Funny when people thing that we are talking about another sector of the economy and not for an inscription in our cultural paradigm. In other words, it's not so much about the entities behind the digital accelerated sphere, it is about the dominant ideology driving them on.

👀

in case this helps www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-st...

Sometimes you need a departure from reality in order to fully grasp its burden.

What is happening when different accounts follow different political parties (in Germany, before the recent elections) and then leave the algorithms to fill the rest of the feed? AfD get's promoted overwhelmingly (in Tik Tok and X), despite the initial preference of the user...

This was a fascinating read. You might find it interesting, too. academic.oup.com/book/60493?l...

Excellent elaboration by @eric-reinhart.com on what counts as « violence » from anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytic angles. “What counts as “violence,” and what counts as “order,” are always political determinations made by those in power” www.bostonreview.net/articles/wha...

Follow the money...

FOLD IT IN, DAVID.

It's just the beginning.

"After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together, the only indubitable 'progressive' goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑒." - Against Progress Slavoj Zizek

If something goes wrong it would be a technical and not political issue I suppose...

And a great discussion. player.captivate.fm/episode/6295...

Amazing book, the title of which hints at the book written by James C. Scott "Seeing like a State". It points to a new epistemology of our era, mapping the ways that power and society interact through and within the digital field. It's open access! - Seeing like a platform P.Tornberg, J.Uitermark

The AI paradox. If an AI program has to spot when a cultural creation (photograph, article etc.) is an AI product or not, what signifies AI's advance, its successful mission or its failure? #paradox #AI

I've read a lot of posts the last days insisting that Bluesky is the main social media for academics nowadays. The problem, in my view, is that we still don't have something equivalent to the old mailing lists, with a more conversational approach, apt to the opportunities of a today's platform.

Submitted the final version of my next book on AI, Big Tech, and the geopolitical struggles over them. Now hopefully nothing important happens on those topics before it comes out... Pre-order here: www.amazon.co.uk/Silicon-Empi...

But what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us? aeon.co/essays/philo...

A long read by @trillingual.bsky.social, but worth every minute of your time. A detail that leapt out, for me: 'in 2016, the perpetrator of a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida checked Facebook midway through his assault'.

Summer reading... "The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away." - Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“[The Expert] speaks as an ordinary man, who can receive authority in exchange for knowledge just as one receives a paycheck in exchange for work.” ~ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

We need to know what humans do before we argue that machines can do it just the same. There can’t be AI literacy without a literacy in being human: how we make meaning in work and life, distinguishing the artificial from the imaginary from the true. mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

Reacting to bullshit is what social media is mostly about. And reacting to other people reacting to bullshit, of course …

I started Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. It’s wonderful so far. I’m grateful for it. This short 1000 word post of mine - at Politics/letters & linked here — is my version, written in conversation with a new film, a horror short. politicsslashletters.org/reviews/the-...

«Models don’t ‹generate› any new meanings but enclose and commodify those that already exist, working to freeze the embedded social relations in whatever turns out to be the most profitable forms for the interests that own and promote ‹AI.›» @robhorning.bsky.social on #genAI as commodified language

Excellent long read by Adam Sitze! “A democracy that can’t look ahead can’t survive, & the university is the watchtower where democracy goes to scan the horizon. It offers depth & perspective where electoral politics demands immediacy, continuity where democratic contestation brings frequent change”

You wanna see something really scary? open.substack.com/pub/amandagu...

Getting into this by @nickbernards.bsky.social ...Interesting stuff! www.plutobooks.com/978074534889...

New tripleC article: Manfred Knoche - Towards the Liberation from Capitalist Business Models: The De-capitalisation of Journalism and Communication Studies doi.org/10.31269/m3b... Introduces the notion of the decapitalisation of the media, rollback of the logic of capital in the media economy.

"Conscientiousness," a shorthand for the ability to make plans and follow through on them in a disciplined way, is in free fall among young adults in the US. Previously, young adults were always the most extroverted, but now are the least.

it's very funny that reddit has become basically the only source for both humans and AI that actually has value now

Hugely important topic in media criticism Via @brianstelter.bsky.social: The Financial Times recently dubbed it "the great crime paradox:" Violent crime rates are falling, both in the US and the UK, "but a growing share of people think levels are rising." view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/175...

Ten years from now the only film projects capable of securing any finance will be a nine-hour trilogy based on Tom Bombadil's backstory and Emerald Fennell's bukkake version of Pride and Prejudice.

“To put this in perspective, a single 1-megawatt data center consumes as much as 25.5 million liters of water annually. That’s enough to meet the daily water needs of 300,000 people, making each facility equivalent to the water demands of a small city.”

Book for the rest of the summer. Some notions seem natural, but their naturalness is the dominant ideology hidden in plain sight.

Palantir is becoming the US government contractor of choice, embodying its idea of government as essentially policing?https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-government-contracting-push/

Did you vote for a person or for a digital platform?

You remind me of gold... (For LP)

First: regulation is not the opposite of innovation when it comes to AI Second: citizens want AI to be regulated. 🇺🇸 🇪🇺 and elsewhere: listen to your citizens. See evidence from 5 continents 🌍 in our @techpolicypress.bsky.social piece @aimediademlab.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/governments-...

Check your symptoms in case they match.

#photography #analog #film #35mm #poetry #mypoetry #TheBalkans #LforLimbo #zenit122 #winter2000 #ondespair

It’s interesting that we find annoying the fact that some people get attracted by AI music, while not thinking the same about many more people that get attracted by millions of AI apps and devices.

Incredible scene. FBI: Do you like Marx? Mhmood Mamdani: I haven’t met him. FBI: No, no, he’s dead. MM: Wow, what happened? FBI: No, no, he died long ago. ... He wrote that poor people should not be poor. MM: Sounds amazing. www.warscapes.com/conversation...

Silence of the night #silence #nightphoto

"Do not expect too much of the end of the world." ― Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts #BookSky

Gen Z on democracy...

"ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study. The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users."

“And the inherent hyperspeed of the internet means fashion cycles pump out ephemeral fads rather than era-defining trends.” – W. David Marx, Status and Culture

Some lives matter more than others…