Techocalypse

If Aldous Huxley had known about endlessly scrolling short videos from a handheld device, he would have made it the preferred media interface of his Brave New World .

He wisely understood—unlike Orwell or Bradbury—that ruling elites don’t need censorship and book-burning if they can convince people to voluntarily abandon literacy.

AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards

Electronics evolved rapidly without any help before. Why can't we pull it again?

These technological breakthroughs happened in a context of cheap energy. Unless we have a "unicorn tech" (nuclear fusion for example) giving us cheaper energy than 1960's oil, we will never again see these days of extraordinarily cheap energy.

Without cheap energy, we h... See more

Here’s what I’m trying to do with my life and my work. I’m trying to fully integrate everything. So the transition from work to play to everyday life is all seamless. So that it’s all one thing. There’s no difference between living and making art. I’ve gotten really close. Music, comics, writing, painting, playing with Eli, doing dishes, cooking, a... See more

It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.

Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software . Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We s... See more

You might think of this chart as the shape of attention. After clicking to start, thousands rapidly exited, some immediately, some after a minute or two. But if you could make it past three minutes, you were more likely to finish than to give up. And once you hit five minutes, your odds of completing the exercise were very high. A quarter who start... See more

Most of modern life is designed to get you out of your deepest self and into your head, where you are more vulnerable to anxiety (the grease between the wheels of technocratic capitalism).

I’d be even more aware from now on! I’d remember that machine learning has been defined by the people who want me to believe it works the way they say it does. But an algorithm can’t really observe anything. So it can’t really measure my behavior, and so it can’t really discover anything for me, or about me!