chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.
That's the interesting thing about AI: it is based on historical data sets, on the entire corpus of human creation. This is an opportunity to examine our past: Who are we? What does this data represent? How can we prevent ourselves from repeating the same problems? Sure, the amount is overwhelming – but much like with our history, we can analyse it... See more
About the problems of the Creator Economy There is a desire to be seen how you wish to be seen. Content today is presented without almost zero context, e.g. videos on Youtube recommended by an algorithm.
Our information system has split into an endless number of micro communities, from group chats to online fandoms, all learning about news and major events through increasingly bizarre digital formats.
When I polled a group of friends, one person heard the news in the comment section of a bird's Instagram account, another learned of it in a Discord... See more
Metaphors mixing mind with machine proliferate across pop psychology—not least in subliminal fan communities, where the videos are seen as programmes that can delete, rewrite, and generate new “programming.” That a behaviour can be ‘soft-’ or ‘hard-coded’ is useful shorthand for nurture and nature—programming from parents, society, and environment... See more
The fundamental tension of narrative control in the networked era is that most companies impose a hierarchical brand management model onto what has effectively become a distributed, permissionless process. And when the emergent meme-space of networked media meets censorship-resistant infrastructures, brands take on a life of their own.