The book 1.0

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

We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I... See more

The canonical example of the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashion-industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing... See more

Changing attitudes toward social media created another breakthrough for the 1,000 True Fans model. In 2008, few people seemed interested in venturing beyond the social-media ecosystem, because this was where much of the excitement about the Internet was concentrated. As I learned from personal experience, to have expressed skepticism about these... See more

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

If we want to choose how we are interpellated by neural media, that is, if we want to shape ourselves and our subjectivity through the apparatuses of neural media, now is the time to work. Doing so will require that we embrace the unique characteristics of neural media through literacy and experimentation, with a critical sense and a clear... 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