These companies, the attention economy itself, and the consumerist society that gave birth to it, deploy vast resources to turn as many people as possible into passive consumers, to reduce us to our eyeballs and our wallets. Because the more control a company can get over those things, the better their stocks will perform.

First, consumerism turned... See more

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more