforms can now, with their LLMs, mine the words, pictures, and thoughts of the past, turning all of culture into raw material for the generation of cheap content.

The transfer of the self’s setting from bodies to communication systems

The “content of the self”—again, Cooley’s wording is prescient—varies “indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments.”8 The “I” is contextual; it changes as situations change.

A computer network exists to maximize the speed of data transfer and processing, to shorten the delay between input and output. The more we rely on computers to mediate what we say and see and think about, the more we have to adapt our thought, speech, and behavior to their characteristics and requirements.

In forming opinions and casting votes, people are motivated much less by political ideology than by group identity.45 Opinions emerge from affiliation, not vice versa. People may like to believe that their political views reflect a careful, reasoned analysis of the issues, but usually they’re by-products of tribal allegiance. They’re rooted in emot

When human beings serve as the repeaters in a communication network—when they take on a signal-amplification role while still acting in their traditional roles as creators and interpreters of messages—Shannon’s distinction between mechanism and meaning gets shakier still. Meaning becomes a network effect. What’s true is what comes out of the machin

Lippmann looks beyond the ideal citizen of democratic theory—“sovereign and omnicompetent,” in his memorable phrase—to bring into focus the real person: time-strapped and distracted, biased, susceptible to resentment and sentimentality, bombarded with messages and images, overstretched, wavering between confusion and overconfidence.

“We imagine most things before we experience them,” and our preconceptions “govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

The environment in which we live—the “real environment”—is “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” Lippmann argued. “To act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model.” Drawing on whatever information is available to us and filtering it through our own desires and biases, each of us create