Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

The history of technological progress shows that once people adapt to greater efficiency in any practice or process, reductions in efficiency, whatever the rationale, feel intolerable. The public is rarely willing to suffer delays and nuisances once it has been relieved of them. In a culture programmed for ease, speed, and diversion, friction is th

a world defined not by production but by communication, not by objects but by images, representations of things take precedence over the things themselves. Everything is mediated. We become, whether we realize it or not, simulated beings experiencing simulated events in a simulated environment.

By pictures, she meant mental pictures—conceptions of ourselves. But her figure of speech has taken on more literal force today, when we are constantly creating pictures of ourselves, sometimes with photographs, sometimes with words, and sharing them with others online.

Iris Murdoch, in her 1957 essay “Metaphysics and Ethics,” put it expansively: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

Through their clandestine moderation programs, their ability to unilaterally proscribe certain opinions and topics, their susceptibility to mob actions aimed at silencing those with controversial views, and, now, their ability to manufacture speech, social media platforms provide powerful tools for the establishment and enforcement of cultural and

A myth provides a readymade context for quickly interpreting new information as it flows chaotically around us. It provides the distracted System 1 thinker with an all-encompassing framework for intuitive sense-making.

“When man is overwhelmed by information,” Marshall McLuhan saw, “he resorts to myth. Myth is inclusive, time-saving, and fast.”

When the truth gets hazy, tyrants get to define what’s true. The irony here is sharp. Artificial intelligence, perhaps humanity’s greatest monument to logical thinking, may trigger a revolution in perception that overthrows the shared values of reason and rationality we inherited from the Enlightenment.

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.