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Not only is the medium the message but the platform is also the market.

Unattributed, 2018. The Economist - Rulers of the world: read Karl Marx!

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In Second Life, as elsewhere online, afk stands for “away from keyboard,” and during the course of his ethnographic research, Tom Boellstorff sometimes heard residents saying that “they wished they could ‘go afk’ in the actual world to escape uncomfortable situations, but knew this was not possible; ‘no one ever says “afk” in real life.’ ” This sentiment inspired what Boellstorff calls the “afk test”: “If you can go ‘afk’ from something, that something is a virtual world.” Perhaps the inverse of the afk test is a decent definition of what constitutes reality: something you can’t go afk from—not forever, at least. Philip Rosedale predicted that the physical world would become a kind of museum, but how could it? It’s too integral to our humanity to ever become obsolete, too necessary to our imperfect, aching bodies moving through it.

Leslie Jamison, 2017. Atlantic, The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future

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To put it in spatial terms, cyberspace has turned out to be a room containing a house containing a city that has collapsed into a flat landscape in which created transparency turns into paranoia. We’re not lost in a labyrinth but rather thrown out into the open, watched and manipulated, with no center of command in sight. There is a crisis of “participatory culture.” Let’s look at the example of danah boyd and how she’s deconstructing the “media literacy” discourse for which so many had such high hopes. The cynical reading of the news has overshadowed critical capacities. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, boyd asked if media literacy had backfired. Have trolling, clickbait, and fake news undermined the classic belief in the democratization of news production? Whereas for the pre-internet baby-boom generation media literacy was synonymous with the ability to question sources, deconstruct opinions, and decode ideology, media literacy has now turned into the ability to produce one’s own content in the form of responses, blog postings, and social media updates. The shift from critical consumer to critical producer has come with a price: namely, information inflation. (The well-meaning “prosumer” synthesis never materialized.) According to boyd, media literacy has became synonymous with distrusting media sources rather than engaging in fact-based critique. Instead of examining the evidence of experts, it is now enough to cite one’s own personal experience. This has led to a doubt-centric culture that can only ever be outraged, a culture incapable of reasonable debate—a polarized culture that favors tribalism and self-segregation. How can we move from data to Dada and become a twenty-first-century avant-garde, one that truly understands the technological imperative and shows that “we are the social in social media”? We need to blast lasting holes in the self-evident infrastructure of the everyday. As we have learned from Silicon Valley business gurus, disruption is enough to bring down vast systems, which really just consist of meaningless routines. It’s much easier than we think. This also brings closer the possibility of revolution—an event that even the most dogmatic critics of the neoliberal regime ruled out ages ago.

Geert Lovink, 2017. e-flux, Overcoming Internet Disillusionment: On the Principles of Meme Design

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“Design-for-outcomes means designing for how people will actually use the device,” Prestero said. “The biggest difference to working as an engineer verses working as a designer is that, in design, there is no such things as a dumb user, only dumb products. There is no good excuse for failure, no partial credit when trying to save a baby’s life. You need to design for actual use.” This is a lesson engineers need to learn and can only learn when designers and engineers meet like at CONVERGE. The team also worked with manufacturers to ensure that the Firefly looked the part of a medical device. They learned their lesson about MacGyvering around with medical devices. “Everyone has a TV and has watched ER. They know what hospital equipment is supposed to look like,” Prestero said. “It might sound dumb but hospitals would rather have no equipment than junky-looking equipment. Everyone aspires to affordable technology. No one aspires for cheap. Design-for-outcomes means appearances matter.” The team also learned to work around the translators. Remember how Prestero said that no one wants to tell you your design baby is ugly? Turns out he knows from experience. Understanding a few languages, he overheard a translator say, “This man has come a long way to visit your hospital. You better have something nice to say. I know, I don’t understand it either.” From then on, it was cue cards with direct translations. It helped with keeping eye contact between the designers and interviewers. It also helped in ensuring the designers get the answers they need to improve the design, instead of gaining useless praise for an ugly design baby. Want to see how a device will be used? Ask the nurse to start using it. Find out how the nurses might put a blanket over the heat exchanger, risking fire. It happened. Learn how the baby might get wrapped up in blankets, shielding the infant from the healing lamps all because it looked cold under the blue lights. It happened. The solution: Prestero’s team added lamps under and over the bassinette to ensure the baby will still get phototherapy, even while under covers. You can’t design for all user error, but you can ensure that the easiest way of using the device is the right way. “Think it’s portable? Give it to a 4-ft tall 80-lbs nurse. Does she think it’s portable?” Prestero asked the audience. “Does it fit in a bed? Can you turn it on in the bed? There is no substitute for getting out there and trying. There is a whole map of stakeholders. It’s not just human-centred designs.”

