digital life—digital cultures
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 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.
It’s the Real Thing! | Leo Kim
The smartphone turns us into fragmented actors in a perpetual now.
You’re in a War You Can’t See: McLuhan, Media, and the Machinery of Perception
Logging off
It’s easy to forget that we used to find music, movies, photography, and books entirely offline. You’re more likely to discover something truly serendipitous and surprising flipping through vintage magazines at your local public library than endlessly scrolling an Instagram feed that’s already tailored to your taste. Stroll through an... See more
It’s easy to forget that we used to find music, movies, photography, and books entirely offline. You’re more likely to discover something truly serendipitous and surprising flipping through vintage magazines at your local public library than endlessly scrolling an Instagram feed that’s already tailored to your taste. Stroll through an... See more
Escape the algorithm | Dirt
It’s not that anyone is forcing us to humiliate ourselves; it’s that we’ve come to equate being known with being exposed.
Humiliation Rituals
When you look at what actually goes into good delegation documentation, it’s remarkably consistent: What are we trying to accomplish, and why? Where are the limits of the delegated authority? What does “done” look like? What specific outputs do I need? What interim outputs do I need to follow your progress? And what should you check before telling... See more
Ethan Mollick • Management as AI superpower
This is why my students did so well. They weren’t AI experts. But they’d spent years learning how to scope problems in their fields of expertise, define deliverables, and recognize when a financial model or medical report was off. They had hard-earned frameworks from classes and jobs, and those frameworks became their prompts. The skills that are so often dismissed as “soft” turned out to be the hard ones.
I don’t know exactly what work looks like when everyone is a manager with an army of tireless agents. But I suspect the people who thrive will be the ones who know what good looks like — and can explain it clearly enough that even an AI can deliver it. My students figured this out in four days. Not because they were AI natives, but because they already knew how to manage. All that training, it turns out, was accidentally preparing them for exactly this moment.
I get the impulse to recover a more democratic online world compared to the top-down dictates of Silicon Valley. But in seeking a more humane tech future, nostalgia is more hindrance than help; the alternatives will need to be legible to new generations weaned on social-media feeds.
bookforum.com • Kyle Chayka Looks at Our Supposedly Flat New World
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
