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So at first the data reflects existing sociality, but soon datafication begins to change social behavior to correspond with how it is being quantified. Becoming data comes to seem like the primary means of social participation, if not the point of it (as though the point of sociality was to “get likes,” etc.).
Fake Totalities
Rob Horning
Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
Propaganda
Edward L. Bernays
Chatbots and other content generators are sometimes promoted as offering shortcuts around the work of being invested in something, so you can just get to the thing itself. This makes sense only for things you aren’t interested in thinking about in the first place. What they produce won’t be a revelation; it instead marks the absence of a process of discovery, an unmarked grave for a moment of curiosity.
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