Sam Liebeskind

But he saw AI (a term that he had ambiguous feelings about) as a particular variant of a much broader phenomenon: “complex information processing.” Human beings have quite limited internal ability to process information, and confront an unpredictable and complex world. Hence, they rely on a variety of external arrangements that do much of their... See more

There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns,... See more

Yuka Shiratsuchi (白土由佳『はじめてのソーシャルメディア論』, Sanwa Shoseki, 2024, p. 60) defines social media by three elements: many-to-many communication premised on exposure and observation, individually optimized diversity of experience, and accumulation of digital footprints.

It’s tricky, because, you know, we’ve created it as these spaces that are controlled. And they’re economically, you know, managed in particular ways. Yes, the individuals are, you know, co-constructing these systems. Absolutely. But they’re doing it within an environment that has been defined for, you know, value extraction, not necessarily for... See more

“When you look at the history of the internet,” says Jeremy Morris, associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “a lot of the early spaces for communities also became places where people would either trade or barter.”