Why the internet isn't fun anymore + A.I. and magic

Anyway, I don’t want to seem like I’m arguing that the internet of 2023 is “fine” or “healthy”--it’s obviously not. Rather, I’d like to make the case that the internet of 2010 (or wherever you would place the peak of “fun” internet) wasn’t particularly healthy or fine, either, and it’s easy to mistake a sense of ease and comfort under bad condition... See more

I suppose is that I don’t really buy that any of these guys (roon, BasedJeffBezos, etc.) believe what they’re selling--it all feels like a Twitter performance and rhetorical strategy, embedded in and subservient to a fully non-mystical political economy dominated by venture capital, the national security state, etc. As much as I’d like to join in t... See more

A subset of intense, Twitter-famous accelerationists really loves to play up the mystical unknowability of LLMs--the way we still can't quite reverse engineer how, e.g., GPT-4 arrives at its “answers.” You can see this as a kind of anti-modernist desire for re-enchantment, but it’s also a kind of capital-F Futurist Modernism--a total belief in powe... See more