chronically online lives

In that way, some consumers have yielded to a type of techno-fatalism. People know that algorithms exist and often dictate how culture is disseminated to them—and that there’s not much they can do about it, save for abandoning the platforms altogether and embracing a retro-Luddism about their consumption choices.

When I feel unsettled, it’s usually because I haven’t sat down to write in a while.

Unsettled is a good word to describe the weirdness of modern life, and I think one of the main reasons many of us feel unsettled is because no one feels like they’re getting much done. Which isn’t surprising when you consider that people are spending upwards of 6 hou... See more

True disconnection, like true wilderness, is an empty goal. Whether we have shunned social media or not, the internet does not cease to exist as a driving force in the world, any more than ecological systems cease to shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail and hop back in the car. The concepts of the “offline world” and the ... See more

If the spaces we imagine to facilitate reconnection with the self also banish the factors that determine who we are — the wider cultural dimensions of the worlds we belong to — then we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone. Both concepts collapse when one acknowledges that, no matter how far off-grid one travels, there is no place,... See more

Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing.

The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.

In his latest work, Program or Be Programmed , the 15th anniversary edition, Rushkoff proposes four methods to avoid being programmed by digital technology, and to instead become the programmers of our world.

What we require is to:

1. Denaturalize power by revealing social constructions which are ideas we merely invented, and are not pre-existing laws w

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That manual step is something we can introduce in digital notes too. The benefits? You can filter ideas that are not worth coping over into your actual notes. Also, you can wrestle and develop ideas when you have more time to think about them.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have ... See more