how-internet-gets-inside-us

Author: Adam Gopnik

Three types of people in the technology discourse
- Never Betters - believe we are on the brink of a new utopia; information will be free and democratic, news will be made bottom up
  - Clay Shirky, author of “Cognitive Surplus”
- Better Nevers - we would be better off if this had never hapened; the world that’s coming to an end is superior to the world that’s replacing it
- Every Wasers - at any momento of modernity something like this is going on; new way of organizing data and connecting people is thrilling to some and chilling to others - this is what makes an age modern

Cognitive Entanglement - your memories and that of someone eles’s entangle
- Our machines in a way are substitutes for our spouses and companions
- “Public Library is everyone’s pathetic friend”
Cognitive Entanglement also comes with cognitive exasperation
- The trouble is not overall absence of smartness, but the intractable power of pure stupidity that no mind or machine extended enough to cure that
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it

Blair’s and Pettergree’s work on the relation of minds and machines leads you to a broader thought: At any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity..
- Some machine is always showing us Mindl some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind
The real gains and losses of the internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathyu tests, but in the small changes in mood, life, manners and feelings - in the texture of the age.
What we live in is not the age of the extended mind, but the age of the inverted self. The things that usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind - sexual obsessions, conspiracy theories and fetishes are now out there; a click away.