🙈 TikTok & the production of ignorance

PLUS: The audio version of “Will ChatGPT replace search”

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In “Can you predict the future,” I wrote that those offering tech predictions “sell uncertainty and change so that they become an authoritative voice in the face of transformation. In short, they create the conditions for their own relevance.” That’s true, but it’s only partially right. The other part? Speculative technologies!

See, technology itself can nurture uncertainty too. In “Speculative Communities: Living With Uncertainty in a Financialized World” Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls these “speculative technologies” or those that both visualize and obfuscate. They simultaneously represent the complexity of reality and hide it. Take TikTok as an example — it encourages a kind of volatile immersion. It feels a li’l chaotic but you’re nevertheless engrossed and stimulated, left to wonder hours later how a string of bizarre videos kept your attention for so long. Komporozos-Athanasiou likens this experience to “the legibility and logic of a narcoleptic dream.”