Add me to the list of people who claim Yesteryear as a five-star read. A withering critique of modernity and its pathology of retro-mania and back-to-the-land philosophy.
Jamrock retweeted
Raoul Vaneigem has died. He leaves us no instruction manual, thankfully – only an insistence that everyday life can still be stolen back from work, boredom and obedience: in argument, song, drink, dance, love, revolt and the invention of new poetry.
Before I made myself angry, I was going to say that LinkedIn is the best evidence to support my suggestion that social media should be made illegal for adults.
Every "professional" who uses AI to post those stupid shitty, overly long posts on LinkedIn is DIRECTLY responsible for the this new horror of mass destruction of antique literature. If re-ingested that AI-slop would collapse frontier models, so this is what those maniacs chose to do.
I got asked recently to resolve the post/trans human debate (in a work context) and was exploring techno-humanism. This led me to Techno-Humanist Manifesto (Jason Crawford/@rootsofprogress) which I am now quietly working through. The content so far feels like it would align with or be well received by #anglofuturism supporters. It is certainly poking a sharp stick at some of my own thinking.
I’ve encountered a lot of incompetence in my life but never the level of incompetence that @WeAreOpenreach have managed over the last six months. Even Sky are staggered (and embarrassed).
Today's fun read: arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754v1
"These findings provide the first empirical evidence that humans increasingly imitate LLMs in their spoken language. Our results raise societal and policy-relevant concerns about the potential of AI to unintentionally reduce linguistic diversity, or to be deliberately misused for mass manipulation. They also highlight the need for further investigation into the feedback loops between machine behavior and human culture"
I have been revisiting a chapter in Robert Hassan's 'The Condition of Digitality', titled The Culture of Digitality. Key arguments:
* The analogue base and superstructure can’t tell us about culture formation in the digital context.
* Digital production and consumption (base and superstructure) now exist within a single sphere
* This sphere creates a digital loop that excludes and alienates the individual and society from the analogue ‘circle of action’ that constituted a point of authenticity for humans
* Society no longer recognise the basis of our culture formation
* Digital culture does not recognise or promote tradition or creativity
* Edward Thompson argues for a difference between customs and culture, noting customs were more resistant to Capitalism
Source
Hassan, R. 2020. The Culture of Digitality. In: Hassan, R, The Condition of Digitality. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: doi.org/10.16997/book44.f
Is this article, along with “retromania” and The Great Meme Reset, evidence of a foreclosed future or simply a rejection of digital and algorithmic culture (or both) bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgl…
core to this movement is the revival of Vine (!) xitter.cf/nypost/status/19968984…
I am slightly late to the @default_friend party and this article is a few months old, however it may be the most interesting and useful thing I have read comment.org/internet-overexp…
and now I am knee deep in an earlier @default_friend article, "The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland", which, as someone quite damaged by lucid dreaming and who grew up on Duke de Richleau novels, hits quite hard (comparing the astral place to cyberspace)
