internet culture

hans bertens “if there is a common denominator for all these post modernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation, a deeply felt lost faith in our ability to represent the real in the widest sense, no matter whether they are aesthetic, epistemological, political in nature, the representations which we used to rely on can no longer be taken for

Instead of withdrawing, I encourage my students to dive deeper, engaging with platforms as if they were close reading a work of literature. In doing so, I believe that we can not only better understand a platform's ideological premises, but also the inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of hum... See more

So you want to escape the algorithm

A modern darling of edutainment that is a big public success would be Duolingo. Their focus on gamification is deeply studied and widely appreciated. In an interview the founder was asked about the conflict between gamification/engagement and education. To which Luis (founder and ceo of Duolingo) responded they always pick gamification/engagement i... See more

Reggie James • EDUTAINMENT, Technology Adoption, and the current Revolution

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural network... See more

Nameless Feeling

It is not a critical approach towards values, policy, nor the subsequent consequences of these artifacts. We experience our political landscape through the veneer of our “ discourse interfaces” (that’s a Reggie phrase) .

Political Expectations

If technology-inflected solitarist identity makes it difficult or impossible to identify and admire heroes, saints and sages, then it will be difficult or impossible for us to learn how to live well in the digital age.

Tim Gorichanaz • Finding Heroes In A Messy Digital World | NOEMA

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimizatio... See more

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

Like newsletters, what’s said in podcasts is non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Sna... See more

Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

idk if this is really a ‘dark forest’ — more a gated community that means there is trust to share. the commons are too unruly to trust/are feared

For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the creativ... See more