digital life—digital cultures
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
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.
Charlie Warzel • I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)
Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms.
I feel alienated from people that believe technology can solve loneliness. To me, effective accelerationism is doomerism disguised as optimism. The belief that things won’t change and the belief that if they do change, through technology, it will be for the better are both sides of the same coin. In fact, just as entropy is an arrow of time, I... See more
Daisy Alioto • The Loneliness Economy
The Loneliness Economy
Griffin Moss is missing.
Daisy Alioto on the power of refusal in human and bot relations.
Oct 16, 2023
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
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?
If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook,... See more
Slop as a Way of Life | Dirt
Moskowitz blames techno-capitalism’s monetisation of human emotion. Social platforms, they argue, create environments in which users willingly contort themselves into ever more extreme versions of themselves – louder, cringier, more exposed – just to be seen. It’s the natural byproduct of systems that reward emotional spectacle and penalise silence... See more
Humiliation Rituals
In order to make room for this weird, this liminal zone of possibility, we need to get off the grid-like map of quantized utility and grow a culture instead. We do this together by forming clusters of human weirdness; groups of people with varying forms of space, voltage, and potential between them. We need a cohort, a rabble...what Jews call a... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
Practically speaking, desktop experiences represent a past when the online world was driven from workstations, less devices , and intended to be curated, not consumed. So, as you might piece together your day again after 20 minutes needlessly refreshing a feed, let's remember what it felt like when we were surfing the internet, as opposed to it... See more
Dirt: Desktop was the place
Desktop was the place
Looking back through Bliss-colored glasses.
Patrick McKemey on the lost joys of the desktop internet.
dirt.fyi email
1/30/24
In any case, it’s enough to make anyone feel crazy. Over the last decade we’ve watched — and while I’m talking about the tech industry, I think we can all say it’s been everywhere else too — the things we love get distanced from us so that somebody else can get unbelievably rich, the things we used to do easily made more difficult, confusing and/or... See more