what's going on?

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality. Life is so weird and awesome, and there’s so much depth to it, but people, particularly young people, but really everybody with technology and a phone, are sleepwalking through life. It disturbs me... See more

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

Eisenhower recognized that economically dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated by a strong leader to back a cause—any cause—that promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance.

“We become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labour of embodied existence is unbearable.”

“Children are the easiest targets for tech companies because they don’t know the difference between suffering and friction – one difference between children and adults is that adults do. Or at least, we’re... See more

Writing in The Cut (free archived version), Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues that tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient – something to continuously escape from into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands.

The work now is faster. More fluid. More intuitive. It doesn’t move in a straight line from brief to execution – it loops and iterates and responds in real time to culture and data and platform changes. It requires people who can think and make across disciplines. It requires proximity to the brand itself – to the inner machinery of the business –... See more

But I’ve been watching this thing slowly collapse for the better part of a decade now, and I think we’ve reached the point where we can stop pretending otherwise. The model is broken. The economics don’t hold. The retainers have shrunk into project work that makes cash flow a nightmare. The holding companies have been merging and acquiring and... See more