the techno-social environment
Believing that AI will save time is like being a person in the late 1800s seeing their first car and thinking “oh how easy it’ll be to get to the meadow now!” People back then didn’t imagine that by the 1960s we’d be stuck in traffic jams for hours in mega-cities. Now apply this to AI. If we fast-forward a decade, it will have recalibrated the... See more
Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster
- We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.
- The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention.
- These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.
L. M. Sacasas • The Pathologies of the Attention Economy
... See moreThis rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.
The
There is consensus and cohesion within the crowds, but often not across them. Every crowd proclaimed itself the public, while it is merely a public.
Invisible Rulers
Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.
Factoid and crowdsourced truth: The reversal of truth into significance
But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of
... See moreNaomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
We are entering the post-information age. The barrier is no longer knowledge. It’s intention, self-regulation, and courage.
Sari Azout • Figuring it out, again and again
As Sean Illing, a co-author of “The Paradox of Democracy,” told me, “McLuhan says: Don’t just look at what’s being expressed; look at the ways it’s being expressed. And then Postman says: Don’t just look at the way things are being expressed; look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” In other words, the... See more
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise,... See more