Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital culture

  • The Neo Danger

    The Neo Danger

    The MacBook Neo by all accounts is amazing.

    This newest Apple laptop, which consists of MacBook Air compromises for a much more affordable price, has been praised for its performance, build quality, and value. The demand for this “perfect compromise” even surprised Apple, and reportedly contributed to a record number of new customers.

    MacBook Neo website screenshot

    The Neo has few competitors among Windows budget laptops at least at the moment although it could motivate Lenovo for example or HP to improve its offerings. It has next to none among Chromebooks, which are little more than surveillance browsers without the Linux virtual machine option, and still nowhere close with it activated.

    For these and other reasons, the Neo laptop will attract individual users, especially those who already have iPhones and AirPods or Apple Watches but before now couldn’t justify a thousand dollars or more for an Apple laptop. It will also likely have an increased appeal to institutions, such as schools and small businesses, as a result of the same reasons, including the network effect.

    With it, Apple is extending its reach into hardware, which has always been its focus, and adding this extension to its software, platforms (FaceTime, e.g., or iMessage), and services (iCloud, e.g., or Apple TV). As a result, Apple is consolidating its control, and slowly but surely becoming the primary portal through which people access digital networks.

    Such a consolidation challenges adversarial interoperability, or the cooperative potential of different devices and platforms even without the consent. This condition, which has long been considered a threat by Apple, is both central to the invention of the internet (Berners-Lee 2025) and possible remedy to its chronic devolution (Doctorow 2025).

    This consolidation also promotes its colonization of psychological, social, and cultural spaces, which should be increasingly evident. More and more people are walking or worse driving for example while messaging, surfing, or talking as a result of Apple devices. Too many if you ask me seem enthralled with immersion, subjectivity, and other cultural immediacy features that have been promulgated by these devices.

    Some might be more or less alarmed about a human future that increasingly exists within digital networks. Regardless, all of us can be concerned with the way that Apple has positioned itself to exert the greatest control and make the most money, which only compounds its control.

    None of us can dismiss this dependency no matter how much Apple promotes user privacy for example or environmental stability or otherwise presents itself positively to the world. We cannot be confident that it will continue to promote these or other prosocial practices, especially if or when sales start to slump.

    The Apple MacBook Neo in other words might be amazing but upon second thought is also alarming because it contributes to the degradation of digital networks and encourages digital dependency.

    Equally alarming is that such second thoughts might not disqualify the MacBook Neo as my replacement laptop when I need a new one or worse before then.

  • An Internet For All

    An Internet For All

    Tim Berners-Lee’s (2025) recent memoir, which he co-wrote with Stephen Witt, is an invaluable account of the invention of the internet and useful counterbalance to mainstream accounts of it.

    Berners-Lee recounts his experiences from imagining a world-wide web, convincing CERN administrators in 1989 to support his proposal, and its stunning evolution since then into the backbone for contemporary digital life. He also considers other central concerns, such as content moderation, platform monopolies, and artificial intelligence, along the way.

    Central to this account are the central principles in Berners-Lee’s original vision. This vision was, and still is, an open network as a positive tool for human connections that is available to everyone, and not controlled by any single institution or individual.

    I was elated to learn that the internet inventor is still promoting an open and accessible space. He touts for example open-source software and federated platforms, such as LibreOffice and Mastodon, and he is developing personal data pods or wallets, and in so doing promoting data sovereignty.

    I was particularly interested near its end by his distinction between attention and intention economies, or what we’re currently experience and what he envisions for us. In doing so, Berners-Lee rejects both AI-doomers and AI-boomers — he acknowledge challenges and dangers, and criticizes the profit-driven approaches, but embraces the relative advantages — and advocates for in an AI-era reset.

    I found the rhetorical approach to be too episodic at times. One moment is followed by another and then another, and these are compiled and then offered as significant, and too infrequently connected to larger themes.

    I wanted more interpretation, synthesis, and conclusion from such a visionary and hopeful thinker. That though doesn’t mean he isn’t offering a vision of a different digital world, one that is also evoked by recent antitrust lawsuits against Google for example and Apple and successful verdicts against social media companies.

    Surely the one who imagined a networked world must be proud of his creation, and those who continue to develop it.

  • Like Lukewarm Leftovers

    Like Lukewarm Leftovers

    I needed some time to adjust to Paul Kingsnorth’s (2025) latest book Against the Machine and found it useful but ultimately unsatisfying.

    Kingsnorth in a seeming synthesis of his thinking criticizes what he calls The Machine and offers what he considers ways to retain our humanity. He considers the emergence of this mindset, which he considers synonymous with the West, and specifically its exchange of place, people, the past, and prayer — the four Ps — for science, the self, sex, and screens, or the four Ss, before suggesting how to respond.

    In preparation, he suggests the interrelation of emotion and reason for example and laments the reported loss of a fan’s son to gender reassignment (62-63 and 168-169). He also reports some of his own reactions, such as relocating to the Irish countryside where he plays chess by candlelight and resisting the requirement whereby everyone owns a smartphone (111-113 and 304).

    He recommends near the end that readers resist the left-hemisphere approach of the modern mind and develop the ability to attend with the right-hemisphere, which conceives of the world not as a “mechanism” but rather an “organism” (268, 271). He also recommends technological self-control and “reactionary radicalism,” which rejects The Machine moral economy, and its colonization, and endorses one based upon “community bonds, local economies, and human-scale systems” (280).

    I appreciate the way Kingsnorth offers a larger context with his account of The Machine. He isn’t satisfied to concentrate on the challenges of artificial intelligence although he does offer an alarming one. Rather, he places digital technologies in a continuum of not just Enlightenment mentalities, the Industrial Revolution, or even the eleventh century Fen Tigers but also “a 1,500-year civilization” of “‘Christendom’” (5).

    Such an account is a useful reminder that all technologies emerge and evolve, and that this emergence and evolution are important aspects of understanding their effects and articulating informed responses. Even so, it seems to offer a somewhat selective account that ignores other arguably essential elements of this context.

    Digital technologies could be considered for example part of a larger history of technological development, which incudes the invention of literacy for example or farming, that enhances the abilities of humans to trust others and coordinate efforts (Wright 1999, e.g.). Such accounts needn’t ignore the costs Kingsnorth cites or even negate his recommendations, but these could avoid dismissing these developments as completely detrimental.

    Nonetheless, this book encouraged me to reconsider my perspective and defend these beliefs, which is certainly welcome and undeniably useful. Moreover, its account of the past and present could be correct, in which case humanity might be in much more trouble than I realize, or want to recognize.

    The problem as Kingsnorth admits is that he cannot prove his account although this challenge hasn’t prevented others from attempting to do so (e.g., Pinker 2011 or 2018). At such moments, a better option when offered a range of selections might be opting for a more appealing one, which might not be right but could be more motivating.

    That in the end might be the most useful part of this book. For example, it describes shatter zones, including online spaces where we can use The Machine tech to resist its colonization, and distinguishes between raw and cooked barbarians, or those who resist from outside or in-but-not-of The Machine (Kingsnorth 2025, 290-291 and 304-305).

    Kingsnorth suggests that cooked barbarians might discover one day that their limits cannot keep them from being poisoned. At such moments, they would have to look for sustenance outside The Machine if they want to live to fight another day.

    Such moments could also make some of us wonder whether we’ve been cooked too long.