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The problem with non-hierarchical models is human beings are not non-hierarchical creatures. Like all anarchist ideals, the dream of infinite digital liberty turned out to be more corporate talking point than reality. We took the agenda-setting function away from individual power brokers and gave it to trillion dollar tech companies, whose faceless

Technology must support the work of human politics, not replace it.

Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

It is alleged that social media fuels polarization, exploits human weaknesses and insecurities, and creates echo chambers where everyone gets their own slice of reality, eroding the public sphere and the understanding of common facts. And, worse still, this is all done intentionally in a relentless pursuit of profit.

Nick Clegg • You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango | by Nick Clegg | Mar, 2021 | Medium

The digitization of social life has also enabled us to trace the detailed movements of ideas and influences, making it difficult to think of ourselves as spontaneous, original actors in our own dramas. Again, keen observers might have always been able to trace such lines, but now we are all overtly conscious of the flows of social capital, and we h... See more

L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City

internet sociologist Zeynep Tufekci

Moya Bailey • #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice

But by embedding tech and social media into everyday life without fixing the inequalities that still undermine that everyday life, we’ve built a “solution” that actually highlights—and will start to reinforce—fundamental problems of inequality.

The privilege of logging off

At some level of interconnectivity we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so

Substack • Seeing Like a Network

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more

Remains of the Day • Status as a Service

Rather than hold on to technostalgia for a time when it wasn’t this bad, sometimes it is worth asking what it would take to uninvent social media, so that we can chart a course for the web we want—a web that promotes democracy, knowledge, care, and equity. Otherwise, every unexplained decision by tech companies about access to information potential... See more