Dmitri Brereton, an engineer who researches search engines and AI. “Social media, especially TikTok, solves that authenticity problem because some experiential things are just better seen. It can’t get more authentic than a video of a person dining at a restaurant.”

To the maximally cash-focused greed-fueled remote-money developer of today, courtyards mean wasted, non-revenue-generating square footage.

Let’s also pause to consider the many benefits that algorithmic platforms have brought. The ability to go viral has enabled many creators, such as musicians and entertainers, to establish an initial livelihood on social media. This weakening of the power of gatekeepers has unleashed a creative energy that deserves to be celebrated.

Search offers a useful analogy: Before search engines, people accessed online information through directories. I suspect that social media without recommendations will soon seem just as quaint if it doesn’t already.

Today, offering only chronological feeds is not a realistic option for a mainstream platform that faces competitive pressures.

The user got recommendations that were engaging in the moment but didn’t make them feel good once they put down the app after a couple of hours. Companies are pretty good at optimizing against this outcome as well. A simple way to test an algorithm change is to A/B test it: that is, deploy it to a randomly selected subset of users. Then track how many of those users open the app on a given day, compared to a control group. Algorithms called contextual bandits automate some of the work of doing these A/B tests and tweaking the system based on their outcome.

In other words, marriage is a social engagement with a vast social history, one that is innately linked to capitalism and property rights, gender (bafflingly ignored by the piece), class… all of which Callard studiously avoids as she tries to drill down to What It Really Means.

In general, though, I think Callard is so focused on her openness to other ideas that she’s a bit blind to how much intellectualization’s role as a defense mechanism is unignorable and fundamentally important to her experiences.

Still, I must credit Callard for the freshness of her ideas’ expression; it turns out that you can find unique-sounding phraseologies for your mind’s workings when you intentionally avoid reading anything written after the Partition of Babylon.

We turn away from politics (and towards authoritarianism or, as Arendt also noted, unworldly stoicism) because there is something intimidating about the sheer novelty of which politics is capable. To overcome this obstacle, two things are required. First, people must be capable of making and keeping promises to one another, such that there isn’t a constant threat that everything will start all over again. If organisations and associations are to be sustained over time, the power of political action must be held in check by past commitments. Second, if we are to escape the shadow of the past and genuinely start anew, forgiveness must be possible. Forgiveness, for Arendt, holds a very important role in enabling us to break free of perpetual reaction and counter-reaction.

The idea here is that while everyone (animals included) is capable of reaction, only a rarefied minority is capable of genuine action. Action, from this perspective, means leadership, which in turn implies a far larger quantity of followership. Combating this mentality requires us to think of action democratically, as something made possible by the fact of human plurality. Thus all action is in fact interaction.

‘The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton,’ Fromm wrote, ‘need not feel alone and anxious any more.’Pessimism is understandable coming from an exile writing during the Second World War, but that’s a far remove from the world of Twitch gamers or music reaction videos. Even so, the behaviourist turn and our crude embrace of a neuroscientific imaginary clearly signals an attempt to displace a modern idea of human ‘freedom’ with a naturalistic idea of impulse, that is, to insert human society back into the animal world, where feelings of responsibility, anxiety and guilt are absent.

Such a politics is only stirred into being thanks to the energies and actions of the left. Indeed, the reactionary shares with the revolutionary a sense of how much is at stake.

The continually enraged or amused political leader appears to serve as a representative, or emotional prosthesis, for those whose hostility to contemporary politics otherwise has no outlet.

TikTok is awash with apparently ‘authentic’ clips of humorous reactions (often based on pranks), the comments on which are preoccupied with whether or not the interaction is ‘real’.

Something similar goes on in the strain of contemporary cultural documentary-making in which celebrity broadcasters such as Simon Schama or Grayson Perry are filmed gazing at an artefact they admire. The camera often lingers just as long on the presenter’s entranced face as on the object itself, as if the real clues to its value lie not in its form or colour, but in the facial expressions of the person viewing it. A kind of mirroring is enacted between human face and artefact, with each put in service of revealing the other.

Across various genres, embodied responses to cultural artefacts carry greater worth than the artefacts themselves. The streaming platform Twitch (which currently has 140 million monthly users worldwide) enables people to watch other people playing computer games. The gamer seeks to expand their audience, so as to win sponsorship and donations, not just by being very good at the games but by displaying an emotionally engaging persona as they play.

But the costs were deemed worthwhile, in order that one magical moment might be captured, then later replayed, and perhaps posted online to be seen by others.

The Instagrammer on holiday learns how to increase follower engagement by monitoring the reactions that their images receive; the delivery company keeps track of its logistics (and surveils its drivers) on the basis of the customer feedback it receives; the financial analyst scours their Bloomberg terminal for the all-important price movement. The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work.

But anyone who has visited a famous landmark or picturesque beach in recent years will be familiar with a phenomenon that’s no less strange: photographs meticulously staged for posting on Instagram. The time and effort that goes into the production of these images (including costume, hair and make-up) is unlike anything that took place in the age of the analogue photo album, and is only explicable in terms of the feverish hunt for online reaction.

While exposure to vitamin D was associated with significantly lower dementia incidence in both males and females, the sex-specific difference was also statistically significant. The effect of vitamin D exposure was greater in females than males. This finding might be explained by the associations of estrogen and activated vitamin D and declining levels of estrogen in aging females. Evidence has shown that estrogen may increase the activity of the enzymes responsible for activating vitamin D.31 Subsequently, it can be hypothesized that declining levels of estrogen in peri- and post-menopausal stages could contribute to vitamin D deficiency in females.

that He will never as an angry Father disinherit His children,

Too much exposure kills an aesthetic, and beyond the moral ickiness of regular people having to think about their personal styles as self-branding, I simply don’t want to dress any other way! I know, ~people should wear whatever they want~. I am very pro-this take in general, but in practice it can often feel scoldy, like it’s your fault that you care what other people think of you. As someone who deeply values politeness and etiquette (within reason), what other people think of you extremely matters!

When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is, “For it not to feel like a wedding!”

The logics of inside and outside, or offline and online, will have us trapped in what Asha Achuthan refers to as an “aporea” that opens up between the finitude of the biological limits of women’s bodies, and the purpose of technology to enter it and act on it.2

Freedom from violence and manipulation is unlikely to be handed out by owners of social media platforms or law, for women and queers were never the imagined inheritors of internet freedom. Every act of security to protect myself online only reinforces my outside-ness, because the responsibility to be safe has always been mine.

we are “free” to have a voice and speech online, but not flesh;

Just as we are constituted by biomes,3 so too are we by volumes of data, ours and from the planet and things on it, that pour into and out of data centers.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

only works with an internet connection

people love to dunk on these videos because they’re primarily made by young women who are just simply talking about their day and the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue. But, also, most of these videos can’t actually show what these people do because of security reasons and, also, it’s sort of boring visually, so most adult daycare videos are just people eating at the company canteen and making various smoothies and lattes.

Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.

There are a lot of people excited about this stuff and there is a similar amount of people who are terrified of what it could do to us. And a whole bunch more who have never used any of these tools and have no idea where to begin, but once it’s easy enough, won’t even think twice.

the fact it’s becoming open source just as quickly, to me, means we’re not going to wake up one day and find out it all just disappeared.

If you wanted to, you could train an instance of Stable Diffusion solely with your own original artwork or photography and turn it into a (probably pretty bad) virtual clone of yourself.

In my Discord server a few weeks ago, I was chatting with a couple readers who were a little frustrated that I wasn’t condemning generative-A.I. technology more thoroughly. That I was keeping a somewhat open or at least ambivalent mind about it. And I told them that the minute Stable Diffusion was released last August, I thought we had crossed a threshold of which there was no return.

This philosophical commitment to technological determinism may also at times be mingled with a quasi-religious faith in the envisioned techno-upotian future. The quasi-religious form can be particularly pernicious since it understands resistance to be heretical and immoral. Painting with a decidedly broad brush, the Enlightenment, in this reading, did not, as it turns out, vanquish Religion, driving it far from the pure realms of Science and Technology. In fact, to the degree that the radical Enlightenment’s assault on religious faith was successful, it empowered the religion of technology. To put this another way, the notions of Providence, the Kingdom of God, and Grace were transmuted into Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. If the Kingdom of God had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation. It’s worth noting that stories of technological inevitability tend to flourish in contexts were the cultural ground has been prepared by linear and teleological understandings of history. Of course, narratives of inevitability most often arise from a far more banal source: self-interest, usually of the crassly commercial variety. All assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimize resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future.

Honestly, they make this blog worth using. For me. I feel like the design should be for you; the semantic structure is for me.

The first day we just showed them how to link.[3] This was actually plenty. I think this could have gone on for three weeks alone.

They don’t get railroaded into solving mazes.

I Believe (The Nicolas Cage Speech) A speech I like to give—my beliefs wrt Nicolas Cage. This is a speech I like to give my students about my beliefs with regard to Nicolas Cage, to clear up any misunderstanding. Please contact my office if you would like me to give this speech at your school or at a civic meeting.

But because #corecore videos are being created by Gen Z and not millennials, their videos aren’t boring, egotistical snapshots of their actual lives, but, instead, mildly dystopian fragments of the different kinds of media they consume

maybe technology is more of a magical substance than it is a great medicine for society. A realization that cannot come quick enough now that our ideals about social media have been dispelled by the absence of the interpersonal advances we were promised. No, it was all just a trick of getting messages from here to there, not a new form of living.

They write:In the subfield of computer vision, researchers at Meta have demonstrated that images produced by AI models can be identified as AI- generated if they are trained on “radioactive data”—that is, images that have been imperceptibly altered to slightly distort the training process. This detection is possible even when as little as 1% of a model’s training data is radioactive and even when the visual outputs of the model look virtually identical to normal images. It may be possible to build language models that produce more detectable outputs by similarly training them on radioactive data; however, this possibility has not been extensively explored, and the approach may ultimately not work.No one is sure exactly how (or if) this would work; it’s much easier to alter an image imperceptibly than it is text. But the basic idea would be to “require proliferators to engage in secretive posting of large amounts of content online,” they write, in hopes that models trained on it would produce text that could be traced back to those “radioactive” posts. If by now you’re thinking “that’s bonkers,” you’re not alone. Among other things, the authors note, this nuke-the-web plan “raises strong ethical concerns regarding the authority of any government or company to deliberately reshape the internet so drastically.” And even if someone did go to those lengths, they write, “it is unclear whether this retraining would result in more detectable outputs, and thus detectable influence operations.”

I often have to restrain myself from sprinting back to my apartment with endless ideas and caffeinated enthusiasm in tow. I usually burst into the apartment and start ranting at my fiancé: Did you hear about the Fall of Constantinople and how the Ottoman Empire dragged their boats onto land and lifted them over the hills to then drop them into the Golden Horn???

4 Omne quod tibi applicitum fuerit accipe: et in dolore sustine, et in humilitate tua patientiam habe: 4 Take all that shall be brought upon thee: and in thy sorrow endure, and in thy humiliation keep patience. 5 quoniam in igne probatur aurum et argentum, homines vero receptibiles in camino humiliationis. 5 For gold and silver are tried in the fire, but acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

Although members of the Black working class—particularly in their more industrially organized sections—are more likely to have substantive left-wing views than virtually any group in America, they have been paradoxically unreceptive to attacks on the centrist party establishment from the left, at least among older cohorts. To say “Bernie is crazy” is to say, with almost perfect economy, “he does not make sense from where I sit in the world.” It is the same logic by which political conservatives can be militant union members if they have a sense of their collective power at work, or obversely how radical academics so often behave like petty baronets. Such orientations are not amenable to rhetoric or argument alone, as none of our orientations are.

Because the Black working class remains somewhat more socially organized through churches, public employment, extended family networks, and civic associations—and in a distinct way that links its members to the machinery of the Democratic Party—Sanders’s message and his organizing efforts could not take root, particularly among the older voters for whom longstanding forms of organization remain more meaningful.

As Alex Pareene observed last month in the New Republic, Joe Biden’s promise of a fifteen-dollar minimum wage might mean little to a given voter if everyone around thinks Biden is a pedophile and a crook, while Trump is a working-class hero. The former’s nattering about higher wages will seem duplicitous no matter how many times the campaign slogans are reiterated. But the situation is even more straightforward than this example suggests: if your experience of the world bears no residue of popular power, and no residue of that power having brought about any improvements in the quality of your and your neighbors’ lives, it is natural that such promises sound fraudulent.

For those contemplating a 2024 Bernie Sanders run, the question of the legacy the campaign leaves behind seems of even greater importance than what it accomplishes, let alone whether it will allow Bernie to ascend to the presidency. Only in that case will we see a true test of constitutional loyalty for capital, and only then can we gauge money’s alignment with liberal democracy.

Putnam was right, but for the wrong reasons: associationalism matters for democracy, but it hardly matters to capital — and might even threaten it.

Clearly, the internet only becomes comprehensible in the world of the lonely bowler. Online culture thrives on the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society — there is now ample research showing positive correlation between declining civic commitment and broadband access. At the same time, the internet accelerates and entrenches social atomization. The exit and entry costs of this new, simulated civil society are extremely low, and the stigma of leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to being forced to move out of a neighborhood because a worker scabbed during a strike.