Shawn Wasserman, 2017. Engineering.com, Can an Infant-Saving Product Prove the Death of Human-Centered Design?

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Always expecting a technological miracle in the next product cycle, supplicants at the shrine of VC futurism fail to see that we already live in an advanced stage of innovation, and it’s miserable. Ecological collapse, the pitiless exploitation of natural resources, the witless forward march of planned obsolescence, the industrialization of mass surveillance, the militarization of American society, Gilded Age inequality and a dysfunctional political system perpetuating all of the above—this is the present reality bequeathed to us via every technological fantasy concocted over the last half-century. We live in someone’s idea of the future, and it is shit.

Jacob Silverman, 2017. The Baffler, Future Fail: How to rescue ourselves from posterity 

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'Our flesh arrives to us out of history, like everything else does,' Angela Carter wrote. 'We may believe we fuck stripped of social artifice; in bed, we even feel we touch the bedrock of human nature itself. But we are deceived.' Today, our flesh comes to us from the Internet, and not only what we consume but how we consume has changed since the porn wars. Porn is abundantly more, in every way: there are more people, more acts, more clips, more categories. It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar. [...] [...] Decentralization hasn’t led to diversification (except at the margins, where buying ethical porn is like buying vinyl). Most porn remains conservative, brutal, and anonymous. It’s rapid-fire, often monotonous, and even if, or because, it does the trick, much of it is pretty depressing. It’s hard to see how local protests, however admirable, can resist a business model that already profits from decentralized, unregulated, amateur production. Except for the few companies that have profited from distribution, it’s unclear who makes money from porn, and how that money connects either to the work of performers or to how they are treated. With the decline of the industry, pornography, like the Internet itself, seems ever harder to control. Some will find that cause for horror, others, for celebration. Every era gets the porn it deserves.

Katrina Forrester, 2017. The New Yorker, Making Sense of Modern Pornography

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“So much of the privilege conversation really is fancy people contemplating their own fanciness,” [Phoebe Maltz Bovy] writes. “Privilege awareness has become a status symbol.” [...] For admission to top U.S universities, “privilege awareness has become an essential competence,” Bovy argues. “An otherwise qualified applicant who demonstrates unchecked privilege is suddenly out of the running.” The trouble is that students who are truly disadvantaged are precisely those less inclined to declare their vulnerability. “Meanwhile, the students socialized to view themselves as deserving of special help tend to be . . . privileged.” This is an example of Bovy’s true beef with the privilege critique — that it exacerbates existing inequalities while offering the powerful the means to assuage their guilt. “I’ve never quite sorted out by what mechanism awareness of privilege is meant to inspire a desire to shed oneself of it,” she writes.

Carlos Lozada, 2017. Wall Street Journal, The last thing on ‘privilege’ you’ll ever need to read

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Curatolatry also imparts a certain smiling friendliness to expertise. Long ago, a “curator” was a medical worker of some indeterminate sort—someone charged with curing, basically. And even today we can see that curators do what they do not because they are greedy or snobbish but because they want to nurture the public. This is especially important as scandals ripple through profession after profession: accounting, appraising, investment banking, medicine, and so on. A curator would never use monopoly power to gouge users of some prescription medicine, for example. They care about us too much. They are not dictators; they are explainers, to mention another occupation that is much in vogue nowadays. They just want to help you to learn and understand. They are authority figures, yes, but they are lovable and benevolent ones. When I was younger, people on the left used to look suspiciously on the canons of orthodox taste that earlier generations had built. Today, however, it seems the problem with canons is that they celebrate the works themselves—the novels, the art, the historical heroes—and what we actually need to be honoring are the interpreters and critics and professionals who make those choices for us. The books and the art and the history don’t matter any longer, but the curators do, welcoming and excluding and gently nudging the world in the right direction. Actually, we’re well into that curated world already. Yes, I know, the web is a wild west sort of place, with fake news lurking in every corner. But follow our prestige media for a while and you will start to notice an uncanny unanimity of opinion. From TED talks to NPR, from the DNC to the Washington Post and on to the award-winning blogs, they all agree with each other, echoing and quoting and linking back and forth in a happy conversation, all the comfortable insiders welcoming one another with praise and prizes. What they don’t agree upon, meanwhile, is simply ignored. It is outside the conversation. It is excluded.

