"When something goes wrong, we’re as likely as anyone to assume the computer is cursed, has it out for us specifically, or needs to be appeased in some way. And at that moment, the computer does have an interiority that is hidden from us. There certainly is something we haven’t seen or don’t understand! A good programming tool or computer language, though, is a means for us to find and dissect that interiority, stripping away the illusion. AI actively worsens it instead."
"The notion that the language of one (Cummings) is considered legitimate due to its production by an autonomous will or intention into language and its subversions, and the other (Wernicke’s patient) not so because it is an effect of illness and therefore an unintended accident, reproduces a system of value contingent on the Western subject of colonialism-capitalism. The division of poetic versus aphasic (read: not-poetic) speech is layered with the racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism of a colonial order that also continues to delegitimate other syntactical and linguistic deviations found in linguistic practices."
"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."
"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
"What I feel most grateful to myself for in that home video is breaking me of that binary. If seven-year-old Jules was more like me today than not, then there was no opposite of dissociation to call on. There was nothing, or no one, to reintegrate. She was already there, which I suppose is how dissociation actually works, but not always how it feels when the child appears in the depths of our flesh as real, but our culture tells us she is a figment of retrospection."