From chatrooms at thirteen to running a world in Ultima Online to building communities for companies — a life spent tending rooms online. Now I’m turning that instinct on my own data: pulling twenty years of my life off the platforms and onto ground I own, and building the habit of micro-journaling in my own garden instead of Meta’s.
Every untracked transaction is a small act of structural resistance
Every untracked transaction is a small act of structural resistance. From The Digital Caste: Surveillance Capitalism and the Architecture of Permanent Inequality on michaeljoelhall.com
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/buy-your-milk-from-someone-you-know/
Original source: https://michaeljoelhall.com/the-digital-caste-surveillance-capitalism-and-the-architecture-of-permanent-inequality/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Saṅgha · Sevā · Sthira · Dāna
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
“You could always turn left” is the argument of the maze designer explaining to the rat that it has a choice
The choice to opt out is the choice to accept systematic economic disadvantage. From The Digital Caste: Surveillance Capitalism and the Architecture of Permanent Inequality on michaeljoelhall.com
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/the-maze-designers-defense/
Original source: https://michaeljoelhall.com/the-digital-caste-surveillance-capitalism-and-the-architecture-of-permanent-inequality/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Svātantrya · Bandha · Pratītyasamutpāda · Mokṣa
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
Automated systems don’t remove human bias—they move it, and they hide it from view
Automated systems don’t remove human bias they move it, and they hide it from view. I grew up in small-town America. The kind of place where you knew the person behind the counter at the hardware store and bought your milk from someone whose name you could actually remember. It wasn’t romantic — it was just how commerce worked. You exchanged money for goods, and nobody was quietly adjusting your price based on what phone you carried or how long you lingered in the dairy aisle. That world is vanishing.
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/the-digital-poorhouse/
Original source: https://michaeljoelhall.com/the-digital-caste-surveillance-capitalism-and-the-architecture-of-permanent-inequality/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Avidyā · Ahiṃsā · Viveka · Saṃskāra
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
Pratyahara isn’t about escaping the world—it’s about reclaiming agency over what gets in
There’s a pattern running through this week that has nothing to do with asana. It’s about what happens when your nervous system becomes a data point—and what yoga practice offers in response.Start with the divide between those who build algorithmic systems and those who get processed by them. One group sets parameters. The other gets reduced to inputs and outputs. Then look at Gen Z women drowning in anxiety—forty percent wanting to leave the country, a third anxious almost all the time. Economic precarity, climate doom, and the relentless hum of being constantly online.
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/when-the-system-treats-you-like-data/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Pratyahara · Pranayama · Asana · Sadhana
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
Algorithmic sorting doesn’t just reflect class—it actively produces new forms of social stratification
Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade describe an emerging split between what they call the “coding elite” — those who build and control algorithmic systems — and the “cybertariat” — those who are subject to them. This isn’t just a digital divide in the old sense of who has internet access. It’s a divide in who gets to be a subject versus an object in algorithmic systems. The coding elite set the parameters. Everyone else is a data point.
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/coding-elite-and-cybertariat/
Original source: https://michaeljoelhall.com/the-digital-caste-surveillance-capitalism-and-the-architecture-of-permanent-inequality/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Māyā · Puruṣārtha · Karma · Svabhāva
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
Pratyahara — withdrawal from constant stimulation — isn’t escapism. It’s reclaiming your attention from algorithms designed to hijack it.
A recent Newsweek investigation into Gen Z women reveals what many of us already suspect: an entire generation is drowning in anxiety. Forty percent of young women want to leave the country permanently. A third feel anxious about the future almost all the time. Their friends are cycling through antidepressants like they’re trying on jeans. The culprits are familiar. Economic precarity. Climate doom. A dating landscape that treats people like products. And underneath it all, the relentless hum of nervous system overload from being constantly online.
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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/the-anxious-generation-needs-pratyahara/
Original source: https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-women-quiet-crisis-11686238
All content: https://mjh.yoga
Concepts: Pratyahara · Santosha · Samskaras · Dharana
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub
Two people in the same store seeing different prices isn't a glitch. It&# 039;s the system working as designed. From The Digital Caste: Surveillance Capitalism and the Architecture of Permanent Inequality on michaeljoelhall.com –
Read more: https://theyoga.club/the-price-you-were-meant-to-pay/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #shaladaily #theyogaclub
We spent this week thinking about information — who controls it, who translates it, and what happens when the systems meant to organize our lives start sorting us instead.The Digital Poorhouse maps how algorithms don’t eliminate human bias, they just move it somewhere we can’t see it. Automated systems price, predict, and exclude with a precision that would make any historical gatekeeper jealous. The mechanism is new. The shape is old.
Read more: https://theyoga.club/systems-suits-and-who-gets-to-know/
All content: https://mjh.yoga
#ashtanga #yoga #shaladaily #theyogaclub
Yoga Filter: Algorithms, Translation, and Who Controls What We Know
Michael Joel Hall reflects on who controls information and how algorithms sort, predict, price, and exclude, arguing they don’t remove bias but relocate it into opaque systems that resemble an old “digital caste” logic. He highlights Matthew Luko’s work translating government bureaucracy as a model for yoga teachers demystifying practice and notes his new “Tech Support Tuesday” answering Ashtanga questions. He connects this to real-world community as an antidote to tech-driven loneliness, describing how the yoga club mirrors “incidental intimacy” found in run clubs and other offline meetups. He then turns to memory research showing scientists can delete or alter mice memories, questioning what happens if suffering is removed, and contrasts deletion with yogic practice: working with samskaras, acceptance, and changing one’s relationship to pain rather than erasing it.
00:00 Weekly Theme Setup
00:15 Algorithms And Bias
00:25 Algorithms & The Digital Poorhouse
00:47 The Question Mark Suit Man
00:50 Translators And Yoga Teachers
01:04 Yoga as Translation
01:32 Tech Support Tuesday & Real Life Meetups
02:13 Deleting Memories
02:37 Joyce Carol Oates & Identity
03:08 Who Controls What We Know
03:12 The Thread: Who Decides?
03:19 Closing And Next Steps
03:21 Where Are You Going?
07:50 The Digital Poorhouse
09:34 All Eight
12:34 Forget About It