Militias like the Proud Boys and the boogaloo movement instead thrive as “individualized commandos,” as Adam Tooze put it, far removed from the veterans that populated the Freikorps or the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. These were highly disciplined formations with direct experience of combat, not lumpen loners who drove out to protect car dealerships.

Instead of mass membership organizations, voluntary associations increasingly turned to a nonprofit model to organize advocacy in Washington. The shift to the nonprofit drastically changed the composition of these advocacy groups. Instead of relying on dues-paying members, they reached out to wealthy donors to fill their coffers. In a United States in which the government was increasingly giving up its redistributive role, this move created a natural constituency from new welfare recipients. The logic was self-evident: associations that practically operated as businesses but did not want to fulfill their tax obligations to the state saw an opportunity in the nonprofit model. The American political scientist Theda Skocpol casts them as “advocates without members”: nonprofit organizations functioning as the lawyers of a mute defendant.

The Tories — the first mass party in European history — now receive more donations from dead members than from living ones

Parties also remain the paradigmatic victim of Putnam’s disengagement. As fortresses built between individuals and their states, these institutions secured people’s hold on the state throughout the twentieth century. The Austrian social democratic party in the 1930s hosted a theater club, a child welfare committee, a cremation society, a cycling club, workers’ radio and athletic clubs, and even a rabbit breeders’ association.

Since the 1980s, citizens have been actively ejected from associations through anti-union legislation or globalized labor markets. At the same time, passive alternatives to union and party power — cheap credit, self-help, cryptocurrency, online forums — have multiplied. The result is an increasingly capsular world

The transfer of social services from the community to the state level, the argument ran, would threaten citizens’ self-reliance. Putnam was skeptical: both strong (Scandinavia) and weak (United States) welfare states had seen a decline in civic capacity.

At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”

In early American folklore, the plant’s flowering time signaled pioneers that the ground had thawed enough in spring for the burial of the winter’s dead.

The funny thing about Twitter’s feed algorithms is that they were designed to amplify the content that triggered the most reaction, those emotionally sticky posts. This is why boring but informative content never has a chance against that which prompts fury.

When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write.

Do not waste the little span allotted to you producing only work intended for the moment rather than for posterity.

If you attempt always to descend to the lowest common denominator, you will never hit bottom, but you will certainly end up losing the interest of better readers.

25. A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language’s miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality.

Otherwise, you will lapse into inadvertent parody.

23. If you were told in school that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a specimen of good writing, disabuse yourself of this folly. It is in fact an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.

Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.

in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical,

8. All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values.

16. The same book advises: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” That is moronic. Better not to write at all than attempt to heed so obscene a piece of puritanical nonsense. Write with every kind of word that serves your ends.

15. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style decrees: “Keep related words together.” This is vacuous. Awkward ruptures of sense are obviously to be avoided. Taken as a principle, however, this little axiom is not only bad advice; it is a renunciation of language as such. As any decent student of linguistics knows, one of the chief differences between actual linguistic meaning (on the one hand) and mere ostensive noises and gestures (on the other) is the former’s reliance upon structural rather than spatial proximities. The capacity to qualify a predicative phrase by the interpolation of a subordinate clause (for example) is one of those precious attainments that distinguish us from baboons.

The causal dialectic between agency and patiency, to use the scholastic terms, is intrinsic to finitude.

Orwell also decrees: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” No great writer in the history of any tongue has ever observed this rule, and no aspiring writer should follow it. The correct counsel would be “If a word is so excessive as to mar the effect of a sentence, remove it; but never remove a word simply because it is possible to do so.”

“Never use a long word when a short one will do.” This is an idiotic maxim, one that concentrates almost every kind of philistinism in itself. What he should have written was “Never prefer a short word because it is short or a long word because it is long, but always use the word that to your mind best combines sense, felicity, connotation, wit, and sound, without worrying about whether your readers are likely to recognize it.”

Never squander an opportunity for verbal cleverness.

f you show off by being punctiliously precise

I call this the “ultracrepidarian rule,” simply because an editor once tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me from writing about a certain “polemicist who stumbles across unseen disciplinary boundaries in an ultracrepidarian stupor.” The editor lost that argument because there is absolutely no other word in the English language that so exactly means what I wanted to say.

had I but world enough and time

he or she should confine the performance to a single manual, played with two fingers

a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness.

Every great national prose, in just about any tongue, reaches its high meridian only by way of a prolonged and constant negotiation of just this tension between beauty and sublimity—between the decorative and the august, or between the splendid and the lucid.

anfractuous

European music, in other words, had not yet become overinstitutionalized and overcredentialed, as ours has been since the middle of the last century. In Vienna, we are reminded by Mr. Walsh, Mozart worked from 1781 as a freelance musician. Beethoven, too, survived on publishers’ commissions and charitable sponsorship. If they had been born two centuries later, both would have been appointed to endowed professorships, paid handsome salaries, feted by arts organizations, further subsidized with prestige prizes, and never heard from again.

After the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 established the necessity for all Christians to attend confession, presumably so they could be told to stop doing weaving magic, there were suddenly way more texts which enumerated the possible sins which could be confessed. Most of these new works on the subjects had a least one chapter dedicated to talking about how bad it was to talk trash to your friends.[4] It was around this time that we also see a big rise in the number of hell mouths depicted in both visual art and mystery plays.[5] These were meant to remind the audience that unregulated mouths were the road to hell.

when reading up on women and washing for the book I was treated to this incredible passage about what goes on as women do the laundry: “The washing is rinsed, twisted, and beaten in the wash-house where the tongues are quite as active as the washer-woman’s beetles; it is the seat of feminine justice with little mercy for the men-folk. Soaped from head to foot, soaped again, and rinsed down, they go through some bad times

I suspect this tendency is connected to how creators in Hollywood fail to think beyond appetites as the only arcs. The characters’ goals begin and end with personal satiation independent of, or in opposition to, social ties. Any domestic acts of care attached to enabling another person’s life, or own’s own, is typically depicted as the thankless, unpaid, gendered drudgery at the expense of those involved. No wonder “main character syndrome” has become a coping mechanism for a society with few models of relation. Care work is understood primarily in the context of burden, or presented as a cosplay through which right wing fantasies about women are realized.

In reifying the domestic sphere above the public one for women, Trad denies the abuse that occurs in the former setting and primes us to blame the victims of abuse in the latter.

