It's sometimes hard to grasp the pecuniary motives of the big tech companies, because they strike such an idealistic pose.
David Foster Wallace called the condition Total Noise. With it, our reading became peripatetic, less focused.
:D DFW shoutout!! he also quotes Herbert Simon on attention in the next sentence
the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economi…
Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of th…
