Interesting, wasn’t aware of Douglas Rushkoff - yeah in that context “humane” may start looking like an apologia - but lumping together everything and calling it bad misses the value created: there’s serendipity in social networks, but then there’s also ephemerality. Everyone maintaining their own blogs will be better focused, but then their ideas may not interact like on twitter.
Same thing happened with the Zucked book and BJ Fogg (Has anyone read Zucked? - #5 by BJFogg). If there’s an unexplored field of knowledge, and someone advances it, you can’t lay the blame on them. Advancing our knowledge has always been like opening a Pandora’s box: do we stop exploring because there are dangers in the way?
Also, everywhere I’ve looked, everyone’s been referencing the 70s - EDIT: which is interesting… something fundamental must’ve really changed for the worse back then… wage gaps started widening, volatility in the economy, many policies, propaganda etc. (i’m lacking clarity regarding this, really a hunch from many recent readings, so just mentioning this for indication of something significant - to be explored and connected later!)
and if you don’t have the mitigating factors of a real world social life to modulate you, you just go deep in there. In some sense it we may have to recognise that there’s a public health crisis; this is the same as cigarettes in the 70s where the companies were not admitting what was going on.
But there are plenty of useful perspectives in what Rushkoff is saying. The call to go back to more of “real life”, as well as to the original ideas of the web makes so much sense. The ideas of Tim Berners Lee, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart… Have a look at Kevin Kelly’s books from the 90s, so prescient of the times to come. What EFF, Mozilla etc. have been doing. Importance of net neutrality, ownership in the hands of the users, less consumerism more creators…
Ha! I wrote something like this in my diary in 2015.
What would you like to say to Mark Zuckerberg?
…best thing you can do is break up the company. Break it up for the good of humankind, create a public utility, and be remembered for that. And if your shareholders sue you, give the 90 per cent back to them instead.