"The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion.... From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging."
"beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape" has to be one of the worst buried ledes of all time
"I have a deep-seated fear... that the Black struggle will... just be about narrow Black interest.... I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide.... I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned."
"The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead."
"Even if these systems were providing value to disadvantaged people, that shouldn’t make them off limits to criticism. Is it classist to call out the shady business practices of companies like Walmart and Dollar General just because many lower income people depend on the low prices they provide?"
"I didn’t pay all that money for a good seat in the speakeasy just to be turned into a narc at the door."
i think what the "eventually generative ai will be indistinguishable from human-made things" folks are failing to understand is that not only do the methods of creation leave traces in the media they create, you can't predict beforehand what those traces will be; also, people are really really good at recognizing these traces
"Working at an AI-equipped workplace is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book"
"I think Austen could have found success starting an MLM back in Utah, a state run rampant with get-rich-quick schemes. His mistake was going after education in California, a state ready to deal with for-profit schools. He wasn't ready for the law."
"Yes, someone needs to figure out what the implications of quantum computing are for cryptography, but I guarantee you that it is not Synergy Greg"
"[W]hat is currently sold to us as “Artificial Intelligence”... is neither intelligent nor entirely artificial, yet it’s pumping the internet with automated content more quickly than you can fire an editorial office. No system predicated on these assumptions can hope to discern “misinformation” from “information”: both are reduced to equally weighted packets of content, merely seeking an optimization function in a free marketplace of ideas. And both are equally ingested into a great statistical machinery, which weighs only our inability to discern."
"... debates over gender binaries are also material claims... not just cultural ones. [...] “They’re not shitting you when they say the world would come to an end, because their world would come to an end,” Moreton said."
"survivable futures require that we all have access to better ways to be together online"
"You might think you can add enough epicycles to your rules to avoid this problem. For instance, you could list all of the different sorts of vehicles from this game in either the yes or the no column. I don't think this is true. I think you can reduce the problem, but I don't think you can eliminate it."
"You work 'Eraserhead' into your repertoire of nicknames for Art but it doesn’t land as hard as some of the others because even though he senses the cruelty in your intent, he didn’t see the movie and doesn’t know what you’re talking about."
"Despite its name, Red (the album) does not have the most Red (the color) references. That honor goes to Midnights." via data is plural
clear, well-written overview of the positive feedback/signalling game of SEO
"The raw now is where your elbows live, and your bruises, and your socks slipping down your ankles. It is what cannot be recovered later; the strap of your bag that has flopped over your grave Italian seat mate’s programme; the fear that you have left the sound on your phone on; a text from Hope: ‘You’re about to meet the pope!’ It is the point, probably, of the hair shirt and the cilice that we saw in the Capuchin crypt. Your awkwardness, the edge of confusion, irritation, pain, incomprehension on the pope’s face as you approach him, your hand circling your tummy, clashes of bodies, like beads against one another, which will be worn smooth over time."
"Avoid references to family expectations or money. Professors are generally people who have rejected both."
"we go to the cinema to suspend our disbelief and imagine a fantastical world. it's the same drive that the protagonist feels. we want to believe that she is experiencing the supernatural, we want the tension to explode into something we can point to as the Monster, the Villain, the Dark Force. but it refuses to give us that, because reality doesn't give us that."
"Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is. It’s deodorants locked behind plastic. It’s TikTok Hype Houses. It is Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. It’s a sneaker collab between Nike and JP Morgan. It’s your favorite stand-up comic showing up in a commercial for Carvana. "
on Threads: "It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself."
"[E]ducational technology is overly dominated by psychological conceptions of individual learning... AI-based personalized learning systems [are] based on notions of mastery and... statistical measurement," reflecting an "assumption that human intelligence is an individual capacity, which can therefore be improved with technical solutions — like tutorbots — rather than something shaped by educational policies and institutions."
