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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to surveillance capitalism.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff
Financial markets, algorithmic feeds, and AI models are all ways of producing or revealing “value” (in the form of money, pleasure, attention) without producing understanding. They are ways to process data without having a theory for why you are processing it, just a target. In effect, these mechanisms make understanding less valuable, if not altogether harmful. Understanding a system would allow people to game it and falsify it; or to put that another way, the only useful systems are incomprehensible.
Smell the Glove Is Here
Rob Horning
A new set of technologies that promised liberation from censors and gatekeepers is instead producing a tragedy of the mind, by putting a small number of oligarchs, bureaucrats, and ideologues in charge of what and how we read. Together, the new censors and their robots are on the verge of achieving a constriction of human inner space on a scale that Pope Clement, John Calvin, and other fanatics of their age could only dream of.
The Chained Reader
David Samuels
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