warped incentives
Quote from The State of Culture (by Ted Gioia), resurfaced to me by Salman:
"The tech platforms aren't like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don't want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal."
... See more“IMPOSTER — n. 1856 impostur deceiver or swindler; later impostor person who assume a false name or character, in Captain Smith’s The Generall Histories of Virginia (1624); developed from English, imposteur, learned borrowing from Latin impostor, from impostus, contracted from impositus, past participle of imponere place upon, impose upon, deceive;
Israel strikes Iran. A compulsion to doom scroll, but watching myself as I do it. There’s worry, but also a scanning for both clarity and novelty. The main problem is that the same factoids are being repeated over and over; it’s quite hard to obtain new and developing information. What’s happened in the last 30 minutes? It’s a weird paradox; you
... See more“The other kind of growth.” This is a title idea for an essay or book on the challenge of a Kunstlerroman (a story about a developing artist) within the high-pressure and incentive-warped landscape of the Internet. This came after reading a few pages on “The Death of the Artist” (or something like that) which featured an honest interview with
... See moreOn the “Dead Internet Theory” — there’s a Quora bot that is using GPT to answer popular questions. It pulled a face from the site “This Person Does Not Exist,” and it has 1 million views in the last month. The weird thing, there aren’t even any financial incentives to doing this, there’s just a certain fetish to automate because we can. Eventually,
... See moreThere’s something tragic about taking a system that ONCE might’ve caused a breakthrough, but then grew stale. Though the act of sharing it and meme-ing, it can go viral, but through going viral, it lodges itself in everyone’s heads and can’t be updated. It’s stunted and holds no future utility, for the creator or the users. It’s almost like a
... See moreUFO footage from totality is trending on X (meaning: the shadow of a plane projected onto a cloud). I noticed 3 back-to-back messages that are syntactically identical. All posts have since been deleted. I think thees messages are designed as bait to bring you to a profile, but then removed for fear of being caught as robot spam:
POST 1:
