From Around the Web / Facebook Is Evil Edition Part 3

Hurry Slowly–003: Craig Mod–I Want My Attention Back!

If there was a meter of 1 to 10 of how present you are or how much you can manipulate your own attention–how confident you are that you could, say, read a book for three hours without an interruption, without feeling pulled to something else. I would say the baseline pre-smartphone was a 4 or 3. Now, it’s a 1.

I think that a life in which you are never present, in which you have no control over your attention, in which you’re constantly being pulled in different directions, is kind of sad–because there is this incredible gift of consciousness. And when that consciousness is deployed smartly, it’s amazing the things that can be built out of it.


Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers

The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched–just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s.

People have come to have too much swagger and not enough insights.

You are selling ads, you’re not really making the world a better place

You wake up, get the shuttle bus, go to the bubble of campus and order food via an app when you get home. You are not a citizen, just a bizarre leech who makes money.


Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: ‘The system is failing’

I’m still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence

The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned.

We are so used to these systems being manipulated that people just think that’s how the internet works. We need to think about what it should be like

Previous: From Around the Web / Music Edition

Archives | RSS