James Williams

Instead of your goals, success from their perspective is usually defined in the form of low-level “engagement” goals, as they’re often called. These include things like maximizing the amount of time you spend with their product, keeping you clicking or tapping or scrolling as much as possible, or showing you as many pages or ads as they can. A peculiar

Here’s the problem: Many of the systems we’ve developed to help guide our lives–systems like news, education, law, advertising, and so on–arose in, and still assume, an environment of information scarcity. We’re only just beginning to explore what these systems should do for us, and how they need to change, in this new milieu of information abundance.

it’s not the prospect of a “boot stamping on a human face – forever” that should keep us up at night, but rather the specter of a situation in which “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”6 A thumb scrolling through an infinite feed, forever.