Impossible Silences - The Convivial Society

Social media is designed to cycle through content rather than encouraging people to sit with it, to understand it at a deeper level. New content is the fuel on which these platforms run.

A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. You're stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable people will back you up, you're going to stick with the default: silence.

Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random distributio... See more

At any and every moment, our actions, our emotional disposition, our thoughts, our will all combine into what another person might experience as our presence. At earlier stages of history, before the advent of the sense-extending technologies, human interactions were necessarily carried out face to face, presence to presence. Before the telephone a

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