The book 1.0

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.

“When I think about the internet (which is impossible),” Natasha Stagg writes, “I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.”

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

Has anyone wrote anything good on the technological effects on human affectivity? The ability of humans to feel?

If immersive media prefigured the rise of the neoliberal world order, network media prefigured its collapse.

Is it clear to you when a trend forecast is coming from amateurs versus the professionals?

ES: I mean, no. I think an amateur and a professional have kind of an equal chance at hitting the nail on the head. True flashes of cultural insight happen where you’re lucky enough to just put the right words against the cultural phenomenon at the right... See more

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.... See more

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.