Join 📚 Jim's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jim's read, .
But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity.
George Packer
theatlantic.com
Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had. Every influencer who monetizes your insecurities. Every corporation that convinces you your worth is tied to your productivity. They thrive while we spiral. And the worst part is, they’ve convinced us it’s our fault. That we are the ones who need fixing. That our unhappiness is a personal defect, rather than a symptom of a society that demands too much and gives too little in return.
Manufactured Anxiety: How Self-Improvement Became a Self Destruct Sequence
Joan Westenberg
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise