Tara McMullin

What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.

Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports ... See more

The securitized subprime mortgages that triggered the global financial crisis demonstrated that even the most material of possessions—the home—was as if made of air and could burst like a bubble. The same years saw the permeation of network technologies into everyday life through smartphone use. These were years in which the meanings of materiality... See more

Though histories of capitalism tend to distinguish between three stages (market, monopoly, late), its story can be retold as one of an ongoing dematerialization of value that begins when an “ordinary, sensuous thing”—a table, say—is transformed into a commodity.[31] Value performs an acrobatic feat, leaping from the ligneous form of the table-in-us... See more

‘The internet is forever’ has long been the refrain of neurotics who wring their hands over privacy. But, back in the earliest days of online interaction, we couldn’t conceptualise what forever meant for digital experiences. They seemed ephemeral, intimate. We were blissfully unaware that our little exchanges might one day be part of ‘Big Data’ to ... See more

Taken together, the union of all your ways of potentially or actually being at home in various areas of your life, online and offline, constitute how you are at home in the universe itself, and on the planet in particular. Along each dimension, you might exist anywhere from nascent, to viable, to disintegrated conditions of identity.

None of us is a... See more