Brandon Marcus
@brandonjmarc
Brandon Marcus
The rise of generative artificial intelligence, as both a practical technology and a popular obsession, crystallises Big Tech’s cultural takeover. AI turns reading and writing into automated industrial routines, optimised for speed and efficiency. It instrumentalises intellect, allows the critical and creative work of the mind to be outsourced to... See more
How Big Tech killed literary culture
... See moreCreedal nationalism was an attempt to explain the continuity of American institutions despite the transformation of its population. The nation could absorb so much immigration, liberal theorists reasoned, because its essence lay in ideas rather than in blood, soil, or religious confession. Unlike European nations, argued philosopher John Dewey,
The article isn’t dead. But how it lives on is in question.
Personalization is coming whether newsrooms build it or not. What's in question is where it lives, and who controls it. Built around surveillance and intermediaries, it erodes trust and weakens journalism’s public role. Built into reader-controlled tools on the open web, it can do the... See more
Personalization is coming whether newsrooms build it or not. What's in question is where it lives, and who controls it. Built around surveillance and intermediaries, it erodes trust and weakens journalism’s public role. Built into reader-controlled tools on the open web, it can do the... See more
Is the article dead?
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
open.substack.com
... See more…the fifty years that followed the First World War were characterized by the most intense assimilative pressure of any in American history. Yet the theoretical and practical limitations of the melting pot could not be ignored by a country increasingly defined by ideological conflict rather than by national expansion. In its confrontation with
We had reached that singularity of real-time imagery that Baudrillard talked about and violence had become an on-demand, streamable piece of media in the process.
The media deluge also alienated us from the graveness of what is actually happening. It’s not that people don’t understand the scale of annihilation in Gaza, but there is a generalized... See more
The media deluge also alienated us from the graveness of what is actually happening. It’s not that people don’t understand the scale of annihilation in Gaza, but there is a generalized... See more
DeLillo's Visions of Violence
We've restructured the presentation of ideas around the needs of advertising platforms, and not by accident, and we're living with the consequences.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
right-wing-populism.pdf
rothbard.it... See moreRather than trying to restore an elusive consensus, I propose that we strengthen institutions of contestation. Our problem, in other words, is not that we have forgotten how much Americans have in common, but that we have undermined or abandoned structures and organizations that express and embody disagreement. Political parties, labor unions, and