A few quotes from some books I read recently:
The Luddites are among history’s more misunderstood protagonists. Their quarrel was not with the machines themeselves, even though they wrecked quite a few of them; they were opposed to the fact that so few owned the machines. It was the social arrangement not the technology they objected to.
– Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism
We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.
– Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Although interactive consumer devices are typically associated with new choices, connections, and forms of self-expression, they can also function to narrow choices, disconnect, and gain exit from the self.
– Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don’t let them banalize you. Keep fighting.
– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive