Alex Dobrenko

As Kristoffer Ørum, artist and self-proclaimed ‘misuser of technology,’ pointed out in a RADAR interview, as LLMs become “very good at drawing things that look like something,” humans have the opportunity to push in the opposite direction, reviving more absurdist and abstract forms of art — much like how the expressionists thrived after the advent... See more

Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.

if I wanted to use the web in a personal way, it seemed better to do so through social media. But this felt like a job too! Everything in social media is explicitly quantified with likes and shares and retweets. All the platforms have a notification bar to show you which random utterance of yours was gaining in popularity, implying that you could... See more

Nestled in the heart of a bustling city is Unity Avenue, a vibrant street teeming with life. It's early morning, and the sunlight washes unevenly over a diverse mixture of new and old buildings ↕, some graffiti-sprayed and worn out by the ravages of time.

Still, taste is closely intertwined with snobbery. And indeed, many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.

To imagine one’s recommendations as wholesale “generic,” rather than generic to one’s demographic, is a step stranger. It may be a tacit acknowledgment of one’s own claim to cultural domi­nance—the world might look flat if you are looking at it from above—or a concession to one’s own frictionless passage through space, online and off. A U.S.... See more