The new Gary Shtyengart book looks good (essay by him). "Everyone carries around a device called an �pp�r�t, which can live-stream its owner�s thoughts and conversations, and broadcast their �hotness� quotient to others." I think I heard someone say it is about rating and ranking everyone.
I can get on board with this. The way we've found to communicate our preferences is reductive, but our preferences are probably reductive, in that they are formed based on incomplete information. It's not that big of an issue by itself, but when we are less humble about how informed we are and let these things escape the cavern of our minds, and when we start screaming these things at the rest of the world - it seems to create this wildly toxic stew. Right?
Like on Facebook - it transforms people into these kind of tiny media outlets, selling an image of themselves. There's a reluctance to be your complete self, because not enough people will bother to take the time to know and understand what it means. It seems like people reduce and slice themselves. And at the same time, the very existence of the "like" bullshit creates a pressure on the consumption side that perpetuates this kind of destructive behavior.
A social experiment would be to take this to its most extreme form: simply doing things to generate "likes" or favorites or followers or whatever. Allowing people to vote on your life.
