Weird and Deadly Interesting

“Perhaps the impulse to label these predictable culture-war moments as discourse reflects a need to make all the anger and fighting mean something. Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.”

“Prompting is an art of iteration. The back-and-forth steps across the mirror world are necessary to learn the language of the machine. But at some point you will make so many prompts, you will see so many computer-generated images or pages of text, that you will begin to question your reality. This can be uncomfortable.”

“The Quadrants are an aide to categorizing and sensemaking for an increasingly complex world around us, a world in which what is actual and what is illusory are often difficult to disambiguate. Because if a myriad of forces, from cheap technology to global media to fragmented politics to re-thinking of the self, playing with the lines between objective, socially agreed reality and types of manufactured “realities” has become easier and more pervasive. Having a means of typing these phenomena is a first step to both understanding, and eventually operationalizing, tactical and strategic uncertainty.”