Description
This brief book - designed to be readable even for people who've had their attention span shattered by doomscrolling and hellsites - presents the concept of Slow Internet. Merging the slow movement with the untapped promise of the early Internet, the authors - governance futurist Corin Ism and altruistic hacker Markus Amalthea Magnuson - articulate three design principles, plenty of concrete examples, a vibe and a vision, adding up to an exit path from the Stressed Internet of today.
Synthesising ideas from discourses surrounding surveillance capitalism, privacy advocacy, platform cooperativism and AI alignment, Slow Internet suggests a relationship with technology where intentionality is front and centre. One where the user should be allowed to leverage technological muscles for their own objectives - rather than becoming the exploit of someone else's interests.
Including suggestions like analogue dating apps, interfaces optimised for well-being, finite scrolls, and websites with opening hours, the Slow Internet manifesto is chock-full of inspiration and ideation, perfect for the fatigued netizen looking for a healthier relationship with the technology of tomorrow and today. A palm tree badge is also proposed as a means to quickly signal an unwillingness to participate in draining demands to boost relevance on socials, and an enthusiastic willingness to establish more pleasant norms.
Slow Internet marries a deep analysis of incentive and market design with actionable steps that developers of enterprises, code and interfaces can make use of to build virtual futures characterised by joy, calm and leisure. This is the spark for those ready to take the step that follows upon critiquing what is: suggesting and building what could be instead.
Product Details
| Publisher | Subversion Imprint |
| Publish Date | May 15, 2024 |
| Pages | 64 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9782931289006 |
| Dimensions | 7.0 X 7.0 X 0.2 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Corin Ism (born 1985) is a futurist, author and artist based in Europe. Their work focuses on the de- and reconstruction of worlds, in virtual domains, on this planet and the next.
Ism's writing takes elements and tools that characterise our worlds today, from social technologies like markets and the rule of law, to technological innovations like digital interfaces and algorithms, and looks at how these can be used differently to produce more emancipatory, just and pleasurable outcomes. Ism attempts to tangent a first-principles approach to social science.
Ism's background is in the global governance of catastrophic risks - where Ism, among other things, was the Executive Director of the Global Challenges Foundation and led the world's biggest prize competition in governance innovation, focused on UN reforms that could help better tackle existential risks like climate change, great power wars and misaligned artificial intelligence. Ism previously also worked as a Research Director on projects on digital jurisdictions, and how to integrate automated sustainability accounting in international agreements, and taught governance innovation at Singularity University.
Ism retreated from all previous positions to co-found the Future of Governance Agency and enter a hermit existence to create a string of books, essays and projects that roll out in the coming years. These works range from investigations into the micro - like love and families as the nucleus of our societies, morphological freedom, and appearance-based oppression - to projects looking straight at the macro of resource distribution. In 2024, the slotted publications are Slow Internet (May 2024), The Next Aesthetic (August 2024), and How to Rule Mars (January 2025). More titles will be announced as their publication dates approach.
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