All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are. - Paul Auster
Excerpt from "The Internet is not what you think it is" by Justin E. H. Smith
The earth, again, has shifted under our feet. We are the targets of a global corporate resource-extraction effort on a scale the world has never before seen. This effort harms us in numerous ways, not least by compromising our ability to use our faculty of attention in ways conducive to thriving. This compromise is felt most sharply in the condensation into a single device, no more than a few inches wide and a few inches long, of nearly everything that matters to us, often including even our interpersonal relations (or, as on Tinder or Grindr, hopeful attempts at them). For many, the only available adaptation to this new landscape is to transform our human identity into a sort of imitation of the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet, to trade a personality for an algorithmically plottable profile, in effect, to imitate a bot.
If you enjoy philosophy and history and their application to understanding contemporary problems then you will probably enjoy this book.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. - Lao Tzu