What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest, process, and respond to an insane firehose of ideas. I don’t think all this micro-context switching is good for us; we’re collectively destroying our attention. Most people know the feeling when they’ve scrolled too much and it makes them feel kind of exhausted and bad, yet for some reason, suggesting that something should be done about this behavior – I’m still agnostic as to what – makes people upset and defensive. I think being perpetually distracted as a species is a very bad thing, and it has downstream effects on everything else

What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest, process, and respond to an insane firehose of ideas. I don’t think all this micro-context switching is good for us; we’re collectively destroying our attention. Most people know the feeling when they’ve scrolled too much and it makes them feel kind of exhausted and bad, yet for some reason, suggesting that something should be done about this behavior – I’m still agnostic as to what – makes people upset and defensive. I think being perpetually distracted as a species is a very bad thing, and it has downstream effects on everything else

Nadia Asparouhova • Nadia Asparouhova on antimemetics, nuclear mysticism, and scrolling

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