Sarah Owen

“Non-self-coercion” is the conceptual distillation of several converging threads of what you could call productivity criticism (if not outright backlash).

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

“In actual fact, [BeReal] is trapping us in an endless, 24-hour cycle – one in which every user knows that everyone else is carefully curating their casualness”

“The digital architecture of social media privileges the expression of emotions. It privileges the audiovisual over the written, the controversial over the moderate. All of this makes us more emotional.”