MK

Hyperconnectivity in the cultural realm promises abundance, decommodification and democratization. Everyone has at their fingertips an infinitely rich and varieduniverse of cultural products. New cultural forms and innovative practices have proliferated. Much digital culture is freely shared rather than bought and sold. And ever-expanding circles

It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all

Moreover, as the critic Rob Horning has argued with respect to TikTok, algorithms do not simply discern what we want and serve it to us; they train us to want what they can serve us. Successful platforms do not just discover what consumers want — they produce the consumers and the forms of consumer desire that they need.

Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization

When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people , whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs.

The inherent contextlessness of platforms like Twitter also works in the opposite direction, though: It’s easy to use the language of social justice to justify anything we want, and by doing so, weakens real, meaningful activism.