> By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the pr

> By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes. I keep expecting some kind of system of phyles. Like "pick your own adventure", but for real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles Instead, bad people weaponized k-means clustering to lock-in us-vs-them. > The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now. Yes and: Decreasing costs seems to accelerate winner-takes-all outcomes. We technoptimists thought that improved production, distribution, discovery, and consumption would lead to a better signal-to-noise. We were wrong. Sure, we got a lot more content. But now anti-information dominates. Why? Some scattered notions: I guess we didn't anticipate the attention economy, how an over abundance in content (opinions) would create a scarcity of attention (deliberation). I definitely didn not anticipate automating the hate machine with recommenders. (Parisi's filter bubble thesis was a near miss.) And I was totally ignorant about rent seeking, financialization, and usury. How our economy's transition from manufacturing to services would accelerate inequity. The resulting anxiety is a huge part of our current hysteria. h/t Clay Shirky's obervation about power laws, Chomsky's theory of the 5 filters, Brandolini's law, Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media.