Tech and Society
sari and
Tech and Society
We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how... See more
via Sam Kriss
The current problem, in short, is not a lack of content, nor an inability to sift through it. The problem is finding ways to care about the things we encounter in our digitally mediated environment, or at least alleviating the overwhelming sense of that environment being flooded with garbage.
Parasocial media, however unsophisticated and shallow much of it may be, at least reflects a theory of how we might navigate this digital landscape. It at least attempts, imperfectly, to answer the question: Why should I care about any of this? (Plenty of content thinks it answers this question but doesn’t.)
Returning to the topic of AI, its prospective applications for content creation seem to mostly get this wrong, doubling down on the fallacy embodied in recommendation algorithms: that humans are not the original source of meaning but passive receptacles waiting to be filled with it. The situation I’ve just described will grow increasingly urgent, thrusting the internet into an entropic state, as AI-generated content proliferates without better mechanisms for making it matter—for making us care about what’s being produced. Or maybe most of it will dump straight into digital landfills, unseen, and it won’t even matter that it doesn’t matter.
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.”... See more
an incredible word spaghetti
Contrary Research
research.contrary.com
Cultural works aren’t hedonic appliances dispensing experiences with greater and greater efficiency for audiences to passively consume. Creators and audiences are always engaged in an active process of outmaneuvering each other. Yes, I want more of what I already like, but I also want to be surprised. New patterns are discovered, repeated, become... See more
Frank Lantz • Unpluggers, Deflators etc. pt 3: Why Not Both?
against AI doomer shit