"That is what our ‘vast and glorious’ potential consists of: massive numbers of technologically enhanced digital posthumans inside huge computer simulations spread throughout our future light cone. It is for this goal that, in Häggström’s scenario, a longtermist politician would annihilate Germany. It is for this goal that we must not ‘fritter … away’ our resources on such things as solving global poverty." ugh
extremely smart, damn "You need manorialism to make little farmers produce surplus, and you need moderation to make openly hosted user-generated content ad-monetizable"
"OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost."
"By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling."
"In the US, women are underrepresented in high-paying occupations, but data shows that gender representation across most industries has improved significantly over time. Stable Diffusion depicts a different scenario, where hardly any women have lucrative jobs or occupy positions of power. Women made up a tiny fraction of the images generated for the keyword “judge” — about 3% — when in reality 34% of US judges are women, according to the National Association of Women Judges and the Federal Judicial Center. In the Stable Diffusion results, women were not only underrepresented in high-paying occupations, they were also overrepresented in low-paying ones."
"The reason that black box mechanics are so dicey outside of the casino is that it’s not always clear that a player has opted into the metagame, or that they are qualified to give consent. Those qualifications are, basically, maturity and intelligence, specifically with regard to the mechanics of the game. Any repeatable real-money transaction, such as a loot box, breaks the magic circle and turns every armchair into a swimming pool."
"Despite late capitalism, despite all the things we’re going through, the internet already runs on dedicated volunteer labor."
"how the hell am I gonna believe you when you say ‘yea I’m listening’ but you’re actually watching a 100 foot screen of Animal Planet bears wrestling each other"
"making my writing available for automated summarization? So someone can sell ads by a depersonalized version of my stuff? The feeling is nausea."
'It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things.'
"There’s an ambiguity here as to where the real value lies. Is the reaction testament to the value of the song (or the computer game, the Christmas present or whatever else)? Or is the artefact just an instrument used to provoke the impulsive emotional reaction? The simultaneity of artefact and response suggests a novel synthesis of criticism with behavioural experiment." [...] "reactionaries’ explicit purpose is to restructure society around ‘natural’ hierarchies of race and gender, and to dehumanise those who, for example, exercise the perilous freedom to cross the English Channel in a small boat." via https://www.metafilter.com/198362/The-Cult-of-Reaction
"The models are just an acceleration of processes that are already in place. The ideal outcome of a machine-learning driven society is overfitting: a world where, whether all our jobs are automated or we've just trained ourselves to work with the machine, no new information will need to be processed, all will be determined and predicted."
'Kraemer discovered that the only way to avoid wage-theft was to do "mindless busywork" that produced the clicks that her bossware demanded, even if it got in the way of her work. This is yet more proof that "you treasure what you measure," or, more formally, "any measurement becomes a target" (AKA Goodhart's Law).'
on the symbols/network schism
"These reactions, I think, help us to imagine what a public culture might be after free culture’s demise. What remains, however, is to recapture that productive engine of Kelty’s recursive publics that drive cryptocurrency and web3 today in building other hyper-capitalist futures. If commons-based peer production is a joke. If free culture is a ruse. What ways of doing with technology remain? Just as Jackie Wang has productively re-read theories of control through racial capitalism, I see a continued challenge of reimagining democracy, addressing its historic exclusions, and colonial underpinnings."
"Again and again we see female-dominated media fandoms’ interpretations dismissed as emotional and ideologically motivated. But what is all this vast effort to butch up Kirk but clear evidence of at least equally goal and emotion-driven work on the part of male-dominated sectors of fandom and popular reception?"
'Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. [...] [I]n a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"'
"The only reliable source of profits is in the extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it in the tech sector."
'“What already works” is a fundamentally conservative and nostalgic lens through which to view cultural production. Looking at “what already works” rejects an idea or potential of progress, and instead narrows the scope of possibility of a medium to only be capable or remediating its greatest hits.' [...] 'People already famous from producing “works” are now focused on meta-work, their cultural capital gained from doing that work in the first place now refocused on producing content related to their strongest signifiers.' (but how do you distinguish nostalgia from maintenance and re-absorbing work into the commons?)
