the techno-social environment
It’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters
the techno-social environment
With the proliferation of digital speech, communication reversed from information to affirmation. We post to reaffirm our standing in the digital tribe.
Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution
Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?
Ezra Klein • I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message
On social media, passive audiences of the literacy era reversed into participants expressing thoughts and emotions as in oral communication. Algorithms track their preferences through countless identity markers. The entire design is built to reward identity signaling.
Andrey Mir • The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution
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
the way that our world – digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism – makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.
The I in the Internet
Different genres, same engine: trust earned through charisma, resonance, and the steady performance of alignment, inside a media ecology built for niches.
Renee DiResta • Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
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
“To say that any technology or extension of man creates a new environment is a much better way of saying the medium is the message. Moreover this environment is always invisible and its content is always the old technology.”
3 Reversal
... See moreThis rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.
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