internet

While we conventionally think of ourselves as “using the internet,” we are simultaneously and undeniably a part of it . We are both creators and the created. We are man and machine, becoming a new kind of man-machine being, beyond any one person’s conceptualization.

My current-day interaction with the internet seems to contain ever fewer of these portholes and chance encounters. If the internet is a superhighway, it feels like there are fewer exits, and you’re expected to keep traveling to the same places over and over again, based on your past behavior (and purchasing history). In fact, the highway always

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As the internet evolves, especially for us “very online people,” there’s a deepening sense that we are, together, becoming something beyond the scope of our original intentions. We are rapidly approaching a sum far greater and more mysterious than what we often perceive as its cold, mechanistic parts.

Doppelgänger is window into our collective selves and the machines we’ve built that so easily and efficiently sort us into groups of “us” and “them.” Typically, these kinds of books play a nifty trick on the reader. The subjects, the people we call them , are easily rendered as others, leaving the reader feeling terrified, superior, smug—or all... See more