networked worlds

she uses the language of gaming to produce a profound and together mind-blowing reflection of the new contemporary climate condition. In her hands, the video-game becomes the most radical and powerful form of ecological speculation

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to... See more

Stories by Stephenson – which tend, predictably, towards singular heroes who win at technocracy – form the inspiration behind Amazon’s Blue Origin and Facebook’s Metaverse.

As calculators shifted math from rote computation to conceptual exploration, AI nudges creativity towards the uniquely human - the emotional, the ethical, the culturally resonant. It’s not a duel at dawn with paintbrushes or pianos but a partnership, with AI as the trusty sidekick, expanding the canvas of human expression.

For creatives, it’s... See more

The debate over “is it real or fake” is somewhat ironic, because so much of what we experience as reality even within our own bodies is actually simulation.

Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

In this human-made apocalyptic context, it seemed to me that interactive participation by the viewer made the more sense, by putting them in a situation of urgency rather than passively absorbing content. The game forces you to make choices and decisions. That's how the world works. This need for real, urgent action is just as true in reality as it... See more