Thomas Frank, 2017. The Baffler, The Revolution Will Not Be Curated

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Life in the Instagram bubble requires a constant calibration of how it will be viewed from outside. That need to make life itself aesthetic, to ask, over and over “What will this look like in a square?” exerts a slow, constant pressure of its own. It can be pleasant, and it can also squeeze like a vice. At Stanford, where Instagram was born (or at least grandfathered), they have a name for it: Duck Syndrome, since, in the words of one student, “It’s where everyone on campus appears to be gliding effortlessly … but below the surface, our little duck feet are paddling furiously, working our feathered little tails off.” How does it feel to live atop this pool? Is it worth trading the occasional dopamine rush for the feeling of constant self-surveillance? As the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska once wrote, “The window has a wonderful view of a lake but the view doesn’t view itself.” Part of the pleasure of Instagram is the way it edits out the ugly emotions that make up so much of the rest of social media. But it takes tremendous energy to live a life managed for appearances. The longer one lives in this world, the more tempting it becomes to escape, and to disappear. [...] Nothing, not even the internet, has had a better career these past twenty years than the everyday. On television and in social media celebrities shorn of talent or responsibility serve as our avatars of ordinariness. The greatest source of fascination in our daily lives isn’t art or politics or faith, but the lives of the people around us, and those of people we’ve never met. Call it the Great Disintermediation. It started with the Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age. And it continues to this day, on 200 million screens and 70 billion snapshots a year. In 1930, Ludwig Wittgenstein had a presentiment of this evolution. In a passage from his notebooks, he speculated on the future of the arts. He began by imagining what it would be like to watch someone without their knowing it: 'Nothing could be more remarkable than seeing someone who thinks himself unobserved engaged in some quite simple everyday activity. Let’s imagine a theater, the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself, etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself. But then we do see this every day and it makes not the slightest impression on us!' “Life itself.” Without the proper perspective, left simply at the level of existence, life has no import, no meaning. But through the right lens, it would be wonderful. Wittgenstein then goes on to say that of course this is impossible. There is no way to stage daily life, to put it in a theater and watch unobserved. And without that remove, the everyday becomes cold, boring, dead. In Wittgenstein’s words, it’s like a snapshot, “one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experiencing something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness.” There’s something ironic in the remark about “justifiable coldness,” since Wittgenstein himself loved photography. He used to buy cheap cameras for every excursion and liked nothing better than to take snaps with his friends. Had it been around in his day, he probably would have loved Instagram. But would it have been the frame he was searching for? I don’t think so, at least not yet. For the time being, Instagram is more of a peep show than a theater. For all its enormous reach, its view on the world is keyhole-tight. It lets in just enough light to see the vase in the corner and the picture scroll hanging on the wall. Never mind the storm raging outside or the fire beyond the palace gates.

Jacob Mikanowski , 2016. The Point, Camera Phone Lucida

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[...] philosophers who write in this style are only one of the six types of philosopher to star in [E.H.] Smith’s story: In his equivocal label, they are "Mandarins." The Mandarin shares the pages of Smith’s book with five other types. There is the Curiosa, who blurs the boundaries between natural science and philosophy. There is the Sage, who engages critically with a culture that he or she has thoroughly internalized. There is the Gadfly, whose critical engagement with the culture deploys such modes as parody or invective. There is the Ascetic, who disclaims such ersatz values as wealth or honor or pleasure for the real values: goodness, reflection, simplicity. Finally, there is the Courtier, speaking convenient untruths to power. These types flit in and out of Smith’s pages; wisely, he does not furnish us with representative examples of each type but rather invites us to see something of them in ourselves, our colleagues, and the figures of history. [...] Commercial society has no obvious place for a Curiosa or Sage or Ascetic, philosophical types who stand awkwardly alongside the interests of the mercantile classes (especially when their vocations rely for their sustainability on commercial patronage). Nor does commercial society display a consistent attitude toward its Gadflies, putting one under house arrest while giving another a prime-time slot. It has, however, found a temporary dispensation for its Mandarins: the modern research university with its combination of teaching, publishing, and committee duties, selling transferable skills to the children of the middle classes and a dose of high culture to liven up their weekends.

