Archive

The True Costs of Misinformation
Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Of course we’re avid, avid watch­ers of Tucker Carlson. But inso­far as he’s like the shit fil­ter, which is that if things make it as far as Tucker Carlson, then they prob­a­bly have much more like…stuff that we can look at online. And so some­times he’ll start talk­ing about some­thing and we don’t real­ly under­stand where it came from and then when we go back online we can find that there’s quite a bit of dis­course about would­n’t it be fun­ny if peo­ple believed this about antifa.”

The Breakdown: Joan Donovan on Domestic Misinformation

We are immersed in a hyper­par­ti­san media ecosys­tem where the future of jour­nal­ism is at stake, the future of social media is at stake. And right now I’m real­ly wor­ried that the US democ­ra­cy might not sur­vive this moment.

Gilad Lotan on Interventions for Individuals

Lo and behold human­i­ty is fair­ly con­sis­tent. We would men­tion morn­ings in the morn­ings. We get tired sort of towards the evenings. Talk about cof­fee more fre­quent­ly in the morn­ing. These are the sort of nor­mal diur­nal pat­terns that we see on Twitter, right. As expect­ed. But when inter­est­ing events hap­pen and events that are out of the ordi­nary hap­pen it’s very clear that they happen.

Welcome to the Entreprecariat — Disrupting Precarization

The rec­i­p­ro­cal influ­ence between an entre­pre­neuri­al­ist regime and per­va­sive pre­car­i­ty, their ambiva­lent coex­is­tence, is what the con­cept of the entrep­re­cari­at refers to. To artic­u­late some of the ways in which this mutu­al influ­ence takes place, I’d like to intro­duce what I would call a pos­tu­late of the entrep­re­cari­at. So here it is: The more pre­car­i­ty is present, the less entre­pre­neuri­al­ism is voluntary.

The Algorithmic Spiral of Silence

A cou­ple of major plat­forms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, have become in many places around the world a de fac­to pub­lic sphere. Especially in coun­tries that have less than free Internet, less than free mass media. And these coun­tries have tran­si­tioned from a very con­trolled pub­lic sphere to a commercially-run one like Facebook.

Virality, Uncreativity and the End of Self-Expression

With social media, the com­pelling oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-expression out­strip the sup­ply of things we have to con­fi­dent­ly say about our­selves. The demand for self-expression over­whelms what we might dredge up from the inside, from our true selves. So the self that we’re express­ing in social media has to be posit­ed else­where. We start to bor­row from the net­work. We start to bor­row from imag­ined future selves that we can project. We start to bor­row from the media them­selves and from oth­er kinds of con­tent cir­cu­lat­ing there that we can now con­sti­tute our­selves with.