Server. Credit: Josef Rousek.

They believed that we needed to create a kind of media that would promote democratic personalities. And if we did that, we could prevent racist nationalism. They dreamed of media that would surround you, that would require you to make your own choices and use your individual perception to define the images that mattered most to you.

Midcentury American intellectuals like Margaret Mead and John Cage believed mass media like radio enabled Hitler's rise. As a counter, they suggested something that sounds a bit like the Internet.
↩︎ initialized()
Dec 1, 2016

That misinformation plagues our politics is a symptom of a larger, more existential problem: The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it. No matter what Facebook might believe, there is no turnkey algorithmic solution that will ensure a perfect civic network.

In 1990, a couple Japanese modems allegedly launched the Velvet Revolution. Today the rubble of public sphere is a thousand private Slacks.
↩︎ New York Magazine
Dec 1, 2016
More Headlines