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Stephen
https://www.goodreads.com/blythos
Nevada
by
Maria was supposed to be back at work fifteen minutes ago, but whatever. She can do whatever the fuck she wants, apparently, and nothing truly bad will ever happen.
“This situation is completely without precedent, and it is now evolving so quickly that we can barely keep track of where we are. And the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it, they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.”
― The Twittering Machine
― The Twittering Machine
“For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait.22 Notifications light up the ‘reward centres’ of the brain, so that we feel bad if the metrics we accumulate on our different platforms don’t express enough approval. The addictive aspect of this is similar to the effect of poker machines or smartphone games, recalling what cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the ‘gamification of capitalism’.”
― The Twittering Machine
― The Twittering Machine
“The city, by storm light, looked far too malevolent. There were things he could recognize – columns and steps and archways and so on – but there were others . . . he shuddered. It looked as if people had once tried to add human touches to structures that were already ancient . . .”
― Jingo
― Jingo
“Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job.”
― Moving Pictures
― Moving Pictures
“A 2015 study looked into the reasons why people who try to quit the social industry fail.21 The survey data came from a group of people who had signed up to quit Facebook for just ninety-nine days. Many of these determined quitters couldn’t even make the first few days. And many of those who successfully quit had access to another social networking site, like Twitter, so that they had simply displaced their addiction. Those who stayed away, however, were typically in a happier frame of mind, and less interested in controlling how other people thought of them, thus implying that social media addiction is partly a self-medication for depression and partly a way of curating a better self in the eyes of others. Indeed, these two factors may not be unrelated.”
― The Twittering Machine
― The Twittering Machine
Stephen’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Stephen’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
413 books
|
83 friends
1,321 books
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91 friends
269 books
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64 friends
16 books
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46 friends
156 books
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8 friends
99 books
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43 friends
296 books
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219 friends
61 books
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11 friends
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