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But sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty calories. It’s sugar — short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts, Twitter posts (even blogs seem longwinded now), pop-ups and visualizations…Sugar is so much easier to digest, so enticing…and ultimately, it leaves us hungrier than before. Worse than…
Watching an unbelievably beautiful video of Hubble probing the edge of space: unfathomable 17.000 comments, but half of them inane, gross, with atrocious spelling, insults from childish name-calling, immature outbursts, vicious moronic bullying to outright gibberish insanity. Reading YouTube comment threads can make…
For hundreds of millions of years, Sex was the most efficient method for propagating information of dubious provenance: the origins of all those snippets of junk DNA are lost in the sands of reproductive history. Move aside, Sex: the world-wide Web has usurped your role. A single illegal download can propagate more…
Consider, for example, the fact that the size of military units has not changed materially in thousands of years, even though our communication technology (from signal fires to telegraphy to radio to radar) has. The basic unit in the Roman army (the “maniple”) was composed of 120-130 men, and the size of the analogous…
The Internet is awash with sex. In a few hours, an innocent can see more of the pleasures and perversions of sex, in a greater number of close-up couplings, than a eighteenth century roué could experience in a lifetime devoted to illicit encounters. The Internet is the greatest sex education machine — or the greatest…