The book 1.0

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.

technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us,

And a random Lana Del Rey review I stumbled across on Pitchfork a while ago said the job of the writer is “to whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving

When someone’s political leanings begin to change, most of the time it is because they have fallen into new circles, not because they have learned something new from personal experience about how the government or the economy works.

If we want to choose how we are interpellated by neural media, that is, if we want to shape ourselves and our subjectivity through the apparatuses of neural media, now is the time to work. Doing so will require that we embrace the unique characteristics of neural media through literacy and experimentation, with a critical sense and a clear... See more

At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.

Simply put, we don’t know what is important until many years later.

way of reaching understandings of what is going on , i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.