The book 1.0

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, consolida

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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.

Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

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

way of reaching understandings of what is going on , i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

André has the excitement of someone who is traversing new ground, but he’s also serious about the work.