Tech and Society

Art will in fact thrive upon the mess that AI wreaks upon the masses. Action to reaction to commodification of said reaction. Toss in some enshittification and babe, there's really nothing better you could do for Art.

It is not that computers can never induce feelings in their audience, but that in so doing they raise the bar for what will eventually be perceived as unexceptional, thoughtless, predetermined.

Continued hype is necessary for the industry, because so much money flowing in essentially allows the big players, like OpenAI, to operate free of economic worry and considerations. The money involved is staggering—Anthropic announced they would compete with OpenAI and raised 2 billion dollars to train their next-gen model, a European counterpart j... See more

Scraping the Social: “We are unknown to ourselves—and with good reason.” Friedrich Nietzsche—“Even the retards are starting to figure it out.” (comment)—“In data we trust.” Priceonomics—“The Internet fails to scale gracefully.” Chris Ellis—“I want to be surprised by my own bot”—“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leo­­na... See more

My prediction may be too early, but I think it is directionally correct. The centrality of the internet in our lives will fade. Sure, we will still use it for banking, for sending off quick missives and for looking things up and so on. But the current culture of all day, every day screen time will fade. It will become passé, spurious, and something... See more

Exploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"

If I had to take a bet of what the majority of iPhone owners are doing right now, it would be very simple → they’re looking at their iPhone. Hardware that powerful, produces an image that is equally powerful and equally shared. The iPhone’s image is one of self-attention.

Each hardware paradigm releases a sort of canonical image that goes along wit... See more

So much of of the existing music, film and TV culture — using 20th century technology — is cookie cutter, lifeless and uninspiring.

The democratization of the AI tools means even more people can pump out content, so context will matter more than ever in order to give meaning to the work.

While I personally wouldn’t go so far as to describe current LLMs as “a solution in search of a problem” like cryptocurrency has famously been described as, I do think the description rings true in an overall economic/business sense so far. Was there really a great crying need for new ways to cheat on academic essays? Probably not. Will chatting wi... See more