the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
The internet flattens information into one endless stream
- 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
This current manifestation of the internet and consumer technology is insidiously powerful because of the way that it can mimic these loops that evolved for other things and were necessary for our survival. They’re now essentially being co-opted by a sort of fake system. The tech systems have gotten so good at mimicking these ancient reward
... See moreMichael Easter • Scarcity Brain
We have changed our environment enough that our current ways of understanding what’s going on no longer hold: technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us, and this trend will only... See more
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
The individual user relies on the information flowing through their phone to make their choices, and their decisions then feed back into the overall system.
The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays
- Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.
- Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.
- What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
We chase numbers and icons because they’re always available, and the chase is often so immersive that it keeps us from seeing where it leads, which is often far away from what we actually want. This can lead to what the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman calls “counterfeit fitness”: the constant, momentary “wins” that come with playing... See more