The Post-Individual
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The Post-Individual
If the experiences of past generations are a guide, what lies ahead isn't the collapse of civilization. It's the invention of a new one based on a very different idea of what it means to be an individual.
The Post-Individual
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent book The Dawn of Everything recounts how early Mesopotamian, American, and African societies moved between individualistic and collective periods based on how people procured food (hunting, individualistic; planting, collectivist) with a fluid complexity to identity and function:
“The freedom to abandon one’s... See more
The Post-Individual
The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros — a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We. The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new p... See more
The Post-Individual
This also isn't everyone's experience. It's most true for Very Online people who have allowed their self-identity and sense of self-worth to be tied up in these spaces. This is much less true for people whose lives are rooted in real-world communities. The state of the post-individual is not a default all experience the same way. It's a condition o... See more
The Post-Individual
“For adults as well as children, computers... offer companionship without the mutuality and complexity of a human relationship. They seduce because they provide a chance to be in complete control, but they can trap people into an infatuation with control, with building one’s own private world.”
The Post-Individual
be wary of the seduction of complete control, world builder.
“Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.”
The Post-Individual
For individuals before the internet, the key existential question was “Who am I?” After the internet, it's “Who all am I?
The Post-Individual
“Separating my identities on Twitter does not mean a lesser experience, but a far superior one; social interaction in any medium is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me at some... See more
The Post-Individual
“Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think. It changes people’s awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world. The new machine that stands behind the flashing digital signal, unlike the clock, the telescope, or the train, is a machine that ‘thinks.’ It challenges our notions not only of... See more