Techocalypse
If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.
Jonah Peretti • The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
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.
Carl Hendrick • Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age
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Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.
AI now promises results without the reckoning, but frictionless creation leads to weightless rewards
Anu Atluru • Make Something Heavy.
Addressing those who are critical of using the technology in this way, Zuckerberg said, “If you think that something someone is doing is bad, and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time, in my experience, they’re right and you’re wrong, and you just haven’t come up with a framework yet for understanding why the thing that [they’re] doing... See more
Vincent Sanchez-Gomez • We’ve all bought into technosolutionism, but we can opt out.
So, I just haven’t figured out how to make AI work with my life? Lame.
Thoughts on AI (particularly generative AI) in no particular order of development or importance:
The widespread use of AI is resulting in the largest collective brain drain of the human experience. But is this the result of COVID (remote learning, overreliance on online experiences, mental decline from Long COVID) and AI is the tool used to
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
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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