? Is technology or culture the problem?

The ongoing functionality of Wikipedia relies on an army of software agents – bots – to enforce and maintain correct formatting, build connections between articles, and moderate conflicts and incidences of vandalism. At the last survey, bots counted for seventeen of the top twenty most prolific editors and collectively make about 16 per cent of all

“I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”

Rebecca Solnit via Travelling At The Speed of Soul

As we have seen in the previous theses, our digital environment:

Regulates our lives towards a smaller number of paths purposely designed by others rather than trails more fortuitous and exploratory.

Builds up a monolithic authentic self rather than a lush set of mutually-enriching contextual identities.

Is heavily focused on categorising people,

Yet, smartphones are much more than an accumulation of improvements in hardware and software into a pocket-sized device that we spend too much time looking at. They represent something entirely new. When we pick up our phones, our taps and swipes engage not only a system of hardware and software, but also something much bigger—a set of

Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the

Recently, scientists have proposed that our brain divides the world into two separate regions: near and far. Everything that’s close to us – the things we can touch, see, and feel at any given moment – falls into the “near” category. Anything that’s out of our immediate reach – figuratively or literally – falls into the “far” category.

Dopamine gets