The book 1.0

In a work featured in this section, American artist Joshua Citarella trawls the message boards of 4chan, Reddit, and other such platforms, collecting designs for flags that express young people’s political self-identifications. The designs he has collected combine wildly opposing discursive systems in a sort of schizophrenic mélange: “Islamic,... See more

If immersive media prefigured the rise of the neoliberal world order, network media prefigured its collapse.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving

The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

In my new book, I came up with the word “Filterworld” to describe our interwoven environment of algorithms. These equations have become inescapable, influencing the vast majority of what we consume online — and thus what kinds of culture we consume, period. I use “filter” because algorithmic recommendations are ultimately filters that sort content.... See more

Social knowledge is thus more epistemically fraught than personal knowledge. However, it is critical to our ability to function and coordinate and, furthermore, it is what gives that ever elusive quality of “meaning” to our lives.