Saved by Andrew McCluskey
The Dark Forest and the Post-Individual
Including, most recently, post-internet, the reality expansion that has been wreaking havoc on the human psyche at an accelerating rate ever since the first pioneers sent a message across the internet in 1969, and which entered its late phase around 2016.
Forget the ancients. Can you put yourself in your own 2015 headspace?
Venkatesh Rao • Disturbed Realities
The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is
... See moreJia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Out of everything I’ve ever written, “The Post Individual” best encapsulates what I’ve learned about life online: that to go online is to become reindividualized and born again as a slice of self that interacts with the slices of selves of others. Through this we are building a new society that redefines what individualism even is.
Yancey Strickler • Yancey Strickler on Substack
The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.