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As this recursive expression of the anaesthetic takes hold of the situation, having your neighborhood mapped by satellites and filmed by drones and then turned to rubble is only the first step of a process which then compels the ruins and death and destruction to be documented and circulated online. Life and death come to *make sense* only as data points within a military campaign, only as violent blips to be recognized and registered within the same genocidal apparatus that effectuates them.
Anaesthetic Violence
illwill.com
Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like, *If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product …* I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.”
How to Fix the Internet | MIT Technology Review
technologyreview.com
Putting screens in stores and malls would allow social engineers to pass people off from screen to screen, amazing them with new possibilities and offering them more choices. Consumers would be free to choose from among dozens of different laundry detergents, cereals, and toilet tissues—even if they were all manufactured by the same two or three companies. What mattered was the experience of choice, and the stark contrast between America’s freedom and the Soviet Union’s restrictions.
Survival of the Richest
Douglas Rushkoff
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