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“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

The limitation of our vision is not due to insufficient data. Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged... See more

The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse .[2] The key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, or shrink or expand.[3] It exemplifies "the slow evolution of societal values and norms"

They told us we are lucky, to live in an era of endless doors; of infinite selves waiting to be summoned with a scroll, a post, or a step-by-step transformation.

But no one warned us of the disease it carries. Of how too much possibility can fray the edges of a person.

If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

It becomes sixteen.

Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a... See more