the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland
default.blog
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
Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.
Factoid and crowdsourced truth: The reversal of truth into significance
Information and media abundance have made us cognitively impatient. We don't want to spend the time.
The Internet provided an opportunity not only for imaginative play but for personal transformation, a liminal space between fantasy and reality, something betwixt and between. Just as the printing press brought individuality through literacy and the novel helped create the modern sense of self, the Internet fractured this self by enabling multiple... See more
The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland
... See moreBespoke realities are made for—and by—the individual. The collision of the propaganda machine and the rumor mill gave rise to a choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe; some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonizing the group you also hate. Other people,
An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West... See more
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
The overall digital environment is dictated by tech companies with ruthlessly capitalist, expansionary motives, which do not provide the most fertile ground for culture. While the magazine fashion editor may periodically use their ability to pick out and promote a previously unheard voice, the algorithmic feed never will; it can only iterate on
... See more