? Is technology or culture the problem?
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,
Robin Berjon • Retrofuturism
Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug
... See morenoemamag.com • Surveillance Capitalism vs. The Surveillance State - NOEMA
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
... See moreJames Bridle • New Dark Age
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
... See more