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Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience 

Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
Safetyism and Wokeism are fellow travelers, joined at the hip in many more contexts than not. Both elevate people’s subjective and emotional experiences, so long as they point in a progressive direction, over what is biologically or scientifically true. It is time for both conservatives and traditional liberals to wake up to this reality, which requires more consistently translating our convictions into action.