"Extraction—of natural resources and of labor—is the defining American act, at home and at war. Inasmuch as art is for the statement of itself, earthworks such as Heizer’s extract for the sake of extraction. To me he is the most patriotic of artists. The effect of an earthwork is never big enough to critique its circumstances nor generative enough to counter the harmful effects of its creation. In this, the NFT producers have accomplished something great, and outdone the 1970s land artists. With minimal labor, no pretense of theory or contextualization, no aesthetic clarity, and no object to speak of, they have set off exponential extractions. It’s not new; it’s just worse." [...] "Art can’t fill the damage done by extraction and enshrining a site of extraction through installation, reframing it as a cultural space, is a softened blow rather than an elucidation. When art fills a void, it justifies the void."
"If I asked a teenager to create an Animal Crossing Island with a farm aesthetic, they might create something close to what Ballerina Farm looks like." [...] "... Mormon culture often tells girls they should grow up to be something kind of like an AGA. Always on. Divided into compartments — one that is ready to receive whatever needs warming, one that is always prepared to produce something sustaining. A surface that is not too hot to the touch. But enough warmth to extend to all the people in the space around you, all the while burning through more fuel than you can shake a damn stick at."
stirring presentation on early lgbt digital spaces (including printouts of Community Memory) and the concept of leaky/imperfect/expansive archives
'I recently heard a business journalist say that when he’s short on story ideas, he’ll just look for people who have given TED talks and “figure out what they’re lying about.”'
some points on design and the right to repair
as much as I recognize Whedon's shortcomings, I really didn't connect with this specific criticism—seems to be arguing that particular "realist" techniques ("show don't tell") should be valued over their alternatives... e.g. I don't agree that stories are (or should be) "about letting the audience disappear into a world you created."
"For the most part, this greenwashing isn’t for us. It’s for those in the community with a guilty conscience and for nervous rich investors and speculators. It ends up so weird and confused because it’s a community of explicitly anti-community, anti-government people clumsily feigning membership on a finite physical planet stocked with other non-Bitcoin people. That’s how you end up with a mix of ‘Bitcoin is a battery’, mixed with ‘STAY POOR CLIMATE ALARMIST SJW’. It is exhausting and unpleasant."
'“Fairy-taken” is also a less individualistic explanation than “languishing.” This sadness and inability to work is happening to you, but not because of you. It’s not that you failed to hustle hard enough, or to take appropriate care of yourself—it’s just that there’s something very evil and arbitrary in the world, and it chose to snatch you up. And there’s no solution and no cure, unless you can trick the fairies into letting you go.'
"I'm glad you're asking this. Jordan Ellenberg dropped me a note saying that I'd written a novel about wealth disguised as a novel about sex. I think that must be right."
"the new and the first are temporalities that often attract and accrue value in the art market"
"Molly Millennial’s condition is sincerely aestheticized precarity."
"Feign importance with repeating app sounds!"
"Kim explains that since the religion prioritizes women marrying and starting families young, blogging has become a natural outlet for people to share their domestic lives, all with a coat of glamour. And it allows them to generate income without having to compromise their duties at home. The way Mormon women have used the internet to manage these basic needs has come to define a huge portion of the influencer culture we consume and criticize today."
very compelling short story
"Crypto investments cannot be anything but a zero sum game, and many are actually massively negative sum. In order to presume a crypto investments functions as a store of value we simultaneously need to suppose an infinite chain of greater fools who keep buying these assets at any irrational price and into the future forever."
from Joanne McNeil: "... artificial intelligence with personality could become an early twenty-teens kitschy retro artifact. [...] The Tesla Bot announcement seemed to pre-figure this. The person in robot costume danced to music that sounded reminiscent of Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, which was released more than ten years ago. This isn’t the future. It’s an aesthetic that’s played out."
