the techno-social environment

The more benefits a network provides, the more it enslaves its users.

Three factors keep us on a given platform: its monopolistic aptitude, its habit-forming design, and the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Much like a genie enslaved to his lamp, users cannot escape these magical apps.

the way that our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.

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

Significance is subjectivity married to collectivity.

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.

Increasingly our tech also opens us up to new vectors of anxiety. Regardless of whether you’re working more or less, your nervous system is now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness. Perversely, this information obesity actually makes us feel... See more

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.