Status Updates From The Age of Surveillance Cap...

Glass life is intolerable, but so is fitting our faces with masks and draping our bodies in digitally resistant fabrics to thwart the ubiquitous lawless machines. Like every counter-declaration, hiding risks becomes an adaptation when it should be a rallying point for outrage. These conditions are unacceptable. Tunnels under this wall are not enough. This wall must come down.

Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power.

Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the "others," especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion.