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Many of us are confused, finding ourselves fighting for the very globalist institutions — World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union and trade zone — we had been protesting against ten years earlier. Last week, I wrote about the way the institutions we may have once thought were promoting Enlightenment values or developing the world’s ... See more

Douglas Rushkoff • Everything is In-Between

The Analog City and the Digital City

L. M. Sacasas thenewatlantis.com

“It’s not a question of sitting by yourself and doing nothing,” Mr. Goldhaber told me. “But instead asking, ‘How do you allocate the attention you have in more focused, intentional ways?’” Some of that is personal — thinking critically about who we amplify and re-evaluating our habits and hobbies. Another part is to think about attention societally... See more

nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times

If one’s goal is radical social transformation, electronic media in their current forms of mass availability are not useless—but only when they are subordinate to struggles and encounters taking place elsewhere.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Information abundance creates attention scarcity! By 1997 (!) Michael Goldhaber was pushed this further with The Attention Economy and the Net arguing that attention was becoming the new currency of the digital age.

kyla scanlon • Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely

How the Internet Gets Inside Us | The New Yorker

Adam Gopnik newyorker.com

The disinclination I feel about the digital future is stronger, more certain, but the fear grows from the same root. I see the situation in Faustian terms, as an either/or. To embrace the microchip and all its magic would be to close myself off from a great many habits and attitudes, ones that define me to myself; I would have to reposition myself

Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

But even by the mid 1990s, the promotional retro-psychedelic euphoria had vanished, as it became clearer that though cyberspace was, in fact, a reinvention of the self, it was transnational corporations doing the reinventing and transforming.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Neil Postman diagnosed the same parasite at the level of culture. Tools, he argued, are never just tools. Once unleashed, they metastasize into systems that dictate their own terms, reorganizing the very forms of thought and memory. A technopoly is not a society that uses machines, but one consumed by them, where the parasite has eaten even the cat