Des heideggériens, à commencer par Hubert Dreyfus, ont écrit plus tard sur l’Internet comme l’innovation technologique qui révèle le plus clairement ce qu’est la technique1049. Son infinie connectivité promet de rendre le monde entier stockable et disponible mais, ce faisant, prive les choses de toute espèce d’intimité et de profondeur. Tout, à com

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ce ne sont pas ces technologies qui posent problème, mais notre incapacité à formuler une nouvelle esthétique de vie adaptée et permettant de contrer, ou du moins de limiter, les effets délétères de ces nouveaux greffons. L’heure n’est plus au constat ou à la critique sociale du siècle internet – l’heure est à la proposition, à la tentative pratiqu

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The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you’d be able to count your own heartbeats.

When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your ... See more

Imagining the future is just another form of memory. It’s a kind of forward-looking nostalgia. “The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”3 If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose... See more

We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era. Grand visions of the future are few and far between; the pop cultural landscape is littered with post-apocalyptic dystopias. If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to unde... See more

I think that at this point in life—after ten or so years of a proliferative mode in the online idiom—there is a craving to return to an earlier, slower internet. Before real chronology and temporal relationships were replaced with sped-up simulations of real-time.

The Homo technologicus it produced mirrors the Homo economicus of modern economics, valuing rationality and consistency, discouraging flexibility, fluidity and chance. Today’s personalised tech systems, once the tools of mavericks, are more likely to narrow our opportunities for creativity than expand them.

The internet doesn’t have to demand our presence the way it currently does. It shouldn’t be something we have to look at all time. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d finally be free to hang out. The first time I ever heard about Facebook, back in 2004, was from someone proudly declaring that she had just spent four hours using it. At the time, it was outrage... See more