Brandon Marcus

Social media platforms didn’t just change where we get our information; they changed who does the work of evaluating it. The assessment labor that used to be performed by trained professionals at institutional scale has been pushed onto each of us as individuals, without the training or tools those professionals relied on.

Learning to live together in truth even when the fact has lost its power is perhaps the most serious moral challenge of the twenty-first century.

The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone.... See more

Two-thirds of conversation is social, relational, reputational. Language is often mistaken as an information pipe, but it is really a social coordination technology.

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes,... See more

So here’s the full shape of it. Upward identification mentally relocates us toward wealth we will never have. Meritocratic ideology recasts defending that wealth as moral rather than self-interested. Media and digital culture normalize extreme wealth as a slightly better version of our own lives. Structural power ensures the ideas that reach us are... See more

So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.

An essay is not the process of translating a fully-formed idea into words on a page; it is the process of discovering and testing an idea by challenging it with form, syntax, structure. The friction between idea and ability that AI evangelists promise to eradicate is not a problem suffered by a disadvantaged few. It’s the fundamental condition of... See more

The real question, then: is writing a product or an art ? Obviously, it can be either, and is often both; it’s probably most like a vast product-art spectrum, with most writing falling somewhere in the middle. I’m a firm believer in the idea that labour has value and deserves to be compensated, so it’s not that I think “real” artists should forgo... See more