Techocalypse

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.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more

Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale?

Productivity tools shape our thinking in ways that favor standardization, efficiency, and predictability. They demand structure before inspiration has a chance to strike. They ask for timelines when the problem itself is still hazy. But creativity is not linear. Often, it involves struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right path.

This is what a frictionless world looks like. Everything accelerates, until you forget what it means to try.

There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture. With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional... See more

Not because machines are writing, but because we are beginning to write like them. Predictability has become a virtue. Voice is flattened into tone. Style is reduced to format.