In The Future, Our Attention Will Be Sold

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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2 Responses

  1. Kolohe says:

    Author. Thinker. Life Enthusiast.

    almost stopped reading right there.

    Eventually, when the industrial revolution hit, the primary scarcity was no longer land, as machines could now help cultivate more than enough food for everybody. Now the big scarcity was labor. You needed trained people to run all of these machines that did all of the cool new shit so you could make money and get rich. Thus, for a couple hundred years, the organizing principle in society was based on labor — who you worked for, how much you made, and so on.

    definitely stopped reading right there.Report

  2. DensityDuck says:

    “Social media doesn’t necessarily cause people to become more narcissistic, it just gives narcissistic people more opportunities to indulge their narcissism, and to a larger audience.”

    I think this is a big part of it. It’s not so much that people are newly and uniquely horrible, it’s just that their horribleness can be seen by everyone in the world, and it stays around forever. And the lack of physical proximity–and the ease of finding a new virtual community should the one you’re in expel you for being horrible–means that there is less need to moderate speech (or for listeners to intentionally mis-interpret horribleness as humor.)Report