digital life—digital cultures

AI images remove viewers from the complex conditions of life in favor of commercially or politically expedient fantasy, all while packaging this fantasy in a realist mode that makes it less ideologically suspicious, easier to take at face value.

the decline of third places means there are fewer places to just hang out and bump into each other. Other economic and social factors have surely contributed to this change, but I suspect that it’s largely due to the new third place—the one in the palm of our hands. We hang out online, which means we don’t hang out at all.

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

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

Keepsakes—like luxury watches or rare books—are already finding their place in the second-hand market, attracting collectors and enthusiasts of contemporary relics. In the future, digital keepsakes could also acquire invaluable worth. Imagine, for example, a Friend pendant worn by a major celebrity or a groundbreaking scientist. This small object,... See more

We have been an essentially colonial civilization since the first enclosed farm, since agriculture, really, but definitely since territorial wars, slavery, and resource extraction. It’s what we do - not just with imperial armies, but with basic capitalism. This is our average. Our normal. A digital media environment with algorithms and AIs... See more

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.

to write about the internet in a post-COVID world, specifically, means that you will have to write about everything because everything is now finally online. It’s not uncommon that I start questioning what the internet even is anymore. Is it the memes we share? Is it the platforms we share them on? Is it the infrastructure that underpins those... See more

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