Going Postal
“Seymour is cautious here. As he points out, we’ve only just set aside prophecies of inevitable, internet-borne emancipation, and we should be careful not to make the same confident mistake in reverse, with moralizing, panicked screeds about inescapable algorithmic radicalization. What is scarier, anyway, than the idea that we’re trapped on a collision course with TikTok totalitarianism is Seymour’s insistence that we’re not “trapped” at all—that, in fact, “we are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be.” Whatever dark future we hurtle toward, we are copilots on the journey.”
I found this piece super interesting about a book I may or may not read, but I've been thinking about how we contribute to the social media phenomenon and is it just because they've tricked me into it or is it because I'm getting something I need from it? I'll be thinking about this for a while to come.