One could draw comparisons between how Ada became Maria’s with how many children from Africa, Asia, and Latin America find themselves “adopted” by white families (the vast majority of international adoptions are of children with living parents). For me, at least, the film required just enough suspension of belief to enjoy it without being too aware of the parallel.

whatever they do will happen regardless of the consent given by folks who think they can federate content but restrict where it goes.

folks commented and criticised things that didn’t match reality, or only confirmed their preconceived notions

I still don’t think that anything I did would make any of this easier for bad actors or worse for the community

While talking to more folks, I was introduced to the #nobot hashtag that accounts use to indicate they don’t want to have anything to do with any bots, which I made to behave like the noindex flag, and I added #nosearch in case folks wanted to be more fine-grained with this.

I learned that a) there are folks that would continue to to use the noindex flag to not get indexed by Google, but they’d be fine being part of a “scoped to a user’s timeline and no one else” type of search (I too fell into this category at the time)

One could say, only half in jest, that The Lord of the Rings is a medievalist's revenge on the unacknowledged and undesired ancestors of medieval Europe's civilization. The literal genocide of the orcs with which the book concludes is in a sense of secondary importance to the cultural genocide that their creation signified in the first place. For the very fact that such a creation was at all possible is a sobering testimony to the completeness of European intellectual hegemony over the world, and its successful re-writing of history.

They are, in short, simply the homologs of the great colonial massacres.

To begin with, there is the denial of history and geographical rootedness to the orcs—almost, one could say, the denial of time and space. The density of detail and cross-referencing which give Middle-Earth its solidity and reality are deliberately withheld from the orcs in keeping with their ontological shallowness. Certainly, there are no genealogical tables, no accounts of culture and history, no etymological speculations about their languages, no maps of their territory. The orcs are defined simply by negation, as the antipode to white culture and civilization. There is an illuminating contrast here with the “goblins” of TH, who have a national territory (“Mount Gram”) (TH, 17), leaders (“the king Golfimbul” [TH, 17], “Bolg of the North” [TH, 279]), “cities, colonies and strongholds”, and a capital, “the great mountain Gundabad of the North” (TH, 279–80). But because of the symbolic significance the orcs were to acquire for Tolkien, all of this vanishes by the time of LTR: we hear of “anthills” rather than cities, neither Mount Gram nor Gundabad can be found on the Middle-Earth maps, and the orcs are no longer described as a sovereign (if odious) people but are merely the slaves of Sauron and Saruman. The conceptual shift is comparable to the change in the description of black Africans necessitated by the rise of the Slave Trade; a revisionist historiography developed in which the Ancient World's knowledge of Nubia and Egypt would be erased and Africa and its inhabitants re-created

What Tolkien has done in creating LTR, then, is to draw on a potent complex of images and fears that, though particularly prominent in the early part of this century, goes back much further and deeper in the structures of the “political unconscious”82 of the white bourgeois Western psyche. This, in part, is what accounts for the “naturalness” of the narrative even in its supernaturalness. The bizarre situations of LTR strike no discordant note with us because, at a deep level, they are completely familiar. For he is painting a picture we have already seen innumerable times before: white civilization besieged by dark barbarity.

Significantly, the eventual defeat of the black racial danger posed by Sauron and the orcs is symbolized both by the fact that the Shirechildren born in the victorious year 1420 have “a rich golden hair that had before been rare among hobbits” [RK, 375]—a token of Aryanization—and by the long list of children Frodo foresees for Sam and Rose [RK, 382]. The race has been saved.

The fear of “race-mixing,” as we have seen, manifests itself both in LTR's degraded men—the “gangrels,” the “squint-eyed and sallow-faced” “half-orcs” who threaten the (racially-pure) Shire (RK, 335, 350, 352)—and in its ominously uplifted orcs—the “half-orcs and goblin-men that the foul craft of Saruman has bred, [who] will not quail at the sun” (TT, 180). The decay of Gondor is accounted for partly by the mixing of their blood with that of lesser men (RK, 165) and partly through the simple failure to reproduce. Faramir warns: “The Enemy increases and we decrease. We are a failing people, a springless autumn. . . . Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry”

And all the allegedly different races of humanoid beings of Middle-Earth are in effect really human. “Laterally,” in the Shemitic second tier, this is conceded in Tolkien's statement in LTR that “Hobbits are relatives of ours” (FR, 21).67 But even more importantly, it is inadvertently admitted by the revelation that interbreeding (the traditional sign of speciesmembership) is possible “vertically,” between tiers. More than one elf-human combination is mentioned, giving rise, as earlier noted, to humans of noble blood, and Tolkien admits that: “Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring.”68 Correspondingly, among the first harbingers in the Shire itself of the threat from Mordor are a “squinteyed ill-favored” Southerner and a “swarthy Bree-lander” who Frodo and company meet at the Bree inn (FR, 213, 219), and these later turn out to be “half-orcs and goblin-men” (TT, 180). It is the discrete existence of this biological/racial dimension of blackness that underpins “swarthiness” as a signifier of evil. If blackness were merely symbolic for Tolkien (as it largely is in the case of the Black Riders, who are simply fallen white men: thus, with the vision given by the Ring, Frodo perceives they have “white faces” [FR, 263]), then physical intermixture would not have the significance it does—it would, in fact, be an impossibility. But if the orcs are really human, then it makes complete sense that Treebeard should be horrified at what is, in effect, race-mixing, miscegenation. “That would be a black evil!” he exclaims (TT, 96), with the authentic outrage of any Southern segregationist, Afrikaner, or Nazi. The threat the orcs pose is therefore also that of racial pollution.

In addition, there is the following revealing passage in Tolkien's private correspondence, from a letter about a (subsequently abandoned) film script of LTR: The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the “human” form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallowskinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.63 So this is how Tolkien envisaged the orcs: repulsive and degraded Mongols! To my mind, this establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the essentially human nature of the orcs, and explodes completely the pretense that no earthly implications can be drawn from their Middle-Earthly characterization. The opposition of a symbolic and a racial blackness is, in a sense misleading, because, for Tolkien's characters, it can be said, ontology recapitulates physiology.

One author has suggested that the Siege of Minas Tirith itself has an exact correspondence to the actual Siege of Constantinople, tracing similarities in geography, political history, characters, siege machinery, and naval involvement.54 “Muslim tradition . . . has much to say, in history and legend, about the decisive [716–17 A.D.] struggle under the walls of Constantinople . . . it was their failure to conquer Constantinople which saved the Byzantine Empire, and with it Western Christendom, from sharing the fate of Iran and Central Asia.”55 LTR commemorates this victory.

