nothing is less "real," authentic," or "in the moment" less than things marketed as such

fred never misses thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

entirety of Disclosure Day's plot rests on the assumption that everyone believes TV news and not anything online lol

while Pump dot Fun is extreme, i think its a good, if hyperbolic, example of what all gamified platforms are: metrics-saturated platforms like X and Insta but also here are about conforming to *and thus debasing yourself for* what the number counts encourage

alternate take: using "POV" to caption third-person videos makes total sense when your own point of view and the imagined viewer of your self-as-content are collapsed together www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...

"AI is a normal technology, meaning it can be adopted and analyzed using normal business principles; the abnormality is in how we talk about it" mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-logic-...

dealing with "AI" is a bit like dealing with a pandemic — if there isn't social trust and a widely shared prosocial commitment to shared protocols of public health, then there is no protection for anyone, just paranoia and individualistic voodoo

underrated question is what is the role of media/cultural criticism when meanings and power dynamics arent being hidden?

"When AI hallucinates, it’s going through the same steps as when it’s working properly" on why saying "hallucinates" wrongly humanizes a process that is not at all like a brain malfunctioning: elftheory.substack.com/p/why-ai-doe...

let's check in on the UpWorthy guy...oh, lol

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?

I hear critical positions towards so-called «artificial intelligence» nowadays framed more and more as «rejectionism», and this is especially formulated as a critique of the left. The argument often goes something like this: Rather than seeing the potentials of AI, the left merely rejects it 1/

the psychoanalytic distinction between "desire" and "drive" also seems useful to explaining that shift from "wanting to converse with friends and build relationships" to "compulsion to consume repetitively to sustain a machine-zone-like fugue state"

To call slop automated is not to say it is free of human labor — rather, this human labor is already embedded in automated operations, not only made machine-like and subsumed under the logic of algorithmic curation, but made machine-readable, dissolved into patterns and quantifiable reactions 5/

new danah 🎯 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... it's weird we say "social media" to describe broadcast-like influencer-filled platforms and not use it to describe group chats, discords, and other far more "social" places

i read a million takes about how cameras lost their relation to truth, and here's yet another news event filled with conspiracies about everything but the footage

to me, the more interesting question isnt why highlights are more viewed, of course they are, but what accounts for the enduring popularity of the endlessly long streams the highlights are clipped from?

always skeptical of AI apologism that rests on "people want," "humans are inherently" essentialism. as rob notes, the creation of those desires is the whole point here

AI slop and nostalgia go so well together because nostalgia itself is the desire to misconstrue the past by smoothing its messy lived reality away into conceptual ideals. nostalgia and AI work in similar ways

improved framing, takes into account the enduring truth-telling function of cameras and is not just the too-easy panic over some linear descent into fakery www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/u...

New piece: "ALGO-READ: The creative automation of the reading subject" Open access. Critical study of the production of ‘the reading subject’ as a media trend, unit of value and data point www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... in RELATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (eds A. Lagerkvist, J. Smolicki

there’s a new edition of The Social Photo (Verso) and i wrote a little preface for it

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

also seems like a good guide to what writing about AI not to take so seriously; shows who is either not thinking carefully enough about the topic or is deliberately writing obfuscatory hype

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

modernity is the doom loop of having to describe the same thing with ever new terms

The “human” we compare to AI, though, mistakes the dichotomy. It’s not that AI isn’t human — it is an automation of capitalism, a human imaginary. The opposite of Artificial Intelligence isn’t the human mind, the opposite of AI is a community.

What would be your key media studies texts on digital images / digital visual culture and gaming? Not necessarily brand new, rather foundational and still relevant ...

Bauman never misses

If you want a deepdive on robot restaurant issues, i have written about both animatronic robot servers and performances of automation, and Eatsa's digital automat and the hiding of human labor behind "frictionless" tech. 🤖🍕 www.e-flux.com/architecture... reallifemag.com/ill-at-ease/

all i want to do is read old social theory and apply it to new stuff but i dont want to start a substack. help lol

best place to start for defining "slop" is Weberian theory. one key aspect there, and for slop, is understanding the link between rationalization and irrationality ie "slop" is often used to describe both that which is "fully optimized" *and* chaotic purposeless hallucinations

yes - better than trying to arbitrate what has "soul" or not is to critique that which is centrally conceived and controlled, made primarily to be efficient and profitable, AI or not

NOW ONLINE: The lastest special issue of Photography & Culture on «AI and Photography», guest-edited by Briankle Chang and Sarah M. Miller and featuring among others my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» #OpenAccess

My new article, Bio-AI: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Data Animism, is out from Culture Machine. Part of a special issue on The Aesthetics of Biomachines edited by Johan Lau Munkholm, Naja Grundtmann, Kristin Veel & Kathrin Maurer. culturemachine.net/vol-24-aesth...

i.e. chatbot use can restructure our means for self-knowledge, routing what was once "introspection" through a tech company's servers and its ideological modulations

i mean, "a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion" is pretty much the underlying philosophy of metrics based gamified social media, from twitter to instagram to this place

feels like the right question! why should people think something that was previously inhuman slop now being slop thats even less human is especially noteworthy?

hate social media platforms pitching themselves as real an authentic more than any of the fakery happening elsewhere

"smart" podcasts as a form leverage the feeling of thought and sociality to get people to consume content that, if written, would seem remedial or downright dumb thebaffler.com/outbursts/th...

Read my new essay about the shriveled imagination of the life-extension guys!! On Bryan Johnson, communist cybernetics, and the Human Centipede. And if you're in NY, head to the launch party in Brooklyn tonight for Empty Set mag (Dear Friends Books, 7pm🩸) www.emptysetmag.com/articles/blo...

"people no longer have a choice but to assume that everything is false" they keep saying this but thats just obviously not what is happening. again, better Q: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of images? (fromhttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/opinion/ai-sora-slop.html)

i dont think real vs fake is whats at stake here (the political valence of AI is). none of these examples are pitching the AI imagery as real. "fake imagery" is a weird term for this slop bc wouldnt that also encompass most art and memes etc?

read this same take every month for years even though there's a constant stream of newsy widely-believed video happening all around us the better question is: what accounts for the enduring truth-telling function of cameras in an age where believable fakes are easy to generate?

that users could prefer a generated simulation to actual old clips for nostalgia purposes clarifies how nostalgia is about consuming "decontextualization" in itself — nostalgia negates history under the auspices of longing for it

telling that so many (good and correct) critiques of AI sound exactly like the main critiques of the media culture AI was born into

telling that Meta didn't attempt to make compelling little AI clips for their ad. the commercial instead is just "this AI product will have AI," nothing more. bc they dont need to convince *why* anyone needs AI products, they just need to demonstrate they are burning money in that field