As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence – entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty- first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has... See more

a world in which selfhood has become capital­ism’s last natural resource

the way that our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.

Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves on­line, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.

most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection – this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.