Tag: digital culture
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Quite Careless Indeed
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration. Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat,…
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A Little Privacy Please
My kids cannot understand what I’m sure they would consider my obsession with privacy. They technically didn’t grow up with cell phone, and got their first in middle school. Still, they’ve spent most of their lives with these devices, and the cultural changes created by these, and they insist upon the death of privacy. I…
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Seductive Sirens
I wanted to like Chris Hayes’s (2025) new book. Instead, I found myself wanting more from it. Hayes compares the commodification of labor in the nineteenth century to the commodification of attention today. In doing so, he distinguishes among voluntary, involuntary, and social attention (27ff) and contrasts boredom and idleness (59ff) before considering the deep…