Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

As a species, we’ve faced the emergence of new power structures tied to new information technologies that externalize core aspects of mind. This is what happened with writing: it was a tool of the state, used against the people. But over time, with much effort and luck — through new symbol systems, new technologies like the printing press, new instruction systems like mass schooling — writing was transformed into a shared substrate for democratic thought and interiority and cognition. We just need to repeat that process — but this time intentionally, with eyes wide open, and much, much more quickly.