? Is technology or culture the problem?

"Our various technological prostheses become extensions of our absentmindedness as they become more refined." - Duncan Reyburn

As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, machines “express those social forms capable of producing them and making use of them.”59 Looking at the ways we interact with our smartphones reveals the social relationships and power structures that undergird modern society.

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

The term “cynical romantic” might seem odd, since cynicism and romanticism are typically regarded as opposites. Whereas romantics are devoted to pursuing aesthetic beauty, sentimentality and the sublime, cynics deride everything and everyone as motivated purely by self-interest; they reject all contrary evidence as fatal stupidity or risible

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

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. When Kevin Dunbar analyzed the data from his in vivo studies of microbiology labs, one of his most remarkable findings was just how many experiments produced results that were genuinely unexpected. More than half of the data collected by the researchers deviated significantly