Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

As communication speeds up, once-stable social structures and relations become as malleable as water.

There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities. Simmel’s description of the “psychological conditions” of the metropolis—“the rapid telesco

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

The public-interest standard is more than a legal principle. It’s an ethical principle. It ensures the people’s right to have a say in the workings of the institutions and systems that shape their lives, a right fundamental to a true democracy and a just society. The vagueness of the standard is necessary for a simple reason: in a pluralistic socie

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.

Language, writes Karen Armstrong, a religion scholar and former nun, “is not only a vital means of communication, but it helps us to articulate and clarify the incoherent turbulence of our inner world.”14 Even the most ineffable experiences are quickly translated into words by the mind. Moment by moment, we speak ourselves into being. And then, tur

With digitization, communication has lost its human scale.

Everything in the feed was given the same semantic weight, which was no weight. Everything had the same semantic context, which was no context.

In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!