Fast web surfing is economically engineered to maximize data harvesting

Evidence

Immediacy style rapidly inputs information available on the surface as immanent unto itself, without need for slow, long reading or interpretation. And the internet as we know it has been built and regulated to ensure that this celerity of “surfing” concords with profit: as technology writer Nicholas Carr observes, “The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.” Platform capitalism entails the hyper-functioning of visuality as surrogate for other senses and precipitates the cognitive state of “image overload.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes her central thesis (compressed circulation makes culture impatient with mediation) and connects to Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid’ debate with Steven Pinker.