The book 1.0

In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their... See more

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

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 that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.

Creator platforms algorithmically incentivize us to create at the pace Wall Street and the market demand. This is why we’re pushed to create more and more. Not because our audiences are asking for it. Not because the world needs more of what we have to say. Because we as artists, the platforms, and their investors desire, to varying degrees,... See more

At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.

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