Member-only story
- The internet has become so good at thinking for us, that it is becoming increasingly hard to think — as an individual, or at all. I often find myself combing through news websites for ideas, because I’ve become, perhaps exponentially, less capable of observing what’s happening around me.
- There is no such thing as objective perception: we perceive as well as our tools, biological or technical, allow us to see.
- It’s almost impossible to think non-ideologically: reflection is conditioned by the idea-logic of whatever websites, or TV stations, we happen to frequent. If there is one quality that all American journalism (really: think-piecing) shares, it is the smug self-satisfaction that comes from having a built in-audience, of having a readership that assumes the positions you’ve assumed for them.
- How we spend, or whether we spend at all, is just as important as how we vote (perhaps more so). Americans have fallen into the habit of voting their ideals, living their social conditioning.
- The dream of the Hyperloop is developing land transport that matches the speed of Internet life. Coastal cities are so dominant, culturally, because those are the places, the corridors of development, in which people feel they can meet with the same relative degree of fluidity with which they meet online. I can see this trend reversing.
- Technological revolution produces social revolution, the way an earthquake produces a tsunami.
