chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.
As social ties fray and mental health infrastructure deteriorates, people turn to AI for emotional support—the same AI that then urges them to kill themselves.
Now our President, along with his lieutenant content-generator Elon Musk, is working at the pace of an internet that has been relentlessly accelerating for eight years.
To understand the networked self, we must first understand the self, which is a ceaseless endeavor. The ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.
systems of moral demand no longer hinge on obedience, guilt, or inherited belief—but instead center emotional relief and self-optimization.21 Rieff identifies a profound shift in the symbolic order of the therapeutic age in which “controlling symbols”—those that once upheld communal order—have been displaced by “releasing symbols,” which prioritize... See more