The World Was Flat. Now It's Flattened

that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention. T

It’s inevitable. We shape our tools and our tools shape us. The problem occurs when we allow the shaping to go completely unremarked upon, when we lazily assume the inevitability of  this  and acquiesce obliviously to its logic. Yes our tools will shape us, will change us, but the idea that certain tools should be ubiquitous while others

This history of flatness is important because it shows that flatness has a history. The homogenization of Filterworld is not just a phenomenon of our own moment; it is a consequence of changes that happened long before algorithmic feeds and is just as likely to intensify in the future. After all, each time a…

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The computer flattens the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our lives, as it coaxes us away from real-time, face-to-face relationships with people and the natural world. I fear that one day we will finally have the science to show that generations of children have been harmed from using computers way too early and way too much.