What is lost when we “watch Netflix” rather than shows and “listen to Spotify” rather than songs?| Real Life
Cyberneticists like Stafford Beer sought the balance between large-scale systems and individual autonomy| Real Life
Driverless cars won’t be a new form of transportation but the end of it| Real Life
The non-apocalypse of Y2K obscures the lessons it has for the present| Real Life
On social platforms, the "fluid self" is not a rejection of personal branding but another manifestation of it| Real Life
God games like Civilization and The Sims offer a fantasy of control based on miniaturization, giving us little ant hills to rule over. But they are also premised on the idea that we too are ants and should try to emulate their efficient "societies"| Real Life
Satoshi Kon's movies, which paralleled the rise of social media, explore the surreal meeting of interiority and public life| Real Life
I’ve come to view the internet as the intelligence that watches me — and watches with me — until it suddenly doesn’t| Real Life
Sidewalk Toronto is dead, but its legacy shows there are more ways to violate one’s privacy than collecting one’s image| Real Life
Nothing else needs to be said or thought when you can appeal to vibes| Real Life
If the voice is the “seat of the self,” there is power in deploying or withholding it on social media| Real Life
The memeable trope distracts us from the way conspiracy theories actually spread| Real Life
“Living with Covid” forecloses the convenient narratives we rely on to manage uncertainty| Real Life
People pay a premium for tracking technologies that get imposed unwillingly on others| Real Life
The more conversations machines produce for us, the harder it will become to say something non algorithmic| Real Life