"I’m not suggesting that Rushdie carries a picture of Mario around with him at all times, but I am suggesting he might force it into conversation in the green room of a writers’ festival, and that by the power of the novelists descriptive language, Oates would have a pretty good idea of what Mario looked like, and what his deal was. It’s possible that she might respond to a picture of Mario with “oh that’s Salman’s little friend” but I’m fairly sure she would remember the name."
"Imagine you go back in time to the 1970s to change the history of the internet to your own liking. Based on the events described in the reading, how would you do it? How much funding would you need to achieve the changes you seek? Where do you get that funding from at the time, and how difficult is it to obtain? What does your answer to these questions say about the “great man theory” of history?"
"As it turns out, Pam’s case of Wheelchair was terminal."
"As always, the discourse waits at the whims of some of the most arbitrary shit we shouldn’t ever have to care about and inevitably curdles into the most annoying version of itself the moment it gets big enough."
in cortex's words, "a catalogue of metafictional entertainment"
'[T]he structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”'
"Cars, however they’re powered, are environmentally cataclysmic, break the tethers of community, and force an infrastructure of dependency that is as financially ruinous to our country as it is dangerous to us as people. In order to build a more sustainable future and a better world for humanity, we need to address the root problems that have brought us to where we so perilously lie today."
"But the smartest and most effective move the industry made (the aforementioned measures wouldn’t work without it) was to push people from My to Me. To introduce forms that would motivate people to see themselves as the main – and then the only – content of what they do online. I’d like to stress that although early web pages (or home pages) are remembered as personal, the person who made it was not the initial content; that turn took place later."
'This site features a curriculum developed around the television series, Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), a fictional narrative about people working in tech during the 1980s-1990s. The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.' really thoughtful and thorough!
'Slowly, slowly we reconnect the threads that connect me typing at my laptop in 2021 CE London backwards in time... to the dawn of the written word in the fertile crescent, when the gala priestesses of Inanna, who spoke only in the women’s tongue, sang in praise of her, “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana” nearly four thousand years ago.'
"I've received several DMs from friends asking what do to about parents/family members who believe misinformation regarding the election, vaccines and COVID. Here's a research-based thread to help explain the roots of these beliefs and how to (and how *not* to) address them."
"Hate speech can come in many forms, including memes that combine text and images. This kind of multimodal content can be particularly challenging for AI to detect because it requires a holistic understanding of the meme." that is not the reason that hate speech is difficult to detect, and it's actually harmful that you think it's the reason, sorry
"...however vulnerable the situation of transphobia makes us to the pain of wrong love, however vulnerable trans people are to abuse from cisgender partners, wrong love is not a trans problem. It is not a chaser problem. It is a problem everyone has; it is the problem that systems of meaning-making as diverse as heterosexual marriage, political lesbianism, and T4T sexuality all attempt to safeguard against."
language preservation and nlproc
Kyle Chayka: "the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started."
fantastic, provocative essay about how decentralized and p2p networks are not immune to exploitation
"White Savior Complex causes a lot of money to be wasted in order to, for example, give children sneakers and headphones that are of little to no use to them. At its most harmful, it can lead to an entire country being colonized. Creative Savior Complex works in similar ways: without proper consideration, many of the ways we try to help as creatives may mean valuable resources that could’ve done a lot of good are wasted, or, at its worst, it can lead to people getting hurt."
"a reading seminar and survey course looking into the constitution, scale, and many dimensions of the modern\colonial world-system. The texts here are merely a tiny fraction of the work done by non-Anglo-European, non-white scholars and activists in articulating the origins, development, and hegemony of the modern world-system, and yet my hope is that these will act as sparks for curious minds and a place within which to situate oneself and start from."
"a platform for resources, information and action steps to support intersectional environmentalism and dismantle systems of oppression in the environmental movement, led by environmental activists and sustainability advocates"
"StereoSet is a dataset that measures stereotype bias in language models. StereoSet consists of 17,000 sentences that measures model preferences across gender, race, religion, and profession."
