new example of secret feminine lore just dropped, because everything Claude told me about how to use this was deadass wrong

the popularity of neocities is the ultimate sign of the death of the website as a medium the website is dead enough to be having a nostalgic revival through platform logic

you know whose business model should afaict be fully over in the age of vibe coding? Linktree

when people say artists need to work with emerging technology more in order to be relevant, it's not a controversial new take. it's an old take, literally an ancient take for most of human history painting was the state of the art of image-making technology

Sarah Friend & Arkadiy Kukarkin’s "The Lives of Infamous Men" generates live video where politicians, clips, and Foucault collide 🎥 Created for the Internet Archive x Gray Area Trillionth Webpage Net Art Commissions. 🌐 More ⤵️ blog.archive.org/internet-arc... @isthisa.com @GrayArea.Org #Wayback1T

just a reminder that I have a newsletter and if you subscribe TODAY then TOMORROW you will get my first email update of the year buttondown.com/isthisa

Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones, 1997, quoting The Economist, "The World in 1995"

This, and works by Arkadiy Kukarkin, Chia Amisola, Jesse Walton, @mai.bsky.social , Olivia M Ross, Ophira Horwitz, Raúl Feliz, Rodell Warner, and @isthisa.com turn preserved data into presence & memory into experience. We'll feature them all in upcoming weeks. 3️⃣/3️⃣

New substack today 💥 I started seriously asking myself "do I actually take steps towards cognitive defense when interacting with AI, and what are they?" substack.com/pub/isthisan...

spiraling lying in bed thinking about all the times my heart was closed when it should have been open

many esoteric traditions involved cognitive protection rituals that one should engage in before contact with entities that may or may not be malevolent, full of temptations, deceptive, or seducing this is more important now than ever before

anyone who has read Accelerando will know the lobster-themed AI takeover was long coming

One big thing I did in 2025 was finally receive a huge upgrade to my cyborg parts-and I decided to write more about it to get started on one of my 2026 experiments: writing about software Read the full post on substack: open.substack.com/pub/isthisan...

stumpy the greyhound (and a sort of unofficial mascot of the media arts scene here in Berlin) is unfortunately battling soft tissue sarcoma, however this process has revealed his latent divinity, plz pray for his complete recovery

Happy Columbo’s Day

telling my kids this was waymo

here's a shower thought that might make people mad: AI boyfriends are going to be way more disruptive than AI girlfriends, because the average man is already used to way more self-sacrifice, subservience, and dare I say ... sycophancy ... from a partner than the average woman

humans could learn a lot from how dogs jump up and down and run around in a lil circle when they're happy, just saying

wondering today if the current rise of the online "critical internet researcher" (I support them) is a product of the first truly social media literate generation with useless graduate degrees now being out of the academy

wow maybe we should use this? if you ask English learners, they often complain about the utterly unhinged mapping of spelling to pronunciation. legitimately it makes the language a lot harder also this can be read already by a fluent English speaker without any trouble and looks based?

considered going and submitting my work to Neurips, but as a non-student non-academic apparently I'm in the highest ticket price category why bother having an arts track at all, if the only non-academic ticket is the highest-price industry one?

in this household Lain is famous

feel so vindicated about James K covering Duvet, after going around saying she sounds like bôa for years to mass confusion

ladies, is it a red flag if your bf is mean to Chat?

remind me to start tweeting about EU politics more so random drive-by Americans have more clues I'm not from there

I know there are a lot more urgent things going on in this world, but if you depend on any daily medications you should be securing a 6-8 month supply of them like, yesterday

breaking news: no more "interspecies communication" "the more-than-human" "multispecies thinking" etc if I can't bring my dog to your event

if you run an art organization please for the love of god have an email list, instagram *cannot* be replied upon to show me your content unless you are also putting on makeup to trending audio

residencies are cute, but tbh I'm also tired of the endless onslaught of artist opportunities that require moving house for months. idk why people think strong creative work is aligned with rootlessness

the position consistent with aaron swartz's published writings is quite clearly "training is fair use but we should do guerrilla open access on closed model weights". this seems likely to upset every major faction but i don't think it's incorrect

I think this image would literally kill Theordor Adorno

Remote Viewing, a new sculptural work that displays (to scale, one-to-one) what Google Earth sees of the location it's placed in currently on view at the Fellbach Triennial Kleinplastik 🛰️

How can open social protocols fail us? I put together an analysis comparing several specific failure modes between Farcaster, Bluesky, and Mastodon. Please let me know if any of the protocol descriptions could be presented more fairly! shazow.net/posts/open-s...

who am I to deny such desire (giving my dog a pizza crust)

we urgently need a non-fascist technooptimism

I think the most important things for language learning are the willingness to look stupid and faith willingness to try to speak even though you will be wrong or read even though you only half understand, and faith that day by day even though it's too slow to be perceptible, you're getting better

Normal people go to art museums to take selfies, art people go to art museums to get pissed off

saying "thank you" to the chatbot is Pascal's wager for AGI

Great pieces about the tension between freedom and safety by @isthisa.com in the latest issue of Protocolized 💫 open.substack.com/pub/protocol...

i'm tired of being told to stop doomscrolling. i'm just scrolling, it's not my fault there's doom on there

one must imagine sisyphus decentralizing the web somewhat

imagine thinking this was going to bring manufacturing back to America

questions for and about decentralized alternatives to big tech originally wrote this in early 2024 for a book chapter but publication has been indefinitely stalled, so dropping it on the blog blog.isthisa.com/decentraliza...

I agree with this, but I also think the explanation is clearly in the conditions of production. Software - the full stack from marketing, comms, design, frontend, backend, hosting, etc - is not and never will be optimally produced by a single person for a 1000 euro artist fee

look, not to defend openai, but they didn't make a "ghibli generator", they made a general purpose image model and *users* figured out how to make ghibli-style images. and based on experimentation last night, openai seems to have taken steps since to lock down the creation of these images

when they write text books about the fall of the "west" 50 years from now, they will blame the personal automobile and its associated ideological apparatus

thinking about how, despite knowing that the EU has committed to banning fuel driven cars by 2035, Volkswagen (car industry roughly 20% of the German economy) installed sensors to cheat on emissions tests instead of developing competitive alternative vehicles

the creation of uv meaningfully shortened agi timelines

the hardest part about fine tuning a diffusion model is installing your python dependencies, you might think this is a joke but I assure you it is not