Tech and Society

The political scientist Henry Farrell has argued that we’ve had artificial intelligences before in the form of markets and states. A market is just a big information-processing, decision-making device. So, in a funny way, anytime I see that something costs $4.99 and I pay it, I’m giving up a kind of autonomy to the force of the market, right? I’m n... See more

Exploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"

The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonate with, and if we’re lucky, some part of the world might too.

In its desperate hunger for clicks, much of the media has decided to endorse a maximalist interpretation of what AI might do. I’ve cataloged them before: disrupt every industry, eliminate poverty and need, send us off of into the stars, end death. Or, alternatively, threaten everything we’ve built, provoke dystopia, exterminate humanity. Take your ... See more

If I had to take a bet of what the majority of iPhone owners are doing right now, it would be very simple → they’re looking at their iPhone. Hardware that powerful, produces an image that is equally powerful and equally shared. The iPhone’s image is one of self-attention.

Each hardware paradigm releases a sort of canonical image that goes along wit... See more

We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how broke... See more

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to grati... See more

Aside from the doomers who believe that AI will kill us all and the techno-utopians who believe it will solve all of our problems, there are three main ways that people seem to be thinking about AI. 

At one extreme, you might fear that AI will take your job. Certainly, you’ve read as much in the press, and it does seem to be getting better and bette... See more

By shape shifting between utopian global computer and Ponzi dispenser, crypto both indoctrinated New Internet practitioners and implicated them amongst a crowd of day traders that they otherwise would have been repulsed by. In crypto's effect on the New Internet, we see the subtle ways that access to capital can simultaneously accelerate and mutate... See more