While nominally a fiction writer, W.G. Sebald's work remains theoretically prescient. Long before social media, he understood the suspicious anxiety inherent to learning about the world over social media. His works embrace this unease, accepting the unreliability of all individual sources, but also the obligation to make sense of them. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Images were once too scarce to be deployed rhetorically; they seemed to be more documentary by default. Now communicating continually with images is common, which generates a nostalgia for when images could speak something other than what the photographer meant to say. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Much concern has been raised around teens spreading misinformation on TikTok. But fear, and a sense of abandonment by the authorities, can drive compulsive behavior online. Young people — facing just as many threats as adults, but with less power to protect themselves — are just as susceptible to this as their elders. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Sidewalk Toronto is dead, but its legacy is instructive. It shows that surveillance systems aren't so much documenting as producing a desired reality — and that erasing these images, rather than increasing privacy, only makes that constructed reality harder to audit. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Proponents of "Web3" often claim that their crypto-based platforms will eliminate some of the problems associated with conventional social media. It will replace big tech companies with decentralized systems, replace the drive for virality with a commitment to community. But Web3 remains entirely dependent on existing platforms to attract users, and relies on the same dubious incentives to build hype. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Watching old movies reveals a chasm between seemingly once-possible "off-grid" experiences and the continuous connectivity that persists today, arching between childhood and later stages of life. The way our timelines excavate our own pasts for us not only makes remembering from a distance less possible — no longer are we narrators remembering a singular bygone era — but contemporary storytelling too is morphing away from the "closed chapter" adventure into narratives that take this sustained connectivity into account. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Conversations about technology tend to be dominated by an optimistic faith in technological progress. There is endless encouragement to think about all of the exciting benefits of new technology, but significantly less attention paid to the ways things might go spectacularly wrong. That's where Paul Virilio comes in. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Those who view “real life” as distinct from images might prefer to believe that undocumented experience is the “truth.” They might suggest that experiences contrived to produce photogenic images are false, an “as-if” experience, LARPing in the pejorative sense. But the life they are describing — a way of being in the world that is untouched by performativity and projection — is the biggest LARP of all. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

The concept of “the offline" is deeply enmeshed with that of "wilderness." Both concepts offer a fantastical escape from the hazards of a globalized world. But in setting up a binary between the corrupted, digital self, and the pure, disconnected self, they both perpetuate a hazardous logic. Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.

Beauty filters like "Belle" are praised for providing better representation. But the underlying technologies are historically steeped in bias, which raises the question: Is this sort of representation desirable in the first place? Read more essays on living with technology at https://reallifemag.com and follow us on Twitter @_reallifemag.