Andrew Golis

Are we lifehacking ourselves to death?

The top-ranked post at Hacker News right now is from a software developer who asks, “How do you stay emotionally efficient?” The question, with its assumption that emotions, like work flows, can be managed with greater or lesser efficiency, strikes me as another small but telltale sign – along with the rise of “social networking” sites and the structuring of “friending” as an automated process – of the insidious colonization of our personal and social lives by the ethic of the algorithm. As usual, the process of colonization begins with the warping of language. “We shape our tools,” wrote John M. Culkin, “and thereafter they shape us.”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.