This is an incredibly insightful essay. I think this is the quote that enrages and saddens me most: "It’s easy to forget that it all could have gone a different way—the design of the internet and the media could have been intended for human flourishing, not human hacking. Wisdom and restraint were not impossibilities; they were options discarded in company meetings."
A few years ago I remember having a conversation with someone who was theorizing about a future authoritarian government enacting surveillance and control measures on the population against our will. I said something like "Why would they bother? We're all happily walking around with the means to all of it in our back pockets." It is truly crazy to think how much it's escalated since then, and really, just in the past few months.
I can't wait to read Careless People. I'm currently reading Filterworld by Kyle Chayka; I feel like you might be into it, if you haven't already read it!
I tried to read the Musk biography a couple months ago and couldn’t stomach the first chapter. I commend you for letting yourself sink into these worlds on behalf of the thinking and expressing you then bring here for all of us. I’m consistently grateful for your perspective.
In the early days of the internet, it felt like an “anything is possible and we don’t yet know where this could go but we’re all finding it out together” kind of experience. It’s chilling to see, through your namings here, that at a certain point “all of us” were not finding it out together at all. It was getting locked in place without our realization and we were becoming tied down to a future we didn’t know or have the capacity to comprehend.
This is an incredibly insightful essay. I think this is the quote that enrages and saddens me most: "It’s easy to forget that it all could have gone a different way—the design of the internet and the media could have been intended for human flourishing, not human hacking. Wisdom and restraint were not impossibilities; they were options discarded in company meetings."
A few years ago I remember having a conversation with someone who was theorizing about a future authoritarian government enacting surveillance and control measures on the population against our will. I said something like "Why would they bother? We're all happily walking around with the means to all of it in our back pockets." It is truly crazy to think how much it's escalated since then, and really, just in the past few months.
Reading those books really brought home how intentionally destructive the design has always been. So much hubris.
Oof. Good food for thought. I am so wary of AI.
Thanks for putting this all to clear word.
I can't wait to read Careless People. I'm currently reading Filterworld by Kyle Chayka; I feel like you might be into it, if you haven't already read it!
Would definitely be into that. Putting it on the list!
This is bleak, but also, I think, right.
Sometimes I don't realize how bleak I sound. Ha!
I tried to read the Musk biography a couple months ago and couldn’t stomach the first chapter. I commend you for letting yourself sink into these worlds on behalf of the thinking and expressing you then bring here for all of us. I’m consistently grateful for your perspective.
In the early days of the internet, it felt like an “anything is possible and we don’t yet know where this could go but we’re all finding it out together” kind of experience. It’s chilling to see, through your namings here, that at a certain point “all of us” were not finding it out together at all. It was getting locked in place without our realization and we were becoming tied down to a future we didn’t know or have the capacity to comprehend.
Well said. It definitely stopped being "all of us" and started being a small group of very rich people. It's wild.
Great article, really enjoyed it!