Hi.
I hope this finds you well.
It seems rather bleak right now doesn’t it?
We were promised that technology and the Internet would fix everything: healthcare, education, food, agriculture, politics, but what we ended up with is pretty much the opposite – a world in which all of us preach to our own choir, like headless chickens running around chasing the next dopamine fix in the shape of a “like” on Facebook. Silicon Valley has perfected addictive design patterns and used this to capture our attention, our will and our motivation. Zuckerberg said back in 2013, “as long as you give everyone a voice the world usually ends up in a good place” – I wonder if it was this world he imagined as the good place?
How do you disrupt the disruptors, the innovators, the fixers of the world, the brave, the social, the be yourselves, the authentic self-promotors? I suppose you start with politics, with regulations, with taking back control over your attention and your agency. Innovation moves so fast that no single system can keep up with its speed and attention consuming ideology, least of all politics. Can you make an Uber for politics?
The ‘Mildly Interesting’ Anthology offers five different perspectives on the current social and political online landscape by five artists working at the forefront of contemporaneity. The only constraint given to the artists was that the piece would be a slideshow based on screenshots of online things. I very much enjoy the idea of having screenshots of websites as information in that it gives away the source. Simple, yet effective.
Jonas Lund