And you twist the darkness in your fingers - by Rob Horning
One of the effects of chatbots may be to turn “seeking information” into an alibi for an experience of risk-free simulated sociality.| robhorning.substack.com
One of the effects of chatbots may be to turn “seeking information” into an alibi for an experience of risk-free simulated sociality.| robhorning.substack.com
It took a while, but I finally finished rereading Georg Lukács’s “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” The last time I read it must have been in the “Web 2.0” era, because I had made some marginal notes about the “general intellect” and the commodification of the self in social media as a kind of proletarianization.| robhorning.substack.com
A note on generative AI as commodified language| robhorning.substack.com
One thing I mastered in failing to get a Ph.D.| robhorning.substack.com
About Leif Weatherby's 'Language Machines' and being entertained by "auto-intimacy"| robhorning.substack.com
is it worthwhile to read meaningless text| robhorning.substack.com
Placebos and the voluntary suspension of disbelief| robhorning.substack.com
The more we study MrBeast thought, the brighter our hearts will become| robhorning.substack.com
Precisely 303 must-dos, must-tastes, and must-tries| robhorning.substack.com
Being compelled to ask yet again, Are friends electric?| Internal exile
"social media" has always been oxymoronic| robhorning.substack.com
on Gogglebox and vicarious participatory media| robhorning.substack.com
post-consumerism and AI agents| robhorning.substack.com
Earlier this week, Taylor Lorenz shared a link to a site called They See Your Photos, run by a company obliquely promoting an encrypted image-hosting app.| Internal exile
In an essay for the Walrus about the pervasiveness of “fake reviews” online, Timothy Caulfield describes something he calls “the opinion economy,” which, he argues, “is built on our desire for a beacon of clarity and certainty in our fantastically chaotic information ecosystem.” Caulfield has a capacious definition of fake:| robhorning.substack.com
“I’ve realized that much of what I’ve written about of late can be summed up this way,” technology scholar L.M.| robhorning.substack.com
Concern about algorithmic culture often recurs to the fear of a doom loop, the idea that nothing new will be possible because we will be fully embedded in a predictive simulation that has become the horizon of our reality.| robhorning.substack.com
