Botched Little Animals

The human brain itself — that mysterious maker of metaphors — has through the ages been portrayed as (a) a hydraulic pumping system, (b) a clock, (c) a telephone switching network, (d) a digital computer, and, now, (e) a large language model. In constructing machines, we also construct ways of seeing the world, and ourselves.

In the course of writing Superbloom over the last few years, I found myself losing patience with the prevailing critique of social media and the internet, the one that portrays the technology as something imposed on us by an imperious external force (progress or capitalism or Big Tech or what-have-you) and that in turn depicts us as the hapless, he... See more

Because technology is a repository of human desire, a full critique of any machine needs also to be a critique of human desire. We’re the machine’s makers before we’re its victims.

We build all these systems and we complain about them as if they’re out of control, as if they’re controlling us, but we build them.