the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
... See moreInfluencers are opinion leaders with the power to influence what people believe or buy and the capacity to shape sentiment and norms within their niche. They innately understand how to connect with others in a digital age, developing intimate trusted relationships with their followers, yet are also capable of achieving reach commensurate with mass
Clicks and Conflict
status.news
Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.
The I in the Internet
Western democracies, by contrast, with our open speech and open systems, are supposed to have a commons, a marketplace of ideas that allows for cross-cutting dialogue and eventual consensus. It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection. Content and creators optimized for engagement outcompete everything else—not... See more
Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
Digital computers are fundamentally disconnected from the world; they are operating entirely on the abstraction of it. They are being fed pictures of the world. It is like someone living in a box and knowing the world only through photos of it. It is two fundamentally different things. It is incredibly easy to manipulate, and incredibly reductive.... See more
Karl Ove Knausgaard • The Reenchanted World
A “mirror-world” we’re all contributors to re-producing.
The Database dramatically expands access to information, challenging the authority of even the most venerable professional weavers of Narrative. Official narratives are just one more datapoint, one more entry in the Database, one way among many of generating a path through the entries.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
This majority illusion can trick you into believing that a minority opinion is the dominant consensus point of view overall when it’s really the viewpoint of the loudest or best connected members of a community.
Invisible Rulers
the web as we knew it is shoved off the page, a decades-old online civilization of websites reduced to training data for slick chatbots.
John Herrman • Will Google’s AI Plans Destroy the Media?
Revenge of the Followers
nytimes.com