Sublime

Underpinning Zuckerberg’s manifesto was a conception of society as a technological system with a structure analogous to that of the internet. Just as the net is a network of networks, so society, in the technocrat’s mind, is a community of communities.

Researchers have found instead that the distribution of attention remains highly unequal across a wide range of digital contexts, ensuring the hypervisibility of a few and the invisibility or near-invisibility of the great majority. The winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) logic, sustained in part by algorithms that ratify and reinforce what is a

In fact, overlooking this fundamental aspect of human nature arguably landed us here, at the end of this first age of social network goliaths, wondering where it all went haywire. If we think of these networks as marketplaces trading only in information, and not in status, then we're only seeing part of the machine. The menacing phone call has been

Likewise in the Entrepreneurial Age, tech companies don’t own the multitude to which their users belong, yet they exploit it as a strategic resource thanks to the superior design of their applications, the regular and systematic monitoring of their users’ activity, and the increasing returns to scale they derive from networks. It’s not about master

The first principle is benevolence. When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me.

rhetoric and tactics. 6. Dependency: The free services of Google, Facebook, and others appealed to the latent needs of second-modernity individuals seeking resources for effective life in an increasingly hostile institutional environment.