The techno-social environment
The internet flattens information into one endless stream
The media and society can be understood as conversations (Jarvis)
the platformization of culture and creativity makes it harder to imagine another way forward. The past plummets down a memory hole and the future is reduced to what a prediction market or recommendation algorithm anticipates. The present, meanwhile, becomes a fragmented slop bowl of takes and sensations that lead nowhere. We live in slop capitalism... See more
everything's computer, but how?
If you don’t have your counterparty’s trust — or piggyback on someone who does — an exchange of ideas can’t even begin.
Casually, trust is like a currency in that way.
Casually, trust is like a currency in that way.
Mike Elias • Epistemic Reserve Notes
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 enti... See more
Brett Scott • Tech Doesn’t Make Our Lives Easier. It Makes Them Faster
the database experience frames the encounter with narratives so that we experience narratives as just so many entries in a database of information.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse
The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
for better and for worse, the multiplicity and scale of digital media effectively brought the age of consensus to an end, it did not return us to an age of common sense.
L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities
Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.