It's like how every discussion of AI goes from zero to Skynet in ten seconds:

There's deep study here, deep scholarship, deep insights and we have this natural tendency to go "whoa so what if my Instagram account could go to my job instead" "here's 80 million Bruce Willis works for cheap".

It's a particular sore spot for me because anonymity and what it means is something I actually went to Reddit HQ a couple times to discuss with the guys in charge. The world could have been a better place. They never offered me the community manager position; they mentioned that the pay was terrible and that they didn't see me working for that little (which says a lot about their priorities). Erik Martin made Time Magazine making $15 an hour.

Life on the Screen is particularly poignant because it's Book 2 of a trilogy. Second Self came out in '84 and was basically "whoa our self-image has no fuckin' idea what to do with computer interaction." Life on the Screen is "there's a bunch of shit here we're completely unprepared for and it might be awesome but the potential for a cataclysm is high." Alone Together is "yep we're all fucked lemme count the ways since I've been tracking this shit since '83" and then her publisher said okay Cassandra turn that frown upside down and she tried to paint a happy picture with Reclaiming Conversation which is basically "put down your phone forever or you will become a pod person."

And here we are, with Matt Yglesias arguing that phone calls are barbaric.