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the internet, as we have known it, has evolved from a quaint, quirky place to a social utopia, and then to an algorithmic reality. In this reality, the primary task of these platforms is not about idealism or even entertainment — it is about extracting as much revenue as possible from human vanity, avarice, and narcissism.

Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.

that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed. Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention. T

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

"The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have." (Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?)

This corporate world generates a kind of digital utopianism (Turner 2006). Lanier argues how this reflects the general corporate takeover of much of the world, especially since the growth of neo-liberal discourse and practice from around 1980, first within the US and Britain and then throughout much of the world (Klein 2007).

John Urry • What is the Future?

micro-individuality

open.substack.com

The internet, we could say, is still running in a fairly agrarian economy, as that most precious digital commodity—data—is consigned to the localities of individual platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and, yes, Facebook. The metaverse, Zuckerberg suggests, is a railroad between these local economies that lets them exchange data with the u... See more

David Phelps • People are the New Platforms

it is only a matter of a few years, soon after the turn of the millennium, until bandwidth becomes sufficiently capacious to make technically possible the “metaverse,” the alternative, cyberspace world imagined by the science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson.

James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg • The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentive