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

Instead of space, there are numbers representing flows, such as how long it takes to drive to work or the number of bars one’s cell phone gets at a certain location. Wormholes exist at every scale, from airports to freeway exits to the Redbox outside the supermarket, and determine a lot about life in these suburban environments, shortening distances between people, goods, and information and surreptitiously rearranging the city as well as the globe.

When cloud processes fail, interestingly, they fall out of the cloud, re-entering our purview as small cockpitpunk crises until we fix them and banish them back to the magical aether where they belong.

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes,” for which he was ridiculed, but his statement has aged well as a metaphor if not a literal description: a visual reminder of the wormholes we’re teleporting through to reach one another, the digital bridges and tunnels — the infrastructure we arrived by.

headphones reposition us each within our own unique reality.

“@vgr The assumed consensus becomes its own reality - a position others can respond to. It doesn't actually need to accurately describe what's happening, the narrative can just live its entire life in the medium where it was created”

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I started thinking about this meme’s six-year journey from a dark corner of young Twitter to the florescent lighting of high-school-friend Facebook. I’ll argue are different ways of looking at the same thing: One is that a single Twitter user released this sentiment into the collective unconscious, or activated an existing sentiment, and that by going viral that sentiment has become thoroughly and invisibly embedded in the fabric of culture to such a degree that it now consistently reappears throughout the world. The other explanation is that creative originality, the kind we still police with terms like “plagiarism,” is even more of a myth than we realize, and we hadn’t faced that because we never had the tools to observe how much we repeat one another.

“Viewed through this lens, employment takes on a feudal quality, where companies no longer provide the tools or resources for getting work done, but instead primarily offer security, a mission, and a tribe to be part of.”

“Places—individual stores, neighborhoods, and entire cities—are fragile, and the internet makes them more so.” “Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new medium contained another medium as its content: Speech, for example, became the content of writing, as writing became the content of print. Cities, which grew independently for so long, might now be the content of the internet.”

“In this future, certain objects, like the snow shovel, might be represented by their own canonical version—the only one Amazon actually ever shows you. Everyone will see their own best choice, though, so it will be canonical just to you.”