Atomized, bespoke digital realities
But the rapid, ample, and aggressively evolving feedback that the internet provides to the social reward circuits is new.
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
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
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Kamala Harris, the Pope, and Samuel Beckett Walk Into a Bar | House of Beautiful Business
... 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
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
The internet drastically increases the ease of finding and fulfilling one’s preferred phenomenological feedback loop, whether that be righteous anger, a sense of shared victimhood, or any other appealing gradient.
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
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
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
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.
How the Logic of Cults Is Taking Over Modern Life
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.