The main paper I've been working on for the last 3 years is out: "Value Capture"! It's about the harms of taking on external metrics and rankings as your own core values.
The argument: you're outsourcing your values. It's fast, but then your values won't be tailored to you.đź§µ:
We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
the game of social media is to keep us creating assets that depreciate in hours. If they took months to depreciate, we wouldn’t use the platform as much. But because it’s hours, we “need” to spend more and more and more and more of our time on the platform for it to work for us.
But if some shadowy global elite really wanted to keep a population docile, impotent, and entertained, what better tool could they ask for than the iPhone?
the internet is the greatest device for opening up the world ever devised. It is democratising and enabling. But that assumes its users draw on it to aid System 2 thinking. Plainly, there are times when we use it to inform key decisions – to find out about an illness, to research a holiday, to track a scientific breakthrough. But in the main the... See more