AI boosters argue that, while, generative technologies are new and shiny, they’re at root no different from the digital technologies an artist like Fincher uses, or the practical ones an artist like Carpenter used. They argue that AI is just another tool.
But I can’t get past the fact that, for something to count as a tool, it has to help you do... See more
Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.
This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.
Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more
Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of... See more