atomized, bespoke realities

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

1. Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.


2. Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.


3. What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of

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The 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

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for better and for worse, the multiplicity and scale of digital media effectively brought the age of consensus to an end, it did not return us to an age of common sense.

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 creation of a new reality is centered on three tenets: narrative, curation, and repetition. A story is how we navigate the ambiguity of our environment, how we make sense of the world. It’s the promised land, a vision worth aspiring to, or a reading of the world worth attaching to. A story either inspires us to make a future destination our... See more

Like content feed algorithms, the internet grants us the ability to segment our micro-personas into distinct identities that create and join communities with the micro-personas of others. On the internet our inner selves come alive to manifest parallel realities so powerful they’re overtaking the world that created them.

we are, in a way, going back to the pre-20th century, where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other, and that we maybe will never have anything like monoculture ever again.

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

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