Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the... See more
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because... See more
The young would-be feminists flocking to “WitchTok” for advice on how to conjure love and manifest success are hardly atheists. Neither are the young men of the right who, if not crowding back into traditionalist churches, grope for a spirituality of strength, vitality, and meaning among the aesthetic ruins of ancient warrior cults. These are... See more
Alina Stefanescu's personal library of writing, essays, literary criticism.
Users wishing to know more about Frédéric Chopin, after a lost waltz was discovered the other day, might Google the composer. Yet, even with any number of media reports contextualizing this discovery, the top result—for me—is still an AI-generated portrait of the composer, leading to a music page hosted by London-based music school The Masters... See more
The decision created a new form of liability known as “inducement”: the technology companies, the court ruled, had seduced the users — the teens, the kids, the fans, the pirates — into infringing copyright. It didn’t matter that these services never hosted any files or made a central index.
New technologies may be disruptive to the existing population of working musicians, but even more irresistible to the general public than new technology are new forms of music, which may introduce new classes of musicians who don’t fit neatly into the existing professional categories. Take the rise of rock and roll.