Collin G Brooke

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.

charisma required distance from the audience.

The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.

The platforms’ business model is dependent on the volume and velocity of the inflammatory content being offered. It is not a side issue. It is the driving metric. The more engaging the content, the more eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more advertising revenue.

To exorcise a human problem, you must use a touch of naming magic.

Scale in its practice in humanist reason is thus both a concept and a metaconcept, insofar as it represents to us not only a theory of objects and a theory analyses, but an argument for the relation between objects and analyses, grounded in the claim that they both “have” scale.

There is no teleological arc for digital platforms; they don’t move in one direction toward perfection, the way hard drives have been able to store more and more data over time. Instead, it is cyclical, swinging between different strategies of centralization and decentralization like a pendulum.

scale requires technological adjuncts, because scale is only produced when we move beyond the perceptual limits of the human body.

Gamergate announced our new era, of American life shaped by social media’s incentives and rules, from platforms just beyond the outskirts of mainstream society.