I wish there was an article on this matter that wasn’t written like a capitalist industrial consumer taste manufacturing piece. Takes longer to get to the point too, but that’s just me.
TFA’s author notes they’ve watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization. As someone who is vary of his Century of Self documentary, I think it’s worth remembering how deceptive visual mediums can be.
It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.
None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.
Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.
I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.
It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.
true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.
I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.
Helpful type of nagging for me. Most here would agree they are not a positive aspect of the modern digital experience, calling it out gently without hostility is not bad. It might not be quite self policing but some of that with good reason is not bad for healthy communities IMO.
Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.
Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.
On the contrary, it being published in 2012 makes it feel a little closer to 20th century mode of traditional media cultural criticism which felt a little more grounded than it is now in established media.
It’s also interesting for me because it’s a small slice of insight into the cultural consciousness of people’s perceptions of the trajectory of technology and its ills & promises at the time. It may sound like I’m exaggerating how long ago this was, but it really does feel like 2015 onwards was a large disruption from the expected status quo in the West in both good and bad ways. Not just in politics (Cambridge analytica?)but also in the way the general public perceived the technology industry and the nature of the kind of force it is at large in society.
Would also recommend the Moody's Talks podcast led by Mark Zandi, the Moody's Analytics chief economist. He's been more or less talking about this for months now and sounded the alarm much earlier than others about this prospect.