For the multitudinous orcs fighting alongside the Southrons and Easterlings, who embody this threat, are not just black; they are also Oriental. More than once they are described as “swart and slant-eyed” (TI, 20, 67). In addition, they usually carry “scimitars” (FR, 417, 427; TI, 20). One of the few Orkish words actually cited in LTR is sharku, “old man” (the source of Saruman's nickname “Sharkey” [RK, 367–68]). T. A. Shippey identifies this as being derived from the Arabic shaikh, without, however, seeming to see anything noteworthy in what is surely a remarkable revelation of the evil orcs' linguistic heritage.53 The greater technological development of the West's assailants, mentioned above (the use of gunpowder, catapults, etc.), can also be seen as a grudging and poisoned (given Tolkien's technophobia) admission of the superiority in learning of Islamic civilization to Dark-Ages Europe.

Christian Europe against the Saracens, then, and all the other Asiatic invaders (Mongols, Turks, etc.): this is an absolutely central structuring opposition of LTR, which, unlike the pastoral/industrial conflict, has not received the critical attention it deserves. Tolkien himself would write that a Christian is “hemmed in a hostile world.”

Finally, a semi-serious case could be made that the orcs' class identity is demonstrated simply by the fact that they are the only ones who seem, in the sleepless mills of Mordor, to do any work in Middle-Earth.

In a book where language reveals one's culture, worldview, and moral and social standing, the orcs, as more than one commentator has pointed out, speak Cockney, exchanging “Ars!” and “Garns!” (RK, 247–48).37 Thus Tolkien has decided that the linguistic equivalent of the evil and ugly “Black Speech” is the language of the working class.

This brings us to what will be our central focus: the orcs. It is here that the most unassailable case for a Biblical inspiration exists. Black, utterly evil, lacking culture and history, the bottom link of Tolkien's great chain of being, the orcs are unquestionably the descendants of Ham. Superficially, their blackness would seem to identify them as African, but this is only part of a far more complicated truth.30 What Tolkien has created in the orcs is, I suggest, the ultimate composite “Wild” Other to the defining Self of white, Christian, class-structured Western civilization. The orcs incarnate in their diabolically black bodies an unholy trinity: the threatening subordinate class within, the Islamic peril to the East, and the restless multitudes of the colonized South.

Correspondingly, the admixture of elvish blood has an uplifting effect on its recipients. Thus Elrond of Rivendell, king-to-be Aragorn, and the Prince of Dol Amroth, are all partly elvish, and this manifests itself in their greater nobility, courage, wisdom, ability to withstand temptation, etc. Throughout LTR, blood—elvish at one end, orkish at the other—invariably tells.

Not only is their transcendental (white) beauty (which characterizes all elves) stressed on every occasion they are introduced, but it is also made clear throughout LTR that they represent the unattainable aesthetic ideal of all the second-tier races, i.e., aesthetic standards are not discontinuous from one race to the next

We had the three-tiered racial hierarchy of Middle-Earth, with the elves as founders of culture and civilization, bringing the Promethean light into the darkness; men, hobbits, and dwarves as bearers of a culture that ultimately derives from the elves; and the orcs as the threatening forces who wish to destroy that culture. Moreover, the elegiac tone that pervades much of LTR arises from this sense that the high culture of the past is gradually disappearing—though with Aragorn enthroned as king, a holding-operation can be maintained for a while—as the elves leave Middle-Earth for the West and the new Age of Men dawns. But the correspondences go much deeper. In the Aryan Myth, the Aryans were a white race “which had descended from the mountains of Asia to colonize and populate the West.”20 In LTR, the elves come from across the sea to Middle-Earth. In the Aryan Myth, there is an intimate connection between language, race, and culture, with Indo-European being viewed as the superior “Japhetic” language family which is tied by blood to the Aryan race. (The full significance of this to LTR will be explored at the end.) In LTR, the elves are the original creators of language and culture: Treebeard says they woke the trees up, taught them to speak, and gave everything their names (TT, 85, 90). Their language is the “Ancient Tongue” (FR, 119), which is culturally and aesthetically superior to all the other languages of Middle-Earth. As such, it is unlikely to be fully mastered by those of the middle level, who are forced, like Frodo (FR, 121, 307–13), to marvel at its beauties from the outside.

But the point is that this extrapolation of the argument is not even necessary, for the simple reason that Middle-Earth is in fact our world. (The term itself is just a translation of Middle English middelerde/Old English Middangeard: “the inhabited lands of Men between the seas.”)7 Tolkien says this explicitly: Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

There is a great and grand tradition of using the sheath of humor  to make you comfortable before removing it to reveal the sharp edge designed to Wake You The Fuck Up. See Johnathan Swift, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Eddie Izzard, and a whole bunch of other people trying to engage with any extremely difficult topic in a public sphere. A lot of men still don't get the whole Woman Thing we insist on bringing up over and aain. A lot of straights still don't understand the damage caused by willful denial of other orientations. They don't even think to question the assumptions behind the term 'straight'. A lot of whites still can't see that when I care about Me and My Kind? I care about yours, too. That's why I'm screaming. That's why we all are.

Ursula le Guin put a great deal of thought into the race of her protagonist in A Wizard of Earthsea, she outlined the geography of the world and the peoples therein, and she is generally respected for creating a detailed and internally consistent magic system that formed the core of the narrative of the stories; but when she sat down to write the book she unthinkingly reproduced the gender conventions of the genre even though she’s a feminist.

I do want to see static racial bonuses back though, since now we are referring to different races as species there is no excuse to not acknowledge biological differences between two different "species."

What was it like to be alive then, when—as Marshall Berman titles his book about modernism, quoting Marx—all that is solid was melting into air? Having lived through a pandemic unlike any seen in the last century, we might have a better sense of how to begin answering that question than when I first started asking it of my students as I was learning how to teach them ten years—and another world—ago.

A hundred years later, one of the things we have all become less mystical—or at least less mystified—about is the fact that the politics of many of the Anglo-American modernists were, broadly speaking, atrocious, ranging from aristocratically apolitical to self-indulgently libertarian to outright fascist.

Whatever the solution, Wetherell looks at the retweet very differently than he once did — a lesson that he thinks has broader implications. “I remember specifically one day thinking of that phrase: We put power in the hands of people,” he said. “But now, what if you just say it slightly differently: Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.”

Earlier this year, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, limited the number of people to which a message could be forwarded to five at a time, in response to quick-spreading rumors and disinformation. “The forward limit significantly reduced forwarded messages around the world,” WhatsApp said in a blog post. “We'll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content.”

A full rollback of the share and retweet buttons is unrealistic, and Wetherell doesn’t believe it’s a good idea. Were these buttons universally disabled, he said, people could pay users with large audiences to get their message out, giving them disproportionate power

The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

Jason Goldman, the head of product when Wetherell built the retweet, said it’s a key source of Twitter’s problems today. “The biggest problem is the quote retweet,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “Quote retweet allows for the dunk. It’s the dunk mechanism.”

