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There is death in this. Twenge and Campbell are getting at something when they urge people to worry less about their identities and more about their lives. Between life and the self, there is a choice. This is implicit in the idea of an attention economy. The more compulsively we curate the self, t…

The most important problem with teaching machines, though, is political. In Walden Two, the community is overseen by a benign tyrant, Frazier. In defending his techniques, Frazier argues that the alternative is to leave them in the hands of wicked movements like the Nazis. This comparison only serv…

But as the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling points out, connectivity is not necessarily a symbol of affluence and plenty. It is, in a sense, the poor who most prize connectivity. Not in the sense of the old classist stereotype that ‘the poor love their cellphones’: no powerful group would turn down …

The Twittering Machine appears to have a similar magical quality. Technology has never been just technology. It is always a world of intense emotional attachments. The Twittering Machine promises to give us access to everything, limitlessly, allowing us to transcend the limitations of mere flesh. T…

[...] There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn’t invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.