what's going on?
This is happening because the materialistic world we live in not only values things more than people, but treats people as if they were things.
The Great Diminishment
Much of what we celebrate as ‘good design’ has simply become very good at hiding its true costs. We’ve become brilliant at creating sleek interfaces that make harmful systems more palatable, beautiful products that accelerate environmental destruction, and ‘user-friendly’ platforms that exploit our psychological vulnerabilities.
354 / Design’s reckoning: who really pays?
There’s something oddly steadying about naming the thing properly – not as some grand historical tragedy, but as what it actually is: getting yelled at by dumbasses.
360 / Being governed by Reply Guys
“All sort of buffoonish men, genuinely disturbed and disturbing men whose own lack of human empathy was capitalized upon by surrounding hordes of enablers, grifters, and sociopaths. The authoritarian strongman figure at the heart of awful regimes may possess some unique and interesting, if horrifying, characteristics, but the regimes themselves are... See more
360 / Being governed by Reply Guys
Nolan sees this particular brand of idiocy not as peripheral noise but as the defining characteristic of contemporary fascism. The weapons of fascism – the masked secret police, the corruption, the crackdowns on civil society – are simply “the emboldened physical manifestations of Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses”. America’s entire power structure,... See more
360 / Being governed by Reply Guys
Every corporation in America is poisoning our food, water and air, and every advertisement is telling me to make an individual lifestyle change and either buy an expensive filter for The Poison or buy this new thing that’s Not Poison. (It will turn out to be Poison.)
– @servingcapreal
– @servingcapreal
358 / The feed no longer surprises but sedates
Reflecting on this email from a Sublime believer:
Consuming media has become a massive time-suck for humankind. Only decades ago, the average person had one source of information, if any — the newspaper. Journalists chronicled happenings relevant to their community. And that was it. Someone got married, someone is selling their house, someone died,
... See moreThe Instagram Reels about how to dress for your body type and the endless online shopping are junk food for your anxious mind to chew on—they work because they feel immediately satisfying but are unsustaining in the long-run. You can chase those little highs forever, build a closet packed with technically flattering and stylish clothes and still be... See more