The book 1.0

And that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.

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.

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

The canonical example of the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashion-industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing... See more

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.”

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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