Looking further back, there’s also Night of the Demon (which was also released in shorter former as Curse of the Demon), a 1957 occult mystery about an American academic investigating a colleague’s mysterious death in England. This is high on the “Gorey Illustration” scale, I think. Martin Scorsese named it one of the scariest movies of all time; I would not personally agree, but it is pretty good.

Exit is not a benign withdrawal. It imposes costs on those left behind, and the freedom of Exiteers substantially depends on the unfree labor of others. In 1623, wracked with sickness, the poet John Donne wrote that “No man is an island entire of itself . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” This interdependency is precisely what elite libertarianism finds intolerable. Its ultimate aim is to ensure that the sovereign individual never has to ask for whom the bell tolls, because, pace Donne, it will never toll for him.

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman famously characterized the choice that is faced by people within declining institutions as being between “voice” and “exit.”

Our feral ethos was best demonstrated by the production process. A deal had been struck with the printer that produced the Financial Times. They would use our publication to do test runs on rolls of the FT’s distinctive pink paper, for which we got a cheap rate. The resulting resemblance made for good times on the Tube, as the banker reading over your shoulder, expecting something about interest rates, found himself confronted with headlines like angel, virus: cyberspace breakdown(s) or (my personal favorite) alt.zombie.golf.the.earth.

But if you consider the implications of San Francisco’s new policy—that is, medical coverage being part and parcel of becoming a person—then metaphysics is thrown to the winds. If you take seriously the idea that a person cannot be himself without the intervention of modern technology, then you have lost the notion of a self altogether.

The day after that the police arrived. We did not call them to be clear it was another neighbor who felt threatened. Apparently they had seen the guy waving a machete around and spouting off in our direction. Four police cars pulled up outside his house and he ran inside yelling back at them from out the window. He has rifles inside he said.Jesus Christ I thought am I going to have to side with the guy who wants to kill me against the cops now just out of political principle? Leave that guy alone you fucking cops!

Have you read Tyson Yunkaporta? Rūta: Yeah I was in a Kinship learning journey with him.

And it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly, it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads.

a waste byproduct of the perfectly ordinary, centuries-old global circulation of fuel, capital, and Islam.

Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world.

The internet has enabled us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people.

When the philosopher G. E. Moore, one of Wittgenstein’s friends in Cambridge, could not waive the degree requirements to award him a B.A., Wittgenstein was livid. “If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to HELL directly,” he wrote to Moore, “and if I am worth it and you don’t do it then—by God—you might go there.”

The conception of the body politic isn’t something that actually meant anything to the life of the average medieval person, who was, you know, a peasant. It is a story that rich people told to other rich people and it didn’t involve them. The concept that there was a king somewhere certainly existed, but it was unlikely to influence their lives one way or another. They were busy doing all the actual useful work that kept society going rather than wanking on about the meaning of whoever the fuck was ruling them. This is a concept by the ruling class, for the ruling class, kept alive then as now by a sycophantic group of client writers.

Similarly the Habsburgs made it to the throne because initially they were a relatively poor and weak family from what is now Switzerland. Whilst they had managed to build their territory in to what is now Austria, they were considered a non-threat when they came to the imperial throne in 1440. That is why they had eager papal backing when they did. Everyone thought it would be easy to push the Habsburgs around and, um sorry for the spoiler here, but it turns out that was a bad call too.

Plenty of medieval sources are happy to equate what we now see as queer sex with straight sodomy or even solo sex. Articles 12 and 13 of the Penitential of Theodore for example, (shout out to penitentials and the dildos therein) tells priests to assign penances to sinners thusly:

As a result, in the late Antique period and it was generally considered a career plan to say you had actually won a papal election and then live in one of Rome’s graveyards saying you were the real Pope and that your access to the bones of a lot of dead saints was proof. It was a very big goth rich kid vibe.

When you can no longer grow your own wood or cut your own turf to heat your own parlour, you are made that little bit more dependent on the matrix of government, technology and commerce that has sought to transmute self-sufficiency into bondage since the time of the Luddites.

In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together.

with little significant impact on “air quality” — or at least, no impact comparable to that which Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” modernisation has had. Suddenly, though, the media is full of scientists armed with studies demonstrating how getting a fire going in your cottage in winter will lead to cancer and lung disease on a widespread scale.

the end-to-end principle, that any two people who want to talk to each other should be allowed to do so, without interference from the people who operate their communications infrastructure.

In a discussion of political debate, he argues that the press, in becoming professionalized and prioritizing the objective dissemination of information, had declined relative to the more opinion-driven, even yellow journalism of the late nineteenth century. It’s an argument of a piece with his constant return to the ethic of small proprietorship as a countervailing force to centralized power.

He opposed the Vietnam War and was at first heartened by the student movement, but then he came to believe that the “trouble with the new left . . . lay precisely in its ignorance of the earlier history of the left, as a result of which it proceeded to recapitulate the most unattractive features of that history: rampant sectarianism, an obsession with ideological purity, sentimentalization of outcast groups.”

So as a schematic one might think of different Christmases overlaying each other:An “Franco-German-European Christmas”, freighted with cultural and historical weight. Let us call that the“politico-sentimental Christmas”. And there is an “Anglo-American Christmas” fashioned by 19th-century bourgeois culture and 20th-century mass commercialism and mass production - “organized Fordist Christmas”, which now extends through its supply chains around the world And, by the late 20th century, we have “global Christmas”. The majority of people celebrating Christmas today may not even be in the North Atlantic world, its original cradle. Christmas is now a global commercial event.

Converting the transportation system from fossil fuels to electricity is essential to addressing climate change. But automakers’ focus on large, battery-powered SUVs and trucks reinforces a destructive American desire to drive something bigger, faster, and heavier than everyone else.

Is the electric F-150 Lightning “better” than the conventional F-150 if its added weight and size deepen the country’s road-safety crisis?

To that end, Shukitt-Hale recounts a study where her team treated cells with different compounds found in walnuts, another high-antioxidant food. These components had metabolic effects, but at some point the doses became toxic to the cells. When the researchers put actual walnut oil on the cells, though, things were different. Even at levels at which the individual components were toxic, the walnut oil wasn’t.

It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the covid biosecurity state.

our world of megacities and glowing screens off even further from the real world.

Whatever we think our politics are - and they are likely to be the least important thing about us - we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out - and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face - can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

On this issue, if on no other, I tend towards the Elon Musk worldview: you’re free to express your views here without being censored or cancelled or deleted for wrongthink.

