Notes from Recent Reading: Ruined by Design, Mike Monteiro
Just prior to my dad going into hospital last month, I wrote an entire blog post about choosing who gets to monetise your attention as an artist working in the early 21st century. If you got something out of that post, I recommend that you set aside an afternoon to read Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design: How Designers Ruined the World, and What We Can Do To Fix it. Specifically, the list on page 115, where he runs through the ways in which various online institutions make their money, culminating with a a statement that is both incredibly glib and still nails a particular discomfort I’d been feeling for a few years in social media: “Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis.” Mike Monteiro, Destroyed By Design Of course, given that it occurs 115 pages in, Monteiro’s built a lot of scaffolding around that statement. He’s talked about the ways in which engagement is monetised and how
