digital life—digital cultures

Logging off

It’s easy to forget that we used to find music, movies, photography, and books entirely offline. You’re more likely to discover something truly serendipitous and surprising flipping through vintage magazines at your local public library than endlessly scrolling an Instagram feed that’s already tailored to your taste. Stroll through an... See more

Escape the algorithm | Dirt

Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.

Anastasia Kozyreva • When Critical Thinking Isn’t Enough: To Beat Information Overload, We Need to Learn ‘Critical Ignoring’

pay attention to what you pay attention to

Tech-enabled tl;dr certainly has a place. There’s more content than ever and most of it is too long. But when everything is mediated by a summary, layers are being built between our brains and the thing itself, allowing something else—increasingly, AI—to interpret things for us.

The Summary Edition

When we mainline takeaways, blurbs, bullets, key insights, there is something lost. We are sanding down friction, muffling voice, removing tone, and accepting pre-fabricated meaning. Will AI-driven distilling get us closer to the thing itself, or further away?

That’s the reality of algorithmic society. it creates an endless information loop—like the snake swallowing its own tail. And a fog of sameness descends upon the land.

But this can’t last forever. Human history teaches us that societies resisting change eventually collapse from sheer inertia. And insurgents show up on the scene to accelerate the

honest-broker.com • The Return of the Weirdo - By Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

In fact, Chayka treats the concept of “taste” throughout with a preciousness I doubt he actually is unsophisticated enough to hold. He cites contradictory definitions, mobilizing Voltaire one moment to say that taste must be cultivated and effortful, and then Montesquieu and Agamben the next to say that taste works by rules we do not (cannot?)... See more

bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World

I stand alongside Chayka in looking for strategies to pushing in the other direction. But I can’t help rolling my eyes when he talks as if it’s any kind of novelty for artists (much less “influencers”) to find their visions stymied by commercial demand. Again, one advantage of the algorithmic version may be that it’s externalized in ways that become easier to spot and critique.

As much as I share his concerns, this book repeatedly made we want to yell back at him for willfully underplaying obvious exceptions and counterarguments.

Chief among these is to what degree Chayka’s “flattening” is anything new. When he writes, “If anything, mass culture lately appears more aesthetically homogenous than ever,” he seems to forget... See more

bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World

I get the impulse to recover a more democratic online world compared to the top-down dictates of Silicon Valley. But in seeking a more humane tech future, nostalgia is more hindrance than help; the alternatives will need to be legible to new generations weaned on social-media feeds.

bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World

But that eternal present is a lie, an illusion, a fabrication of the digital interfaces. And this not only destroys our sense of the past but also undermines our ability to think about the future.

In an environment without past or future, all we have is stasis.

So it’s no coincidence that culture has stagnated in this eternal digital now . The same... See more

Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?

We are adrift–a culture of consumers accustomed to buying objects and building collections as the sole means of documenting our cultures–deprived of the infrastructure to do so. But our individual inability to collect and store is one I’ll lament the least.

Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship... See more

Crimes Against Search | Dirt

personal agency vs enshittification