platform capitalism
The culture of any given network is generated by a small minority of people with some trait (or, more likely, deficiency) that makes them desire this novel form of social competition more than others. And one way to ensure you’ll at least be in the conversation is to stay legible — to talk about what others are talking about, or at least to speak... See more
Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture.
Musk has said repeatedly that the only laws he believes in are the laws of physics. But even this is selective. His and Peter Thiel’s shared philosophy favors a narrowed, mechanistic vision of physics—one that emphasizes control, force, and determinism over uncertainty or emergence. Hence their enthusiasm for the factory—not just as a site of... See more
Garden, Swarm, Factory - The Ideas Letter
Before flow attention can be used as a medium of exchange, it needs to be converted into calcified attention and stocked up, which is currently largely scaffolded by the previously mentioned platforms that broker attention trans-actions and create ‘centripetal attention structures’
watermark02.silverchair.com_iwae035.pdf
We often assume that tech is somehow independent of humanity—that it is a force that brought itself into being and doesn’t reflect the biases and power structures of the humans who created it. In this rendering, technology is value-free—it is made neutral—and it is the consumers of the technology who determine whether it is used for good or for
... See moreAzeem Azhar • The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society
s bringing to knowledge work the sort of precarious platform labor that has transformed taxi driving and food delivery.
The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers
The stakes are existential. And that is because, rightly understood, our actual human “attention” – the thing the frackers want, in the form of our eyes on their screens – is nothing less than our ability to care, our ability to think, our ability to give our minds, time and senses to ourselves, the world and each other. To commodify that is to... See more