internet culture
In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have... See more
Byrne Hobart • Bubbling Up | ARENA
Instead of withdrawing, I encourage my students to dive deeper, engaging with platforms as if they were close reading a work of literature. In doing so, I believe that we can not only better understand a platform's ideological premises, but also the inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of... See more
Elan Ullendorff • So you want to escape the algorithm
For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the... See more
Moxie Marlinspike • The Magic of Software; Or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization
If a simplistic description of AI is computers learning to be more human, then the persistence of Hawk Tuah for six months and counting is the inverse: Humans learning how it feels to be a computer—forced to remember, unable to move on, endlessly consuming and regurgitating our past output in slightly different formats—a video here, a podcast... See more
Drew Austin • The Meme Fossil Record
In our present technological era, humans have also needed a new framework to avoid drowning in the daily firehose of entertainment, media, and information. Given this setting of increasing complexity, it becomes more appealing to use an associative concept like “vibes” as a simplifying framework for understanding or self-expression. If we can’t... See more
Alex Vuocolo • Nameless Feeling — Real Life

I use technology in order to hate it more properly. –Nam June Paik https://t.co/8lJQifwyqD
soft web poetic web
There are hundreds of programming blogs. Many large corporations let their engineers blog (a generous gift, given how many recruiters are hovering). Discussions about programming go on everywhere, in public, at all times, about hundreds of languages. There is a keen sense of what’s coming up and what’s fading out.
It’s not simply fashion; one’s... See more
It’s not simply fashion; one’s... See more
PAUL FORD • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg
Like newsletters, what’s said in podcasts is non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.
Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups,... See more
Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups,... See more
Yancey Strickler • The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
idk if this is really a ‘dark forest’ — more a gated community that means there is trust to share. the commons are too unruly to trust/are feared