Drew Austin looks back at some of the articles he wrote for Real Life, and goes a bit deeper on the topic of “how digital technology has gamified reality itself.”
LinkedIn and World of Warcraft are surprisingly similar. Racking up professional skill endorsements, becoming the ‘mayor’ of your neighborhood bar, hitting 10,000 steps a day, maintaining a Snapchat streak, or accumulating valuable in-game items in Stardew Valley are all variants of the same thing. The video game achievements are often even more valuable than the others. […]
[A] global hive mind made up of people in their parents’ basements, gathering and regurgitating information like termites converting wood into their massive enigmatic mounds.