the techno-social environment

the multi-personal nature of our digital presence. We are forced to be digital multi-persons by the niche design of the platforms, as they seek to extract more of our data and attention by making us exercise the various forms of self-representation.

A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be

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The network is less a tool than a habitation, less an apparatus than an environment. We don’t just use it to get things done. We are, as Adorno foresaw, incorporated into it as components. We’re nodes, continuously receiving and transmitting signals. The ethos of the system is one of documentation and representation. We’re all jointly engaged in... See more

If there is one thing the advent of social media has brought home to us, it is how little we think for ourselves.

In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” In a way we are already living the dualistic existence that Kurzweil promised. In addition to our

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Algorithmic media companies exploit the difference between our attentional instincts and aspirations. In so doing, they make it harder for us to become who we might wish to be.