David Pennington
@dtpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
Everybody wants to play in the Stream, but no one wants to build the Garden.
mikecaulfield • The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral
atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element
Nat Eliason • De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
humans talking like machines
Big Think • Mechanized Minds: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought
With LLMs all but conversing with their userbase, the variations between human and “talking like machines” is thinner by the day. I think we also see this across movies and modern books and social media. Maybe it started with the listicle format of content being all the rage, or content experts saying there is a specific way to set up content on the page for maximum human engagement.
This phrase suggests a blurring of boundaries between human communication and machine-like processing, highlighting how AI influences us to adopt more mechanical, perhaps less spontaneous ways of thinking and talking.
Simone Weil, writing in Oppression and Liberty (published posthumously in 1955):
“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.
L. M. Sacasas • Attending to the World
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At • Never Forgive Them
Something is deeply wrong when we sext the same way we order a sandwich.
Catherine Shannon • Your Phone Is Why You Don't Feel Sexy
Xerox and Roll: The Corporate Machine and the Making of Punk - JSTOR Daily
Alex Houstondaily.jstor.org
Xerox, Punk, and the rise of a new aesthetic
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a concept in quantum mechanics. It tells us that what we measure determines what we observe. And what we observe determines the nature of reality.
Are overnight oats ads proof that Instagram is changing reality?
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
- Banish