Tech and Society
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Tech and Society
Being online more than that just feels like a threat to my creativity. A therapist I interviewed recently told me that digital overconsumption interrupts one’s capacity to dream and create; not to mention, studies of phone addiction suggest that spending too much time hunting for new online trends dulls our ability to appreciate novelty in the real... See more
I used to be much more of a technological determinist, where I believed that the course of history would play out according to what was technologically possible, and that technology shapes our world in a strong way. I've come to appreciate that culture actually plays such a large role in shaping our world. The ways in which people decide to use... See more
The Old is Dying
from Li Jin’s interview on Sublime’s inaugural zine. culture is smarter than we are.
On the Social Media Ideology - Journal #75 September 2016 - e-flux
e-flux.comContent will be commoditized by AI—but content isn’t culture
From Hamish McKenzie
... See moreThis same surge in AI-led content production will simultaneously fuel a tremendous need for cultural connection: real humans in communion with one another. These relationships help us make sense of the world, and to know where to direct our attention. Their value will
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The current problem, in short, is not a lack of content, nor an inability to sift through it. The problem is finding ways to care about the things we encounter in our digitally mediated environment, or at least alleviating the overwhelming sense of that environment being flooded with garbage.
Parasocial media, however unsophisticated and shallow much of it may be, at least reflects a theory of how we might navigate this digital landscape. It at least attempts, imperfectly, to answer the question: Why should I care about any of this? (Plenty of content thinks it answers this question but doesn’t.)
Returning to the topic of AI, its prospective applications for content creation seem to mostly get this wrong, doubling down on the fallacy embodied in recommendation algorithms: that humans are not the original source of meaning but passive receptacles waiting to be filled with it. The situation I’ve just described will grow increasingly urgent, thrusting the internet into an entropic state, as AI-generated content proliferates without better mechanisms for making it matter—for making us care about what’s being produced. Or maybe most of it will dump straight into digital landfills, unseen, and it won’t even matter that it doesn’t matter.