"AI" means no more good-faith assumptions of a writer's investment and attention on the basis of their text; it imposes a collective and metastasizing burden of paranoia on everyone mattdpearce.substack.com/p/ai-imposes...

getting other people to respect you as a "real person" doesn't take place at the level of a style transfer; it invariably involves reciprocal attention and moments of intersubjectivity kneelingbus.substack.com/p/lo-fi-beat...

The most important upcoming scholarly work on AI isn't going to be on how processes become automated, but how subjects (we) begin to lose autonomy, and reflect the regressions of automation in our habits and thought.

from John Abromeit's appendix to this collection of Kracauer's writings on propaganda—perhaps useful to understand AI (like local news and right-wing cable news) as an addictive form of terror meant to make cognitive surrender feel like winning cup.columbia.edu/book/selecte...

"artificial intelligence" is, by definition, the negation of human agency, connection, and community

from Sigfried Kracauer's "Totalitarian Propaganda": propaganda usually seen as being in service of some other aim, but ultimately it becomes an end in itself, a manifestation of power for its own sake

felt like this too neatly linked the feeling of fakeness to the recent pivot to short form video. all metricized and algorithmic media is deceptive. like, what's the "real" way to post content in a system that links attention to profit?

it makes more sense to me to say there is no such thing as a "real share" or a "real fan" than to complain about fake ones. who are these "real" people who supposedly are immune to marketing and uninterested in cultural participation? www.garbageday.email/p/everything...

another (and probably less useful) way of putting this is that slop marks the "real subsumption" of content to algorithmic platforms and the capital that organizes them

one of my recent newsletter posts has been turned into a proper article parole.cc/compendiums/...

it's as though the main use case of "AI" in education is to propagate low-effort hoaxes that undermine the Enlightenment project altogether

they never were in the first place journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Suggests that generated video needs to be mixed with “real”video to thrive; its value is parasitic, dependent on undermining credibility of nongenerated material

clips are like AI summaries in that they seem to promise a way to master content overload, but achieve this by making people passive consumers of an ever more superficial stream of disconnected fragments

popularity of "clipping" suggests people like consuming highlights, even of (or mostly of) things they wouldn't care about in its full form www.garbageday.email/p/what-happe...

sounds a bit like Kittler's "discourse network": "the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and produce relevant data"

these sorts of fakes also shape expectations of what events should look like, and reinforce the expectation that all events should be reducible to images

"vibe-living" is good Orwellian term for when people have been made too anxious to make any decisions for themselves about anything www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

seems that "AI" makes "you can just do things" and "you can't do anything" into the same thing, as if they are supposed to be the same goal www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/m...

memes are like fashion trends that people "wear" in media by posting; decoding "what they mean" beyond that verges on folly, like asking what different skirt lengths "really mean"

this conclusion likens social media meme-making with AI paper-clip maximizing; social media is an engine that turns everything into memes the way AI would catastrophically overoptimize on a pointless goal

the problem with "brain rot" as a term is that using memes makes people feel smart (in on a fast-moving joke) but using language often makes us feel stupid (it can be hard to be articulate and never assured that you will be understood)

reminds me of Flusser's claim that communication in images meant that "writing has no future" — this is possibly an intermediate stage in the "death of writing," when language use becomes a matter of mimicking ever more ephemeral coinages

extremely random that the image in a story about "reality distortion fields" shows a guy wearing a Travis Konecny shirt news.artnet.com/art-world/re...

think "monitoring the situation" is about aestheticizing information so that you can let yourself give up on being informed

the casino sportsbook as an "informational sublime" where information becomes so perfectly actionable that it becomes useless, like an arbitrage always already played out kneelingbus.substack.com/p/situationg...

pdf of Simulacra and Simulation dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/baud...

the message in all content becomes "engage with content" — which means that "content" is abolished and replaced with pure form: ceaseless engagement with engagement disjunctionsmag.com/articles/end...

Nice visual/written essay by Terry Godier on how material goods of capitalism (phone, appliances, apps) shifted from being products to becoming relationships. This shift is a mirror of neoliberal subjectivity that demands ‘work on the self’ via moral imperatives. www.terrygodier.com/the-last-qui...

When prediction markets are sufficiently entrenched, facts will be revealed as niche content of interest only to gamblers

AI writing is optimized to seem "good" to people who could care less about the context or the larger point the writing is supposed to serve maxread.substack.com/p/what-do-wh...

this claims that there is no theoretical limit to the demand for hyper-personalized content; but the actual demand for actual content is dictated by social relations (desiring the desire of the other, etc.) arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06060

What I feel when this gets denied as a word

AI slop is a potent strategy of warfare in spreading disinfo and sowing doubt. Quickly produced at scale, AI slop drowns out human-made content and goes viral as spammers detect and exploit weaknesses in algorithms.

at some point athletes throwing games will be fully rehabilitated as offering a form of insider knowledge to help the world predict who's not cheating www.tank.tv/magazine/iss...

"personalization" is manipulation 1234kyle5678.substack.com/p/enter-the-... www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/t...

being unable to conceive of any other goals than maximizing one's "personal productivity" must be a terrible way to go through life

“And yet” should be changed to “because”—people can see that they will use these tools to the detriment of their own relationships

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...