Here is what puzzled me. We have never had more individual data, and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look. That paradox, more personalisation producing more sameness, is what this piece is about, and by the end I want to convince you this is a political economy story that needs and has an easy intervention.
[S]o what? … We risk mistaking a world shaped by prediction for a world shaped by preference, and the more these systems decide what survives, the more power moves from the people choosing among options to the systems deciding which options get a chance to be chosen.
— “Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same,” Lauren Leek’s Data Substack
Fluid Imagination
An eclectic blog, written & curated by Kyle Callahan.
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The Democratic party isn’t being taken over by “the left” or by democratic socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”. We’re seeing the US wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history.
Trump’s tyranny and America’s affordability crisis are related….When corporate America and Wall Street are unleashed – when the president of the United States has made an implicit deal with the moneyed interests to back him and his authoritarian regime in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, monopolization and pay-to-play corruption – of course prices soar and wages stagnate…Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests.
The Democratic party’s mega-donor class may be horrified by the rising tide of progressive populism overtaking more than a few primaries this cycle… Too bad. It’s time that the Democratic party’s mega-donor class recognizes that its real choice is between democracy and tyranny, between an economy that works for all or one that works for a small sliver at the top.
— “The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan,” Robert Reich in the Guardian
I’m sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I’m increasingly convinced that he didn’t acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn’t really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly.
— “Eternal Sloptember,” Cory Doctorow
It’s not like the printing press was distributed by mandate of the Printing Press Action Plan to supercharge the epistemic ecosystem of the Holy Roman Empire. It diffused in chaos, and in the absence of sufficiently powerful political structures to prevent it.
We will not be so lucky this time around: in the 2020s, hawks and statists have the means to prevent another deep disruption of the nature of power. Compared to past revolutions, states are now much more powerful. On the few occasions when modern states have failed to lock down technology—the Crypto Wars are perhaps the most obvious example—it was because the technology itself was so mercurial as to escape any grasp. But AI is heavy on centralised infrastructure, held up by volatile and vulnerable capital investments, and survives mostly by the good graces of the government.
— “Locked Down,” Threading the Needle