We must work out, if only for our own peace of mind, what we think about the breakdown of forms, the widening gyre, the solidity melting ever faster into air. We have to work it out so that we know where we stand, and what we will not stand for. Where the lines are, and whether to cross them and what we will do if one day the times come for us as we sit beneath the walnut tree, armed with a vaccine passport and the latest official upending of reality, and demand a public pledge of loyalty.

Acid graphics, sometimes referred to as Y2K grunge, are the next stage of the Y2K revival that began last year. This trend features grimy textures, chrome metallics, broken grids and amorphous shapes.

The more time that we spend in online spaces rather than physical ones, the less clear the boundaries between the two can appear. And in 2023, graphic designers are shattering that boundary completely by working digital illustrations into real-life photography.

But in 2023, surrealism is getting an unexpected pairing with 80s airbrush techniques, as soft retro filters are overlaid onto strange, chimeric imagery.

In 2023, risograph printing is being reimagined for digital, abstract graphics. Its grainy textures add depth and noise to minimalist shapes.

This doesn’t mean we need a world where nobody talks to anyone we disagree with — instead of thick walls, we need semipermeable membranes. And a fragmented internet, where people can try out multiple spaces and move from forum to forum, is perfect for providing those membranes. Disagreement in society is necessary for progress, but it’s most constructive when it’s mediated by bonds of trust and affinity and semi-privacy. Our boundaries will always rub up against each other, but we need some boundaries.

And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local culture.

What these rising apps and platforms all share is fragmentation. Whether it’s intentional self-sorting into like-minded or community-moderated groups, or the natural fragmentation that comes from a bunch of different people watching their own algorithmically curated video feeds, these apps all have a way of separating people based on who they want to talk to and what they want to be exposed to.

First, there’s TikTok and YouTube; although these do have some comment features, overall they’re far more similar to television, radio, and traditional one-way push media, with content driven by algorithms instead of user sharing.

the hive mind’s constant demands for us to agree with more people than we ever evolved to agree with.

The look and functionality of the original is simple to replicate,

They tinkered at the edges of the platform, but never touched their killer feature, the quote-tweet, which Twitter’s head of product called “the dunk mechanism.” Because dunks were the business model — if you don’t believe me, you can check out the many research papers showing that toxicity and outrage drive Twitter engagement.

Community moderation works. This was the overwhelming lesson of the early internet. It works because it mirrors the social interaction of real life, where social groups exclude people who don’t fit in. And it works because it distributes the task of policing the internet to a vast number of volunteers, who provide the free labor of keeping forums fun, because to them maintaining a community is a labor of love.

By 2019 you could get mobbed by angry librarians, or Saturday Night Live fans, or history professors. The only defense against an angry mob was to get your own angry mob. Twitter felt like a prison, and in prison you need a gang to survive.Why did this happen to the centralized internet when it hadn’t happened to the decentralized internet of previous decades?

the occasional economics blogger who comes off as ideologically tolerant enough to be admitted to both right-wing and left-wing groups

The audience effect is precisely what it sounds like: When we’re working on something that will soon go before an audience, we work far harder than if we’re doing work that’s for our eyes only.For decades, psychologists have documented the audience effect in studies: If you have experimental subjects write out an explanation for other people, for example, it’ll be far longer and clearer and more comprehensive than if you ask them to write it merely for themselves. I’ve interviewed many teachers who’ve noticed the same thing: The essays that students write for their professors (a captive and inaorganic audience) are lifeless and dull compared to the witty, persuasive text the kids will pour out in online forums.

The clipped syntax, jagged lines, the fixation on ordinary, even banal objects and actions, the wry, world-weary narratorial voice: This is the default register of most poetry written in the past half century, including that written by poets who may not have read a single line of Eliot.

To an Eliot detractor like C.S. Lewis, this grotesque simile — comparing the evening sky to an anesthetized human body — was a moment of rupture, a discarding of the entire established tradition of poetic diction and imagery, and the implicit reverence that undergirded both.

We can write verse, if not about the perceived transcendent order in the universe, then about the feelings of unease within ourselves; we can even draw our images from the detritus of consumer civilization — an empty plastic bottle, an iPhone with a cracked screen.

Here are lines — not especially memorable or distinguished ones, but serviceable enough — taken at random from the second volume of Robert Southey’s “Minor Poems” (1823):Aye Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye,/This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch,/Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower/Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock/That thro’ the creeping weeds and nettles tall/Peers taller, and uplifts its column’d stem/Bright with the broad rose-blossoms.Admit it: Your eyes, so far from being fixed, are already glazing over.

Every sentence in that AI generated content came from a human brain. It was merely collected and organized, without proper credit or citation, into a marketable product. The writers who did the actual work? Who cares about them?

People discussed how this could be used for world building (based on the excerpts above, I’m thinking the answer to that is “not effectively”), for writing newsletter entries, for taking care of scenes you were having trouble with or were simply bored of and wanted to get past in your manuscript. In other words, every single author in those comments was excited about the new ways they were going to defraud their readers.

Just two weeks later, an author on TikTok showed up on my FYP extolling the virtues of AI writing software. It was boosting her word count so much faster. Helping her break her writing block. And there was absolutely no thought, at least, in the video, as to the impact or ethics of using AI generated content in your published work.

But more frequently than ever, I had to admit, the new music I put on just seems to wash over me. Yes, I’m getting older, and the vast majority of people tend to lose interest in new music as they age. Yes, my listening habits are not as disciplined as they used to be, now that my smartphone is always arm’s-length away. Regardless, the fact remains: Popular acts that are doing relatively well often come out sounding like background music. Like music to type to.

In talking about this, I found myself worrying about how the lack of money and resources for the expanding class of musicians who need day jobs in order to survive might affect the quality of the music they make. One of the only constants in the history of pop music is listeners worrying that pop music is getting worse, of course, but how would you know if the wolf is here, after many generations of people crying about it? Does it not stand to reason that, as the funds dwindle and the infrastructure fractures for many musicians, so, too, would the quality of their product?

Scientists are trying to figure out how long it takes reinforced concrete to degrade because of carbonation. The average result for a standard structure is 100 years, Allais said. “When you consider that reinforced concrete was invented around 100 years ago,” she went on, “you get this amazing image that the concrete all around the world is beginning to fail.”

