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Devansh's avatar

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Marc J Charpentier's avatar

Thank you for this thought-provoking piece – it invites disagreement in the best possible way.

Still, I sense a structural issue: observations morph into explanations, quotes masquerade as evidence. Take McLuhan’s claim that nationalism emerged with the printing press – a neat idea, but historically reductive. It sidesteps the military, bureaucratic, and linguistic machinery of absolutist states that actively forged national identity long before mass literacy.

This tendency recurs: technology’s influence is overstated, while the human impulse to imitate – to belong – is curiously underplayed. Hairstyles in the ‘50s, Bogart’s signature slouch, feuilleton phraseology – all precede TikTok. Technology amplifies imitation, but doesn’t invent it.

The “we” in the essay remains elusive. Who exactly are “we,” when I live in a small town with residents from over a hundred nations? And who, precisely, is the “dominant voice,” when our media use is increasingly fragmented?

The idea of fighting homogenisation with “quantitative metrics of novelty” sounds oddly self-defeating – a standardisation of deviation, if you will.

In the end, many of the proposed solutions reminded me of an old Volkswagen slogan: Individuality. Factory-installed. The user is cast as consumer; responsibility outsourced to tech – even for the erosion of shared culture.

That said, reading your piece – and interrogating it with the help of a language model – became a curious little process of discovery: an oddly old-fashioned, quietly contemporary dialogue. For that, my sincere thanks.

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