Sublime

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

In our time of huge populations exposed continuously to reproduced voices, images, and words used for commercial and political profit, there are too many people who want to and can invent us, own us, shape and control us through seductive and powerful media.

But all of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable.

Meanwhile, the fragmentation of culture into the “long tail” has diluted the power of taste to serve as an effective means of social exclusion.

trolls’ simultaneously symbiotic and exploitative relationship to mainstream culture,

When it comes to the data used to make these predictions—the information silently siphoned off us by companies trading in what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral futures”—we

person-to-person

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