Brian Thomas Clark

Once something is obvious and working, people tend to underestimate it.

To correct the state of AI discourse today, we need to channel this same spirit and train our attention on the messy facts of the human, material world in which these technologies play. Only when we’ve stopped fetishizing “realism” will we be able to turn our attention to very real air, water, ecosystems, and people these technologies consume in th... See more

AI images remove viewers from the complex conditions of life in favor of commercially or politically expedient fantasy, all while packaging this fantasy in a realist mode that makes it less ideologically suspicious, easier to take at face value.

So which direction are we moving in? Down the same old path – where identity is just content, content is monetised, and monetisation demands a steady drip of oversharing and low-key emotional collapse? Or could we actually start to build new ways of being online? Ones that prioritise people as people, and not just scrolling spectacle?

Until then, w... See more

Our Cringe = Sublime SEED touched on some of this — simply opting out of performance becomes an act of quiet rebellion. Going for a walk without posting about it. Writing a thought without tweeting it. Wearing an outfit without wondering how it will look on Instagram. These small acts chip away at the scaffolding of digital humiliation culture.

It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.

The result is what Moskowitz describes as a “mirror maze”. We enter social media hoping to express ourselves but instead see endless refractions – ourselves as we want to be seen, as others might perceive us, as the algorithm is training us to become.

All of this has consequences for how we think and feel. Our sense of self begins to dissolve under... See more

Moskowitz blames techno-capitalism’s monetisation of human emotion. Social platforms, they argue, create environments in which users willingly contort themselves into ever more extreme versions of themselves – louder, cringier, more exposed – just to be seen. It’s the natural byproduct of systems that reward emotional spectacle and penalise silence... See more

“Authenticity”, I think, looks like the power to opt in or out, perform or not, when you want to—in other words: freedom. So when it comes to the Internet, if switching off entirely isn’t possible any more, then surely the words of MGMT can be useful: “control yourself, take only what you need from it.”