Greenstein points out that a huge portion of what looks like Job praising God throughout the text may be meant as the opposite: Job sarcastically riffing on existing Bible passages, using God’s words to point out how much He has to answer for. Most importantly, Greenstein argues, there’s something revolutionary in the mysterious final words Job lobs at God, something that was buried in mistranslation. In the professor’s eyes, various words were misunderstood, and the “dust and ashes” phrase was intended as a direct quote from a source no less venerable than Abraham, in the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that one, Abraham has the audacity to argue with God on behalf of the people whom He will smite; however, Abraham is deferential, referring to himself, a mortal human, as afar v’eyfer—dust and ashes. It is the only other time the phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement So, Greenstein says, Job’s final words to God should be read as follows: Advertisement That is why I am fed up:I take pity on “dust and ashes” [humanity]! Remember, for this statement, God praises Job’s honesty. The deity does not give any logic for mortal suffering. Indeed, He denounces Job’s friends who say there is any logic that a human could understand. God is not praising Job’s ability to suffer and repent. He’s praising him for speaking the truth about how awful life is.

The most vexing part of Job’s story—after his servants and children die, after the boils, after the debates—comes when Job challenges God to explain Himself in the mode of an ancient Near Eastern lawsuit. The deity appears and, though He declines to explain why He does anything (He prefers to boast of His vast power and inscrutable planning), He praises Job for speaking “in honesty” and condemns the Scripture-quoting pals for not doing the same. Advertisement Advertisement Job then utters a few enigmatic lines of Hebrew that scholars have struggled to translate for millennia: “al kayn em’as / v’nikham’ti al afar v’eyfer.” The King James Version gives those lines as “Wherefore I abhor myself / and repent in dust and ashes.” Historically, most other versions stab at something similar—though, as we will see, modern scholarship suggests some very different alternatives. Whatever Job says, it seems to work: In an abrupt epilogue, we see Job restored to his former comfort and glory. Many analysts think the happy ending was added to an initial core text that lacked such comfort. But even if you accept it as part of the story, it’s unsettlingly cryptic. We are not told why Job is rewarded, whether his reward was divinely given, or what scars the episode has left upon him. We are merely told that he’s materially back to something resembling what he had before.

Religions may have syncretic elements to their beliefs or history, but adherents of so-labeled systems often frown on applying the label, especially adherents who belong to "revealed" religious systems, such as the Abrahamic religions, or any system that exhibits an exclusivist approach. Such adherents sometimes see syncretism as a betrayal of their pure truth. By this reasoning, adding an incompatible belief corrupts the original religion, rendering it no longer true. Indeed, critics of a syncretistic trend may use the word or its variants as a disparaging epithet, as a charge implying that those who seek to incorporate a new view, belief, or practice into a religious system pervert the original faith. Non-exclusivist systems of belief, on the other hand, may feel quite free to incorporate other traditions into their own.

My friend Becca said the website is a way to “honor this space as a being.” I liked the idea that a website could be a way of honoring something, almost like a kind of shrine, or just saying “this is significant.” You give something a name and suddenly you feel “wow, now that it has a name, it can be so many things. Maybe I’ll buy a domain name.” [Laughs]

Just thinking about explaining to a layman the client-server model, HTTP, CORS, URLs pointing to disk, JS syntax in an unstructured editor, &c, makes my head hurt.

Now, if a name is going to be easily changeable forever, please do make it descriptive. I’d much rather maintain code where the variables look like numCols and numRows than i and j. (Just, for the love of God, if you change the meaning, also change the name). But if a name is going to serve as, in any sense, an identifier, something that will point at a big complicated thing from many places far away, make it an opaque identifier. You get similar advice in database schema design — if your user’s email address can change, don’t use their email address as a foreign key in your database. Use a number or a random string instead. Something immutable.

I’m probably being overdramatic there, but I hope my point is clear. “Descriptive” names don’t create transparency, they create the illusion of transparency. If you see that something has the name OrderStatusService, you will instinctively assume you know what it is and does, and you will probably be wrong.

a failure on the part of the thought leaders in the web development community to properly communicate and advocate for the hypermedia approach. Hypermedia was a great idea! It still is!

I agree that staying on Twitter to engage in battles with trolls isn’t “resistance.” But building community and mobilizing resources are.

Twitter hashtags have been used to help organize, mobilize and amplify the biggest peaceful resistance movements on the planet — movements that, by the numbers, have dwarfed white supremacist rallies and the raging crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Twitter is probably the only global digital platform where elite institutions and powerful individuals share space with marginalized people, including the working and lower classes.

I will only point out that there area number of kinder possibilities that my criticshave disdained to imagine: that my wife maydo this work because she wants to and likes to;that she may find some use and some meaningin it; that she may not work for nothing.

I don't think that the governmentand the conservation organizations alone willever make us a conserving society. "Why do Ineed a centralized computer system to alert meto environmental crises? That I live every hourof every day in an environmental crisis I knowfrom all my senses. Why then is not my first dutyto reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?

Thehistory of the exploitation of the Appalachiancoal fields is long, and it is available to readers.I do not see how anyone can read it and plugin any appliance with a clear conscience.

Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by thecomputer with a handy alternative: Wife - alow-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile ofhandwritten notes on Wife and you get back afinished manuscript, edited while it was typed.What computer can do that? Wife meets all ofBerry's uncompromising standards for techno-logical innovation: she's cheap, repairable nearhome, and good for the family structure. Best ofall, Wife is politically correct because she breaksa writer's "direct dependence on strip-minedcoal."History teaches us that Wife can also be usedto beat rugs and wash clothes by hand, thuseliminating the need for the vacuum cleaner andwashing machine, two more nasty machines thatthreaten the act of writing.

To make myself as plain as I can, I should givemy standards for technological innovation in myown work. They are as follows:The new tool should be cheaper than the oneit replaces.2 It should be at least as small in scale as theone it replaces.3 It should do work that is clearly and demon-strably better than the one it replaces.4 It should use less energy than the one itreplaces.5 If possible, it should use some form of solarenergy, such as that of the body.6 It should be repairable by a person of ordi-nary intelligence, provided that he or she hasthe necessary tools.7 It should be purchasable and repairable as nearto home as possible.S It should come from a small, privatelyowned shop or store that will take it back formaintenance and repair.9 It should not replace or disrupt anythinggood that already exists, and this includesfamily and community relationships.

I do not see why I should not beas scientific about this as the next fellow: whensomebody has used a computer to write work thatis demonstrably better than Dante's, and when thisbetter is demonstrably attributable to the use ofa computer, then I will speak of computers witha more respectful tone of voice, though I still willnot buy one.

I do not see that com-puters are bringing us one step nearer to any-thing that does matter to me: peace, economicjustice, ecological health, political honesty, familyand community stability, good work.

Technically, spooky means ghostly or spectral, two words that relate to liminality. To me, spookiness is a suggestion. It leaves the door open to the possibility of life beyond death, of a world that’s much bigger than what we know.