Techocalypse
When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it’s easy to do things. I guess I still don’t like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn’t figure out how to go on without one.”
Link
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.
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.
Ted Gioia • 40 Observations on Public Discourse
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).
Catherine Shannon • On cultivating intuition
The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.
The implication is that Meta will close that friendship gap with AI companions. Zuckerberg clarified they won't replace relationships... See more
kyla scanlon • The Most Valuable Commodity in the World Is Friction
It’s not just that he wants us to have more friends, he wants our new friends to be his AI creations. Gross.
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
permacomputing
Well, I’m hard already.
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... See more
Free Software Foundation • What is Free Software? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards
Anu Atluru • Make Something Heavy.
The Zeitgeist Is Changing. A Strange, Romantic Backlash to the Tech Era Looms
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.”