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

Every communication medium is political, a conduit of power as much as thought. In extending the range of speech, writing widened the scope of personal and institutional influence. A written word had the potential to shape the thinking and behavior of far more people, around the globe and down the ages, than a spoken one ever could. The expansion o

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.

The design metaphors that soon emerged—feed, stream, loop, scroll—stressed flux and fluidity. Nothing lasts, they suggested. Nothing has more than passing interest.

What we gain by substituting fingered speech for reading and writing is the ability to keep up with a conversation that swirls around us all the time. What we sacrifice are depth and rigor. Turned always outward, speech becomes less a way of sorting out our thoughts, of thinking for ourselves, and more a way of reacting to others. We rely on quick

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.

The power of the feed algorithm doesn’t lie in the meaning of the messages it delivers—the algorithm knows nothing of meaning—but rather in its ability to match messages to individuals’ emotional triggers. It automates the striking of responsive chords.

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

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