David Pennington

The intent behind this meme is to evince the power of humor. In the face of two equal perils, just tread lightly; have fun; make jokes. The way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis is to take neither too seriously.

Two years later, I’m still asked about them. People want to know: Did they stay on the Luddite path? Or were they dragged back into the tech abyss?

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of

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This isn’t the same kind of attention we give to our Instagram and TikTok feeds. It is a ritualised form of intentional presence directed to a shared sense of meaning and history.

As a result, our digital commons has become commoditised and overrun by the cult of self. When we shout ‘listen!’ on social media, we are demanding that others ‘Listen to... See more

Content served by algorithms is effective in part because it’s disorienting, which helps to short-circuit the defenses against impulse—discernment, self-restraint, patience—that are the hallmarks of emotional maturity, rendering most of us a little bit more childish.

We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called... See more

We don’t need to fix the problems of the world with technology, we need to fix technology with our human spirit.”

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Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”