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...

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