Nakul Krishna, 2016. The Chronicle, Philosophy beyond the Academy reviewing E.H. Smith’s “The Philosopher: A History in Six Types”

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My take on a lot of the anger, frustration that’s being represented by both the British exit and Trump, is that they’re derived from the fact that we have technological changes, changes in people’s livelihoods. Technology is taking away some of their jobs, and makes it hard for them to find work and have meaning in life. And they’re frustrated, and it has nothing to do with Mexico, or China or the immigrants in Syria. It has everything to do with the fact that automation is coming, will continue to come and that some of those changes will continue to happen. The most common occupation in America is truck driving. There are three million truck drivers and their lives and livelihoods are going to be disrupted hugely by AI automated cars, so we’re not at the end of this. This is still going to continue.

Kevin Kelly, 2016. LinkedIn, Our Inevitable Future: A Conversation With Kevin Kelly About VR, Digital Socialism, And His New Book

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Still, for every such study, there are a dozen more that stick to the same old WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic] model. Much of the reason for this comes down to convenience. If you’re working at a small university in a small city, the easiest volunteers to recruit are those on campus: you certainly won’t have the money to repeat your study around the world, even if those countries had the research infrastructure to support your work. Plus, the incentives of the academic world are geared towards rewarding those who publish frequently, with novel findings. You get publicity, and tenure, for revealing fascinating truths about the human condition, not fascinating truths about the US undergraduate. The temptation is always to generalise and universalise. [...] ‘I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem to study the American undergrad, to the extent that you limit your conclusions to the American undergrad,’ says Heine. ‘The problem is when we don’t limit our conclusions, and start saying: “This behaviour is part of human nature, and evolved on the African savannah millions of years ago.” And that’s where we’re making a really big leap.’ [...] It’s easy to look at such developments, and at the WEIRD bias more generally, and think that they’re the result of ignorance, or arrogance: a case of the West needing to check its scientific privilege. Actually, it emerges as much from optimism, from the Enlightenment idea that we are, or can be, one great big brotherhood of man. Abandoning that model of humanity will be difficult, because it feeds into a wider narrative about human progress: that science has long been on a journey from complexity to simplicity. The goal has been to burrow past the mess and froth of our daily lives to discover the hidden rules that lie beneath, the basic mechanisms that produce the extraordinary effects we see around us.

Sam Dresser, 2016. Aeon, Spot The WEIRDo,  Too much research is done on Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic students. Can science widen its base?

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Meritocracy began by destroying an aristocracy; it has ended in creating a new one. Nearly every book in the American anti-meritocracy literature makes this charge, in what is usually its most empirically reinforced chapter. Statistics on the decline of social mobility are not lacking. In 1985, less than half of students at selective colleges came from families in the top income quartile; in 2010, 67 percent did. For those authors brave enough to cite Charles Murray (as Robert Putnam, for one, was not), Coming Apart documents quantitatively the growing tendency of the members of America’s cognitive elite to marry each other, live near each other in “Super Zips,” and launch their children into the same schools, and thence onto the same path to worldly success.35 Deresiewicz puts this betrayal of the democratic impulse neatly: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.” But the solutions on offer never rise to the scale of the problem. Authors attack the meritocratic machine with screwdrivers, not sledgehammers, and differ only in which valve they want to adjust. Some think the solution is to tip more disadvantaged kids over the lip of the intake funnel, which would probably make things worse. If more people start competing for a finite number of slots, slim advantages like those that come from having grown up with two meritocrats for parents will only loom larger. And has anyone asked working-class families if being sucked into a frantically achievement-obsessed rat race is a benefaction they are interested in?[...] My solution is quite different. The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy—so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label. By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not. If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system. If geographic diversity strikes them as important, they should ensure that it exists, ideally while keeping an eye on the danger of hoovering up all of the native talent from regional America. But they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

Helen Andrews, 2016.  INSTITUTE for ADVANCED STUDIES in CULTURE , THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: VOL. 18 NO. 2 (SUMMER 2016),  The New Ruling Class

