Zoning out while playing slot machines is not so different from entering the "zone" of positive-psychology's flow states

It makes no sense to imagine robots with the agency to choose to love us. Rather than regard them as not quite adequate humans, robots can be seen as a medium for emotional expression between humans

Would any self-respecting person even use social media in the first place?

By giving immediate access to the outer reaches of our social networks, the internet encourages us to take social risks to define our character in a moment rather than accept the embedded identity we build over time

"A: I felt an infinite emptiness. It was terrifying. B: No, that’s good. Do it more."

Facebook's reputation management system and the prison house of identity

ASMR delivers aesthetic transcendence with a formal vocabulary that excludes authenticity from the outset

Microcelebrity evokes something small but it marks an excess, a need for more, a hunger, a dissatisfaction that can't be resolved by social media.

Liquid modernity dissolved identity; social media tries to resolidify it.

"When one is disappointed, one is always wrong. You should never be disappointed with the answers you receive, because if you are, that's wonderful, it proves that it was a real answer, that is to say exactly what you weren't expecting"

Smartphones encourage us to live more chaotically in everyday life while promising at the same time a safe, womb-like harbor from the disarray

Universal paranoia is assumed and redeemed by social media, depleting its power as a critical mode

Social media let us indulge in an affirmative form of paranoia as self-creation

Only people and not books can be literary. To claim a book is literary is to try to use it to naturalize one's snobbishness