The book 1.0

Our sense of it being effective to stick together, to do things like loan each other sugar, proactively participate in building neighborhood safety and infrastructure, or babysit each other’s children is dissolving, because in fact it is no longer effective or efficient to do many of these things.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,

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chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of... See more

I do aspire to be more careless, even in daily life. I’m always down on myself for not being serious enough as a writer, because when I talk to serious writers they write every day, and I’m like ugh, I’ve never done that. Am I really a writer? But when I look at the books that I get the most enjoyment from, they don’t feel that serious. They give... See more

When someone’s political leanings begin to change, most of the time it is because they have fallen into new circles, not because they have learned something new from personal experience about how the government or the economy works.

So, if the Internet has effectively become cable TV, what is the new information frontier?

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

but continued a love affair with language and meaning as texture and material.