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By shouldering much of the creative burden, computer power makes us look and feel creative, and tech firms thrive on that. "Technology democratises a sense of being great," says Mark d'Inverno, professor of computer science at Goldsmiths, University of London. "It makes 'looking OK' seem much easier." But that in turn makes the idea of a creative renaissance seem a bit hollow. It produces lots of material – but is this the result of human creativity? Or just technological ingenuity we're happy to take the credit for? [...] In theory, creativity is supposed to flourish when our options are restricted. A study done by academics Anne-Laure Sellier and Darren W Dahl back in 2011 found that reducing the number of yarn options for a knitting project resulted in more innovative designs, and the link between scarcity of resources and creativity has been made time and time again by researchers. [...] "Politically, it's great that everyone feels that they can take part in the creative process," says d'Inverno. "If people start to understand how, say, music is put together using simple tools, that has to be great in terms of distributing knowledge. The danger comes if we think that that's what it means to be creative. A lot of these technologies work in a way that gives us a quick reward, and we become addicted to the social status it gives us. But it also gives us the sense that life is easier than it is. To get good at anything requires effort." [...] [...] as [Maggie] Boden reminds us, creativity is a process, not a product: we might only be able to describe it in terms of the results, but it's the mental process we need to understand. [...] Colleagues of [Espen Brunborg] in the field of web design have stated that "designers have stopped dreaming", that "frameworks and templates have us covered", that "web design is dead". Studies of popular music have identified a similar homogenisation, with smaller palettes of timbres and a decreasing diversity of chords and melodies. While the latter could be partly attributed to unadventurousness on the part of the music industry, with analytics again determining what 'works' and what is most likely to sell, technology certainly encourages the recall and duplication of the established building blocks of hit records, stifling experimentation.

Rhodri Marsden, 2016. The Long and Short, The filter bubble: Digital technology lets us all be artists but does its guiding hand sap our creativity and lead to cultural homogeneity?

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to quote John Baldessari, going to an art fair as an artist is 'like watching your parents fuck.'

Nate Freeman, 2016. ArtNews,  Adrien Brody, ‘artist’, charms pace gallery, others amid perplexing Art Basel ubiquity

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Fighting poverty has huge benefits that we have been blind to until now,” Shafir points out. In fact, he suggests, in addition to measuring our gross domestic product, maybe it’s time we also started considering our gross domestic mental bandwidth. Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees — you name it. “Fighting scarcity could even reduce costs,” projects Shafir. [...] Investments in education won’t really help these kids, the researchers say. They have to get above the poverty line first. A recent meta-analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of financial education came to a similar conclusion: Such education makes almost no difference at all. This is not to say no one learns anything — poor people can come out wiser, for sure. But it’s not enough. “It’s like teaching a person to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea,” laments Professor Shafir.

Rutger Bregman, 2016. Medium, Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions?

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What is often forgotten, or temporarily put aside, in such excited discussions is how much of this newly created stuff [big data] is made of and out of personal data, the almost literal mining of subjectivity. In fact, the now common ‘three Vs’ were coined in 2001 by the industry analyst Doug Laney to describe key problems in data management, but they’ve become reinterpreted as the very definition of big data’s nearly infinite sense of applicability and precision. When introducing the topic of big data in a class I teach at Harvard, I often mention the Charlton Heston movie Soylent Green, set in a sci-fi dystopian future of 2022, in which pollution, overpopulation and assisted suicide are the norm. Rations take the form of the eponymous soylent-green tablets, purportedly made of high-energy plankton, spewed from an assembly line and destined to feed the have-nots. Heston’s investigation inevitably reveals the foodstuff’s true ingredients, and such is the ubiquity of the film’s famous tagline marking his discovery that I don’t think spoiler alert applies: Soylent green is people! Likewise, I like to argue, if in a different register: ‘Big data is people.’ [...] It is made up of our clickstreams and navigational choices; and it in turn makes up many socially significant policies and even self-definitions, allegiances, relationships, choices, categories. [...] The momentum of big-data definitions tends to reinforce the impression that big data is devoid of subjectivity, or of any human point of view at all. A set of social-science scholars working in the field of technology studies recently urged researchers to turn from ‘data-centred’ to ‘people-centred’ methods, arguing that too much focus on a data-driven approach neglects the human being who is at the core of sociological studies. This reminder, however useful, neglects the central fact that data traces are made up of people. [...] [...] a feeling that big data is inhuman reinforces the sense that it cannot be modified or regulated; it is too often regarded as a raw force of nature that simply must be harnessed. These beliefs foster intrusions of government and private capital forces that people would probably resist much more strenuously if they clearly understood what is happening. The situation boils down, really, to this: to unwittingly accept big data’s hype is to be passive in the face of big data’s mantle of inevitability. Awareness is the only hope.

Rebecca Lemov, 2016. Aeon, Big Data is People