the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
In the post-Narrative age of the Database, we all assume responsibility for improvising our own, often tentative and fragile, narratives about both the world and ourselves. Because narrative is so critical to our sense of identity, however, we are tempted to zealously guard our narratives.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
- 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
Much of what we do is immediately authenticated as we do it, stored as data, classified or scored on some sort of scale, and deployed in real time to modulate some outcome of interest – usually, the behaviour of a person, or a machine, or an organisation.
The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays
The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
theideasletter.org
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
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 It has been replaced by an information ecology shaped by algorithmic selection.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
... See moreThe influencer's primary job is to grow an audience, a crowd of followers who will serve as eyeballs on the content as well as secondary distribution machine. Reach significantly determines to what extent the influencer makes money or accrues power, so the temptation to pepper content with the kind of bait that the algorithms will boost to a niche
most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection – this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.
The I in the Internet
The breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives.