digital life
The ones and zeroes of the digital map tolerate no error or noise. It’s an auto-tuned reality where everything is on the note or it doesn’t exist. Never mind that James Brown reaching up to that note is where we find the soul of the music. In the world of digital figures, that expression of the human soul — that stuff between the official notes —... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
As the Internet became an always-on, mainstream phenomenon, however, it also reverted to the mean. Influencer culture happens at scale. It’s not about finding the bizarre nooks and crannies of weird, but reaching as many people as possible. Hit counts and numbers of followers are all that matter. It is about getting bigger, rather than smaller.... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
A new Team Human Live with Occult Historian Mitch Horowitz
Dec 18, 2024
The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web.
Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased?
In order to make room for this weird, this liminal zone of possibility, we need to get off the grid-like map of quantized utility and grow a culture instead. We do this together by forming clusters of human weirdness; groups of people with varying forms of space, voltage, and potential between them. We need a cohort, a rabble...what Jews call a... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
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
Humiliation Rituals
We have been an essentially colonial civilization since the first enclosed farm, since agriculture, really, but definitely since territorial wars, slavery, and resource extraction. It’s what we do - not just with imperial armies, but with basic capitalism. This is our average. Our normal. A digital media environment with algorithms and AIs... See more
Douglas Rushkoff • Pockets of Weird: The Fight Over Reality
In “This Is for Everyone,” Berners-Lee argues that the web’s lack of compassion is “a design issue ” that can be fixed. “There’s still time,” he writes, “to build machines that serve the human,” that “promote the dignity of our fragile species on this isolated globe.” It’s a moving vision. But it’s hard to reconcile with the entropy of today’s... See more
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
It seems clear that AI art’s biggest utility right now is aspirationalism. The ability to quickly and cheaply generate a vision of the future for Trump supporters. And I’ve written before about how AI art is to modern fascism what futurism was to 20th-century fascism, but the Homeland Security X account posting a Thomas Kinkade painting — and a... See more
Trump's big, beautiful gulag
AI might take over some of our jobs, but I believe it will also lead to a major resurgence of arts and crafts. It might mobilise people in new ways. New luddite rebellion? Bring it on! Not only will we need creativity to find purpose in life (because what are humans for then?), we will also come to cherish the handmade with a renewed sense of... See more
Karen Rosenkranz • The Home as a Place of Production
via Dense 9/2/24