People working in tech deserve both awakening to their part in the state of the world, and also compassion for not already knowing it or knowing how to extricate themselves yet

Before the LLM craze, the “we should maybe reconsider Luddism” thing was kind of a niche topic. Now its urgency level has switched to “everything’s on fire”

Tyson Yunkaporta likes to say that the oral tradition is the ultimate data resilience strategy, which should give a decent hint as to whether physical durability or social relations are the real underpinning of resilience

All right so I spammed this out after listening to one too many A*G*I apocalypse interviews exitmusic.world/ai-researche...

I find my LLM writing radar getting stronger over time. There’s a certain brassy, self-confident style, coupled with the sense of incoherence that comes from a slightly ill-placed metaphor, or even the casual elision of meaning from a plausible but wrong choice of noun. Texts gives this off […]

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Capital is busy completing the construction of a no-escape two-tier economy society. And LinkedIn thought leaders think they can get in on that upper tier if they are loud enough in their support of “disruptive change”

Reading Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” and Kemp’s “Goliath’s Curse” back to back is quite a trip Recommended, so far :)

“The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” https://exitmusic.world/design-can-help-tilt-what-we-do-towards-who-we-want-to-be

I’ve started using this place to sketch out my random thoughts - to think in public, but with as small an audience as possible to minimize my self-consciousness. Don’t subscribe unless my public messy thinking is what you want! exitmusic.world/life-is-supp...

What does your salary depend on your not understanding?

Executives: if I'm working for you I want you to delegate management & retain leadership. Definitely not the other way around.

Today's NY Times comparison of Elon Musk and Cecil Rhodes really clarifies what Musk's whole deal has always been about: rehabilitating the colonialist tradition around new frontiers on the internet and in outer space, and rebranding this deracinated neo-neo-colonialism as "adventure" and "purpose."

Life is (living systems are) vertically coherent. Things built on top of computers, not so much.

“If this is the game, I wouldn’t try to win it”

the reasons gadgets are neato is because they are self-contained and limited gadgetry is a frame, it requires a border physical camera: gadget, neato eink weather display: gadget, neato ipod: gadget, neato modern iphone: not gadget, not neato slop generator device: not gadget, not neato

Petition for a hand-wringing emoji

If you evaluate a technology’s ability to do a job “better than a human”, you have to include all the benefits that the human version of the practice created, in terms of social bonds, regenerative capacity and cultural meaning.

- Life is emergent self-sustaining, self-complexifying complexity and self-diversifying diversity, and thus can only evolve in interaction - Life and entropy are in a dance with each other. No evidence that entropy has to win in the long run, given quantum fluctutations

Okay... deep breath. I’m, erm, I'm writing a book. I think. Or at least I'm writing something that sits in my heart as a book now. Who knows where it'll lead. If you'd like to follow along and cheerlead/act as a passive accountability partner, join up here :) departurein.place/departure-in...

A society is civilized to the extent to which it makes room for the unimportant

Video Dispatch #20: Kill Magic Thinking Bulls**t isn't created or destroyed, it just takes on different forms Podcast episode: pnc.st/s/faster-and... Video dispatch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHm... If you enjoy it please consider subscribing, leaving a rating, or writing a review 1/4

Don’t act because you have hope. Have hope because you act.

Hey, just a quiet reminder: it’s not true that people get more conservative as they age. *Populations* get more conservative as they age because poor and marginalized people die sooner. nymag.com/intelligence...

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Today’s memetic landscape is held hostage by two totalising myths. *Progress* says history is a one‑way escalator toward abundance, mastery, and moral uplift; *Collapse* says the escalator breaks apart and sends us hurtling into ruin. 1/4

Fuck this shit. mastodon.exitmusic.world/@james/11419...

I guess what I've been thinking a lot about lately, as what comes after the dying consumer economy, could be summed up as the New Subsistence Economy

Thinking about detectable physiological differences between the operation of confirmation bias (e.g. nodding along, pace matching) and integrating new knowledge (e.g. furrowed brow, frown, defocused gaze, irregular movement)

Are competitive dynamics contained within a broader creative, diversifying context, or are creativity and diversity embedded within a broader competitive context? I think this is kinda a pivotal question to sit with. As humanity.

Do you think China starting some shit with Taiwan in this moment would violate the maxim that you shouldn’t interrupt your enemy when he’s busy making a mistake? Let’s hope.

from “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

I found myself asking, “what is the objective of the tariffs on Canada?” And I realized that there doesn’t have to be an objective, at least not a strategic one. Spite and grievance are reason enough.

I think I see a “tell” for when Musk is behind something the government announces: wordplay. He loves his stupid, trollish wordplay. So when you see something like “external revenue service”, that’s a signal of his influence.

It would be nice to see mainstream media acknowledge that every alarmist in their ranks about Trump and his henchmen has been correct, and every single "Let's all calm down" guy--a posture of blasé detachment that is consistently over-rewarded in legacy media--has called it wrong from day one.

For me, "regenerative" means "living and thriving in a way that causes all the beings you depend on (even those whose individual lives you cause to end for your own thriving) to also live and thrive"

The problem with institutional knowledge is that it is self-perpetuating. A high-knowledge environment tends to reproduce itself by being weak on supporting process - if you know how to work the organization, you don’t have to have process.

The platform capitalism variant of Linus’ Law is, given enough $$$, all feature requests are shallow

Observation. Barely anyone is talking about Russian influence this time. Given how flagrant it was last time, and how unpunished, and how the, um, strategic situation has only ratcheted up, it seems likely to me that there is more of it now, rather than none.

a key take away from reading a lot of history for me: the people who survive hard times and eventually brutally humiliate their seemingly invincible enemies are not the people whose first response to adversity is “oh well, guess I’ll die”

Wow. I know the Economist usually maintains a tone of amused detachment/worldly pragmatism, but this really feels like they have just decided to throw off any pretence of supporting an energy transition or even a liberal political order. econ.st/40JFaL2

Let he who's dad didn't track their teenage erections and post it to the internet cast the first stone.

Not to blow my own trumpet but it does feel like maybe we were onto something here ..

Trump demands to be the center of attention. It's hard not to see Trump 2.0 as the biggest energy story in the world. But China begs to differ: China built 277 GW of solar (877 GW total now!) & 80 GW of wind (521 GW total) in 2024. That, as Trump would say, is 'uge! electrek.co/2025/01/21/c... 🔌💡

Imagining our world as a living being of which we are an essential part, is an act of imagination in the same way that it is for our gut bacteria to imagine a human being.

Thinking of all the times I’ve heard “climate can be an opportunity as well as a risk!” asserted by people in finance sector as if it’s a good thing.

People want clear and obvious solutions. And I get why. But hope and fear do not neatly map onto each other. The problem/solution frame bears much responsibility for how we got into our predicament in the first place.

"Enshittified tech platforms shouldn’t be able to command attention forever. Their own lust for growth should be the start of their downfall." h/t @jjn1.bsky.social roblog.co.uk/2025/01/the-...