how to survive being chronically online

The anxiety isn't determined by the presence or absence of code. It comes from a lack of transparency and control. You are susceptible whether or not TikTok exists, whether or not you delete it. Logging off is one tool, but it will not alone cure you.

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

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.

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

The collection of so much personalized data—around what time of day we turn to Sade or how many seconds of a NewJeans song we play—suggests a future without risk, one in which we will never be exposed to anything we may not want to hear.

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

... 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.

It’s been endlessly argued that algorithms influence too much of what we watch, listen to, read, and even think. Personal taste erodes while decision-making is outsourced to the platform.