When I first saw this, I thought “Did anyone read this?” That’s always the question when encountering something that you think is god awful. But in the AI era, I found myself asking a follow-up question: “Did anyone write this?”
A social currency is a tokenized asset that represents value within a specific community, often used to incentivize engagement, reward participation, and strengthen brand or community loyalty. It operates similarly to traditional currency but derives its worth from social interactions, reputation, and influence.
This point of view – which troubles the official narrative being rolled out by AI companies – is not rare. In his newsletter “How to Survive the Internet” the author and journalist Jamie Bartlett paraphrased a recent conversation he’d had with someone he described as an “AI power user”: “‘So are you producing more stuff per day?’ I ask.... See more
Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.
Moving “the future” away from ideologies of dominance and control has become imperative. One promising model can be found in the collective known as the Tropical Futures Institute, founded by designer and gallerist Chris Fussner. Based on the party island of Cebu, Philippines, the “institute” is in fact a decentralized, roaming think tank that... See more
In the face of a monolith-in-the-veldt-level era-heralder, what surfaces is an earnest, almost midcentury humanism, interested in charting the distinctions between man and machine.