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Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.

Social Internet Is Dead. Get Over It.

In his note, Abramov, who’s worked at the social network for four years, compared Facebook to a nuclear power plant. Facebook, unlike traditional media sources, can generate “social energy” at a scale never seen before, he said.

“But even getting small details wrong can lead to disastrous consequences,” he wrote. “Social media has enough power to da

buzzfeednews.com • “Facebook Is Hurting People at Scale”: Mark Zuckerberg’s Employees Reckon With the Social Network They’ve Built

Digital media has made it possible to live an even more intensely private life, inhabiting what Renee DiResta once called “bespoke realities.”

L. M. Sacasas • From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities

a flood of new digital communication platforms inundating free societies with instantaneous information and nonstop networked dialogue.

Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy

The aestheticization of labor is perhaps the central distinguishing feature of the tech job, and it has turned tech into the leading indicator for what work is like today.

Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)

Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet. You have to remain tied to your own digital geography or the scope of a specific viewpoint. An audience wants to feel like an in-group, like they’re in on the joke, even if that joke is just that the mayor of New York sucks.

Like so many technologies that came before, it seems to be here to stay; the question is not how to escape it but how to understand ourselves in its inescapable wake.

In his new book, “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is,” Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Cité, argues that “the present situation is intolerab... See more

Kyle Chayka • How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines

FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.

Venkatesh Rao • Against Waldenponding

world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and