Atomized, bespoke digital realities
... See moreBespoke realities are made for—and by—the individual. The collision of the propaganda machine and the rumor mill gave rise to a choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe; some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate. Other people,
... See moreThe development of digital technology like this has made spectacle increasingly privatized and solitary. I think it's hard not to conclude that there is a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention. The central source of our diversion in the attention age has grown
The environment in which we live—the “real environment”—is “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” Lippmann argued. “To act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model.” Drawing on whatever information is available to us and filtering it through our own desires and biases, each of us
... See moreNicholas Carr • Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
People still select and deliver important content to one another, but content no longer takes the form of logical statements with truth-values that can be tested against the absolute truth. Instead, content becomes a vehicle for the expression of emotional attitudes. The automatic means of reaction, such as likes and reposts, on social media do not... See more
Andrey Mir • The Viral Inquisitor
In preliterate societies, truth is “relationship-oriented” and relative to the speaker—a function of charismatic persuasion. With the arrival of literacy, truth breaks free from space and time and attaches itself to a permanent and deeply inward medium: It becomes canonical, abstract and absolute. Today, the children of the web, as Mir correctly... See more
The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir Takes on World History
Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.
Ian Leslie • How To Be Influenced
The internet's infinite private worlds at times feel more like the clan-based societies that predated individualism. But where past worlds were bound by blood, today’s are bound by interests, desires, identities, and what the algorithms governing these spaces — helmed by capitalistic KPIs —nudge us to do.
Yancey Strickler • The Post-Individual
Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to.
Noah Smith • The internet wants to be fragmented - by Noah Smith The internet wants to be fragmented
The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.