Concerned Netizen

Full-Stack Media Ecology

On Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has been released today—and so has part one of my review!

Read it at the Default Wisdom Substack: https://default.blog/p/on-jonathan-haidts-anxious-generation

Haidt’s pragmatic call for action—the removal of cellphones from the classroom and the incentivizing of embodied, social play in childhood—are realistic and achievable goals to help the up and coming generation get their sensoriums back into proportion. I’d recommend this book and, more so, recommend the rallying for the changes at the parental and local level which he advocates for.

Postmodernism is Cyberspace

Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which …

Information isn’t a Substance and Ideas are not Viruses

Look at that image above. Every ring on this “memory plane,” or RAM module, would represent one computer bit. Do those rings look like abstract 1s or 0s to you?

One reason I’ve released my 14,000 word post Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary is to put our socially constructed perceptions of “information” in its place. Especially its fluid nature; we hear everyday that information “flows” and “spreads” around our mediated environment.

This makes intuitive sense at the basic level of how gossip gets around, or how events or ideas come to everyone’s attention all at once when broadcast and widely discussed. However, at risk of being thought of as a guy who always just states the obvious, there are a few mantras I’d wish I could convince everyone to repeat to themselves daily:

  1. Information does not have

Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad-Faith Adversary

What follows is a short book detailing the mechanisms by which computers have thwarted our sense of reality and children’s sense of embodiment, with receipts. The narrative centers Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, as self-reporting on the effects of cyberspace on children; cyberspace as designed and implemented in order to sell computers to adults.


Peekaboo! ICQ!

Peekaboo is a game we play with infants in order for them to learn what child psychologist Jean Piaget termed object permanence.

A world composed of permanent objects constitutes not only a spatial universe but also a world obeying the principle of causality in the form of relationships between things, and regulated in time, without continuous annihilations or resurrections. Hence it is a universe both stable and external, relatively distinct from the internal world and one in which the subject places himself

The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her …

Modems and Codecs—The Human-Scale Stack

It is not enough to understand computers to understand their proportions and scales. We only know that they are very complex and very fast. But they have been very complex and very fast for about half-a-century now, and it seems culture has all but given up on retaining any sense of scope for computers relative to human experience or meaning. They no longer exist within our subjective universe.

Full-stack media ecology is not just an explanation of what goes on between the top and the bottom of the computer stack; that is, between the high-level, easy-to-use interfaces and the bare metal and silicon. It’s about building the historical context for the development and growth of the stack upward and downwards, as a narrative about our lived environment, culture, and who and what we are as humans. We are embodied beings, …

Nice Average Fellows Who Have Developed a Technique

I’m going through my backlog of half-written pieces over the past eight years, and have decided to just publicly release works which are worthy, even in their incomplete state.

This review of the documentary The Social Dilemma was written in September of 2020, contemporaneous with the film’s wide release.

The concept—that McLuhan’s unpublished 1948 book was a review of this 2020 documentary—was solid. But I couldn’t execute it at the time. My own thoughts on this now 4-year-old documentary will be given in these pages soon.


Marshall McLuhan’s Unpublished Review of ‘The Social Dilemma’

The Matrix

In the climax to The Social Dilemma (2020), the “avatar booty doll,” or digital twin, of the fictional character Ben is revealed to be only one of countless subjects to algorithmic experimentation and prediction by closed source, corporate software. Ben is the politically-radicalized …

Competence as Maturity

Acting the Age

Competent people are mature people. Competent people are surrounded by incompetence, but they understand why everyone around them is so incompetent. Furthermore, they have means of redressing that incompetence, and faith in their process. And so they aren’t so liable to get angry or upset about that incompetence. That is maturity.

Competent people are necessarily paternalistic in many senses. But with eloquence, grace, and faith in the processes which can reproduce more competence, they can be paternalistic without being condescending or judgemental in a non-constructive way..

By “processes which can reproduce more competence,” I am of course referring to the processes of maturation. Paternalism, of course, means being father-like. We can’t fault kids for being kids. But when it comes to incompetent adults, we also can’t be exactly like their fathers, except that we wish maturation for …

Domicide of the Microworld

Pilgrim, Breakout!

In a portrait of the “meaning crisis” by way of exegesis of the zombie film genre, John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic relate the notion of Christian apocalypse to that of the film genre’s zombie apocalypse.

While it is crucial for us to have a grasp on the world, it is also crucial for the world to escape that grasp so that our mapping of reality can be recast and recaptured. The feeling that there is more to reality than what we know of it strengthens its integrity, and its independence from our subjectivity makes it more trustworthy. While it is necessary, as discussed above, to feel that the world is consistently intelligible, it is also necessary to have our sense of the world pulled periodically from underneath us. Insight emerges from the wreckage of this

The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics

My talk on March 19, 2023 at the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention in Boston, MA is now available!

The original upload on the FSF’s own MediaGoblin instance includes a link to my original slides, if you want to see things in hi-res. 🙂 Much thanks to the FSF for having me and putting on a fantastic conference. Check out the rest of the amazing presentations at their site.…

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