Reposted by James Tinged Words
It started innocently enough with a Tumblr post entitled, "ur personality is defined by ur favorite line in hallelujah" by rosegoldlips:
"tag your favorite line of hallelujah"
Nek minit...
amatalefay.tumblr.com/post/1651376...
![It is tempting to interpret these episodes as isolated crises, each demanding its own explanation. Yet taken together they begin to resemble something else entirely. [highlight]They suggest that we may have been paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.[/highlight]
The story, in other words, is probably not about content moderation, or data protection, or recommendation algorithms, or artificial intelligence, even though each of these matters enormously. Those are symptoms of a deeper transformation whose outlines are only now becoming visible. What appears to be a succession of corporate controversies may, in retrospect, come to be understood as the slow exhaustion of an idea that shaped the first quarter of the twenty-first century: the belief that a small number of private technology companies could become the primary architecture through which humanity communicates, learns, debates, connects, entertains itself and increasingly understands the world.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jfersscjmut66kwgcgtqmeor/bafkreiah7rc27yjdi6g6in5kf2pbj2hj67pbbq2fpbtqbgdfryp2vfwcfa)
![The remarkable thing about this idea is not simply that it became commercially successful. It became culturally invisible. Platforms ceased to feel like products and instead became environments. Like roads, electricity or running water, they receded into the background of everyday life. Their ubiquity created the illusion of permanence. It became difficult to imagine social life without them, just as it had once been difficult to imagine commerce without railways or politics without newspapers. [highlight]Every era eventually mistakes its dominant infrastructure for a natural feature of the landscape.[/highlight]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jfersscjmut66kwgcgtqmeor/bafkreie5gm7p64t3p3jy44jnd4ltlcapzv63nbxbu2p26dmi5qseiuznsq)
