“Every piece of technology contains complex ontological, epistemological, and cosmological assumptions that engineers rarely question. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and VKontakte in Russia are all based on the same model and the same set of assumptions. The ontological assumption is that society consists of individuals that are like atoms, and you can know the relation between these social atoms by putting a line between two dots, as in graph theory. These assumptions come to dominate our understanding of social relations and social formations, and an engineer would never doubt this or suggest that it’s a fabrication. But from the perspective of anthropology, a society could never emerge from individuals—individuals would already have been eaten by a tiger or a wolf. A society can only begin with groups. It is only with modern individualism that we came to understand society as being composed of atoms. This is only one assumption among many made by the engineers who design our technology.”

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/136/538400/the-call-of-the-unknown-in-art-and-cosmotechnics/

@darius

But look at how he’s being treated.

Meanwhile, I’m like _this_.

And like _this_.