#86: How to Do Things
Now that a huge portion of culture is filtered through software, the superiority of “doing things” to “being things” is at risk: Digital platforms build detailed profiles of us from our online behavior, which in turn dictate what we see and then recursively influence our future actions. This isn’t just an academic distinction, but a fairly urgent question for the physical and digital environments that we will build for our future selves. We all intuitively know that our taste and other aspects of our identities are fluid and continuously responding to the surrounding world — that we are assemblages of actions and behaviors more than fixed data profiles (which are actually just blurry snapshots of us at a particular moment). But platforms like Spotify seem to be training us to believe the opposite