The “Attention Singularity” and cultural psychosis




Much in the same way that automation has made stock trading so fast that no human can keep up, and sends so much data flying around the world that no one can possibly keep track, we’ve surely reached a point where a kind of cultural/technical automation has made politics impossible to process any longer – and trying to only makes you dizzy. Staring into it leads to brain damage. Our puny brains are not able to process constant exposure to sustained levels of outrage. Only the machines can, and we’ve designed our AIs to broadcast it to us constantly.

No, I don’t mean any of this literally. But what else would a culture’s collective psychosis feel like?