evergreen lesson of automation: it's not a way of eliminating bottlenecks but of inventing new and more resistant ones backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we...

The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content

a.k.a. truth and falsity in their ultramoral sense carrier-bag.net/vectofascism...

GenAI is a key activator in the Anti-Vice Popular Front: its output & industry also tell you the rules are over. The increasing volume of synthetic content contributes to the broken windows theory of the information landscape: "the more your environment is vandalised, the less care you take of it."

an essay I wrote last year about AI "companions" www.emptysetmag.com/articles/lon...

It’s a category mistake nobody really talks about: most AI companies are not trying to sell creative tools, they are trying to sell content streams.

👇🏻

Why would anyone buy an AI-written romance novel when you can just prompt the chatbots yourself and "write" your own? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...

useful chart for "deanthropomorphizing" discussions of "AI" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

"desocialization" (like "social deskilling") is a good term for what was once talked about in terms of "social graph" vs. "interest graph," or of "algorithmic recommendation" nymag.com/intelligence...

nice concretizing of the core idea in the history of information overload: overload isn’t a matter of quantity alone, it requires a certain kind of subject to feel overwhelmed. (the early modern scholar who wants to have read every book in the library, the RSS reader who wants inbox zero)

an essay I wrote last year about AI "companions" www.emptysetmag.com/articles/lon...

Here's a thread of some Dan McQuade blogs that we really loved 🦅 The Garden State Parkway’s Jon Bon Jovi rest stop is playing fast and loose with famous quotes: defector.com/the-garden-s...

think "being online" is a cause of boredom that is presented as its cure; platforms and feeds are engineered to make users consistently feel more bored and less creative, to structure their lives in terms of addiction rather than meaning nautil.us/why-the-do-n...

Worth your time. “fundamentally you are in love with a business product”

I wrote about prediction markets, where we’re at and how we got here for Defector

wonder if part of this is that using chatbots leads some users to lose whatever "theory of other minds" they used to have; the chatbots' fluency "proves" that other people are no different from and no better than machines www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

this means that for most people, AI simply is a tool for coercion; its use case is to allow others to make them experience powerlessness theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/you-have-t...

at a glance www.wired.com/story/china-...

a cause for optimism newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

Now that AI-generated fake news video is everywhere, I think it's notable that its main function didn't turn out to be sophisticated and unpredictable deception but rather just more soothing, hermetic propaganda for willing rubes and ideologues nymag.com/intelligence...

data-collection and programming are not sufficient to run an economy because economies should not be focused on optimizing for one particular goal newleftreview.org/issues/ii153...

“slop” as the new “nonplace” maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...

the curse of streaming media: "the ability to cheaply deliver content is matched by its inability to produce anything new" www.unemployednegativity.com/2025/12/livi...

pursuing the dream of a life lived as pure "data creation," with the ultimate goal of being completely manipulatable by the data processors who have a plan for your life

one of the dumbest things I've ever read www.wired.com/story/people...

these findings suggest that people should always understand that interacting with chatbots is like talking to an advertisement, not talking to some supergenius

this reminds me of theories about advertising, and how much we seem to want to believe that we are intrinsically hard to persuade and have something like "firm, established beliefs" when the evidence usually suggests otherwise www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/05/1...

when something that seems to belong to you (a device, your identity etc.) can be modified remotely at will by outside forces, you're always already expropriated

any device that is "always connected" is either working against us or forcing us to work unpaid for someone else

it's almost as if the purpose of such devices is to incapacitate you and make you dependent

i.e. how algorithmically sorted social media already works

this gets at the question of whether one can close-read a generated text or image; the contingencies in them indicate something about the training data, but there seems to be nothing aesthetic in it www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

feel like an ethnography of the people who get paid by the piece to "rank" LLM outputs would also explain a lot about the kind of prose the models are optimized to generate maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...

not clear if the loneliness becomes visible to the chatbot user, though it certainly becomes visible to tech companies, who have incentive to perpetuate it datasociety.net/points/all-t...

also think this fantasy of mastery expresses itself as an opportunity for total surrender, to expect nothing from yourself

OK so this concept of 'interpassivity', which this author dates to the 90s, is exactly what Attali wrote about in 1977's NOISE as "repetition", or stockpiling hordes of use-time that you never actually use mail.cyberneticforests.com/from-interac...

interesting that Flusser invented gooning

I wrote something about generative music and reading Vilém Flusser robhorning.substack.com/p/the-songs-...

seeing LLMs as "ideology that can pretend to be a person" helps make it clear what "talking to chatbots" accomplishes: Althusserian "interpellation"

this seems right, and always makes me wonder what the "suckers" get out of being on "sucker lists," why they enjoy being on them. Is it just some combination of masochism and getting paid attention to? Confirmation bias as a service? maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

regardless of what else they convey in a specific image, image generators offer images that tell those people who want to hear it that "effort/craft is a sham and a waste of time"

seems like one of the main use cases for genAI is to eliminate the joy that other people take in thinking and actually doing things www.thecut.com/article/woul...

Sora 2 is not being “misused” when people use it to produce racist, transphobic, misogynistic, & otherwise vile images—it exists to make it easier to put these images out into the world. Calling it a “misuse” is a grave misunderstanding of what these companies are up to, & lets OpenAI off the hook.

However, the problem with these images is not just their genericness. It's the deeply populist idea that politics can be reduced to its immediately visible effects: politics is not judged by how it affects people's concrete daily lives, but rather by its aesthetics—by what image it produces 4/

hope that is the actual cover

analysis of political AI slop as "generated déjà vu" slavoj.substack.com/p/welcome-to...

but the existence of text and video generators will also fortify those modes of social verification that don't amount to "it's acceptable for me to believe everything I see and read" www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...

when any person's face can be pasted into any face-shaped hole, it doesn't make things feel "personalized"; rather it negates the idea that there is anything personal about a face