Martin's got the right idea
lovely
emma's tremendous thesis project
"Americans love design most when we’re afraid. Just as the Depression enabled industrial design to present itself as the solution to US manufacturing woes, the 2000 to 2002 dot-com crash and 2008 recession, with their long tails, have enabled the rise of a new embrace of design and a new broadening of design’s imagined jurisdiction. This time the specific fear is that the knowledge economy is coming for everyone. Bewildered and anxious leaders, public and private, have responded by throwing in their lots with the seemingly magical knowledge-work that is design."
"As panic around AI-generated fake news and videos have shown, new technologies described as overwhelmingly advanced, conceptually inscrutable, and deeply conspiratorial make for headlines that draw attention. As AI-supported disinformation technologies advance, it is possible we will see panic around these technologies wielded to justify technological closure in the name of “the public interest.” While caution and care is warranted, we should not accept fast and seemingly easy technological closures for these problems without pushing for social, cultural, legal, and historical explanations."
"a series of tools to support creators of new connected technology to reflect on their product’s ethical and social impacts."
"[W]e are told that the Green New Deal is an impossibly expensive boondoggle – by precisely the same people now eager to pour blood and treasure down a hole in the desert. A trillion dollars spent on war returns nothing except trauma and misery; a trillion dollars spent on solar panels leaves behind a nation that gets its power for free each morning when the sun comes up."
louder for the people in the back. 'There is no such thing as “an artificial intelligence”.'
remarkable journalism/literary activism?
"Acoustic analysis of the songs told the researchers that the singing whales were from a number of different breeding grounds... They even recorded a humpback singing two different songs, perhaps in the process of learning one from another migrating whale. [...] [T]he authors have 'clearly demonstrated a location where the cultural transmission of song may occur'..."
"Alien is not, as a whole, a feminist work. Yet Ripley’s force as a character blasts through the sexual subtexts, and far outlasts them; you don’t remember her as threatened, but as triumphing. One of the most rewarding things about science-fiction for feminists is the way it allows us to imagine different possibilities, other futures. Alien’s neo-colonial world is no utopia, but even its nightmare offered a glimpse of a new freedom..."
"But this way of thinking suggests that the blind are lacking something in their relationship with the world which they must rely on the kind-hearted to give them. That a world without sight is a world without knowledge, sensation and community. That sight is better than no sight. This is perhaps not a surprising reaction from a film-maker. But what if this blind man relates to the world in a wholly different way? What if the pictures he gets from hearing, touching, smelling and tasting the world are just as fulfilling as Amélie's and Jeunet's fetishization of vision?"
"As machine learning algorithms are commoditized, those who can work along the entirety of the applied machine learning arc will be the most valuable."
"...my ethics of care says that we should be working for a radical data science: a data science that is not controlling, eliminationist, assimilatory. A data science premised on enabling autonomous control of data, on enabling plural ways of being. A data science that preserves context and does not punish those who do not participate in the system."
"The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature."
by zefyr lisowski
"[S]oft little kitty kisses these are not; they are “deep kisses,” in which the cat full-on plants its lips on Schneemann’s often open mouth. 'The intimacy between cat and woman becomes a refraction of the viewers’ attitudes to self and nature, sexuality and control, the taboo and the sacred,' [Schneemann has] written. 'The images raise questions of interspecies communication, as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos.'"
"Social-practice artworks with a commitment to sociopolitical change have the inexplicable potential to be valued as morally good works, regardless of the impact of the project as measured by the community’s criteria. They allow sociopolitical issues to be subsumed into aesthetic issues, such that a work can fail a community but still be considered good art. [...] Perhaps the takeaway is: The limited attention span for art is not enough. Do the work, and do it whether it’s in the context of art or not. Don’t pretend that doing good as part of a creative practice is better than just doing good. And definitely don’t pretend that good intentions make inherently good acts."
a mere lifestyle company