The book 1.0

“The thing is, I can only give what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If there’s not any discovery, it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve never considered myself the best producer or the best singer or the best rapper or any of those separate categories. But one thing I do have confidence in is my feeling.”

That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

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,

Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of con... See more

What kind of memetic monsters evolve in a primordial stew made of fractalized identities, multipolar geopolitics and viral media? Conspiracy theories, of course.

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

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chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing. Parasocia... See more