Techocalypse
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!
Are overnight oats ads proof that Instagram is changing reality?
Many things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more
Adam Singer • TikTok and Instagram are intellectual poison
There have to be some kind of longer-term, more drastic impact of the attention-shattering of our human experience. Too many tabs, to much switching from one stream of consciousness to another, not enough…work?
Two years later, I’m still asked about them. People want to know: Did they stay on the Luddite path? Or were they dragged back into the tech abyss?
Link
The “convenience” that tech invites replaced what people/ social connections used to do. You can play a video game with someone online on the other side of the world - but now you miss the casual whateverness of your co-player sitting next to you on the couch. Or, hell, the person sitting on the other side of the Scrabble/ Chess board
“The villain here is not necessarily the internet, or even the idea of social media,” she writes. “It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.” The business model of platforms like this — which rely on advertising and clicks and “engagement”
... See moreJenny Odell • How to quit Facebook without quitting Facebook
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... See more
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... See more
Collapse OS — Why?
The Zeitgeist Is Changing. A Strange, Romantic Backlash to the Tech Era Looms
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ross-barkantheguardian.com“The new romanticism has arrived…Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance in everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms - their true calculus still proprietary - that rule all of digital existence.”
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.