This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
Categories
The Herd
Tag: social media
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
Categories
WTF
We keep telling the same stories in different ways. The faces, crises and characters change. The same tribal pattern keeps finding new forms.
The manosphere promises strength and control, yet its communities, platforms and markets are structurally and commercially dependent on reproducing the insecurities they claim to resolve.
The machinery does not need to fail. It only needs to keep working in ways that make more of itself necessary.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
Categories
pity the children
A healthy society expects children to become adults. An unhealthy one encourages adults to remain immature.
Categories
cockroach party
Social media did not create the grievance. It synchronised millions of separate frustrations into a single political force.
Parent-adolescent conflict is not failed communication. It is a regulatory differential through which identity emerges, is negotiated, and persists.
Categories
selling subscription selves
We no longer simply use technology, we now continuously rebuild ourselves and our lives into forms it can recognise, predict and sell.
Categories
trust
Authenticity is not destroyed by media so much as converted into an interface problem: a carefully arranged background, a handful of familiar signals, and the strange little theatre by which the network teaches the self how to appear real.
At precisely the moment technology allowed us to express our own thoughts with unprecedented speed, ease, and fluency, people began switching off from the flood of language-model-mediated self-expression that followed.
Daedelus Kite 