Real songwriting arises from the “internal human struggle of creation,” a process that “requires my humanness.” “Algorithms don’t feel” and cannot participate in this “authentic creative struggle.” Therefore, ChatGPT’s poetry will forever suck, because no matter how closely the lyrics replicate Cave’s own, they will always be deficient. In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave).

According to a 17th century account, the Andalusian inventor Abbas ibn Firnas makes a tower jump in Córdoba. He wraps himself with vulture feathers and attaches two wings to his arms. The alleged attempt to fly is not recorded in earlier sources and is ultimately unsuccessful, but the garment slows his fall enough that he only sustains minor injuries.

The question to ask of trapsmay not be how to escape from them, but rather how to recapture them and turn them tonew ends in the service of new worlds.

Conflating satisfaction and retention helped mediate a tension between developers,who often expressed to me a strong desire to help users, and business people, who wantedto capture them. Appeals to user ‘satisfaction’ hold a moral power within the softwareindustry, and are thus turned to justify a variety of technical decisions (Van Couvering,2007). But they also express a basic ambivalence in technologies of enchantment: peopledesire and enjoy enchantment, and the tension between ‘satisfying’ users and capturingthem is not easily resolved.

As the research community’s center of gravity moved into industry andas companies shifted to streaming, they accumulated data that could replace the explicitratings that had previously defined the field. Logs of interaction data could be read as‘implicit’ ratings: users stopping a video partway through, skipping over recommendeditems, or listening to songs multiple times all became interpreted as ratings data. Thesedata were more plentiful than explicit ratings, being generated by any interaction a userhad with a system, and, in an interpretive move inherited from behaviorism, they werealso taken as more truthful than users’ explicit ratings.

And arguably the culmination of that is ChatGPT, which promises to give you exactly the information you’re looking for in an unobtrusive “neutral” prose style. Much as I hate ChatGPT — and I do hate it with all my heart, unconditionally, unchangeably, eternally — I do get why that fantasy is attractive. But it is a fantasy, because as the man says, there is nothing outside the text. There is no such thing as the raw information devoid of presentation and context. We can’t get at that raw information, and we certainly can’t program computers to do so, because it does not exist. It is a fantasy, and it is increasingly a willful lie.

Beer correctly diagnoses this impulse, one that I detest. It is moral narcissism for intellectuals to exhaust their human capital endowments debating about how they can minimize their own sins while the forces of technocapital grow stronger by the day. Beer’s now-quaint description of the threats we face illustrate just how badly we have been losing over the past fifty years—the “Electric Mafia” he fears is easily recognizable in the control technologies of algorithmic feeds and product recommendations “What is to be done with cybernetics, the science of effective organization? Should we all stand by complaining, and wait for someone malevolent to take it over and enslave us? An electronic mafia lurks around that corner.”“We allow publishers to file away electronically masses of information about ourselves—who we are, what are our interests—and to tie that in with mail order schemes, credit systems, and advertising campaigns that line us all up like a row of ducks to be picked off in the interests of conspicuous consumption.”

It happens that the Center for Information Technology and Policy, where I’m visiting at Princeton this year, shares a building with the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE). I was excited to learn this – a chance to walk downstairs and talk to someone about Operations Research, this strange postwar discipline which seems to have absorbed the cybernetic impulse that had flourished across the social sciences and hidden it away in business schools? But one of the grad students told me that actually the name is somewhat anachronistic—no one really does Operations Research anymore, it’s all just financial engineering aka math and stats.

He’s absolutely correct that there is no “ongoing stasis” option—but we can still try to slow things down! In fact, this is the center of my political program! There is no possibility of democratic action if the speed of change eclipses the speed at which democracy functions. I am still a liberal — and the only way to be be a liberal today is to be a conservative, to try to slow down technological change.

But Cowen’s “maximizing economic growth subject to avoiding collapse” is also merely haggling over the price. There is a strong positive commitment in this nominally normative statement. By outlining this principle, Cowen is arguing that at the margin, we are too worried about avoiding collapse and not enough about maximizing economic growth.

Before linear history came the eternal recurrence of magical time: the sun caused the moon and the moon caused the sun, the seasons cycled through, and human experience was terrifying and strange. Nothing was explained in the sense of a historical causal chain, the familiar scientific “tides are caused by the moon.” History is this attitude applied to human societies, and is co-extensive with concept of progress. The current temporality, what I call cybernetic time, is once again circular. But this circularity, of the feedback loop, combines the circle with the line in what Flusser calls “circular progress.” Each time through the feedback loop intensifies the action, so that we return to the same place but with everything amplified. This is what Flusser calls “the circularity not of the wheel, but of the whirlpool.” Hayek’s optimism was premised on humans existing within history, within time, within the world. If that ceases to be the case, if we produce a runaway feedback loop which overwhelms any dialectical response, then we are post-historical. We continue to go, and indeed we go faster than ever before, but we lose both the past and the future; we don’t know where we are going.

Internet culture writing can surely fight the opacity that conceals abuses of power by connecting moments in culture to strains of ideology and changes in technology. But more interestingly, I look forward to seeing how internet culture writing can help us metabolize changes in hierarchies and cultural values – and transform how we write in general.

When she writes about the mommy bloggers of the 2000s, Lorenz credits WordPress, the blogging and content management service, for turning ‘media consumers into media producers’. However, a more interdisciplinary and historically attuned approach can be found in Lisa Nakamura’s 2007 book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Instead of baptising the mommy bloggers as users-turned-creators, Nakamura finds their spaces to be a prime example of how the social internet collapses these categories. She describes how pregnancy puts women in positions where they interact with sonograms and other medical technologies that create images of them as background for the newly prioritised foetus. ‘The internet,’ however, ‘provides a space in which women use pregnancy Web sites’ modes of visuality and digital graphic production to become subjects, rather than objects, of interactivity.’

On the internet we’re users, subscribers, creators, commenters, customers and commodities. Algorithmic feeds collect and metabolise hoards of our personal data, so no matter what we’re doing – posting or scrolling – we are always doing two things: using and being used. As such, it’s never as simple as traditional media and entertainment writing or cultural criticism, where the creating side is clearly demarcated and the audience can be placed at a distance. The work of internet culture writing is to outline how we all vacillate in our roles as subjects and objects.

The use (or abuse) or the passive voice produces a sense of doomerism, a neoliberal helplessness where companies can’t change, capitalism rages on, nobody is unique and the user (and writer) is helpless in it all.

Marketing is not new, nor is its deleterious effect on young women’s self-image. To acknowledge this historical continuity is not to undermine the above statistics.

Mothers control up to 85 percent of household spending in the United States, and white women have been the face of this market and its targeted consumers since the nineteenth century. Algorithmic recom­mendation systems are changing things; targeted advertising is no doubt offering companies finer tools with which to capture “niche” demographics and hawk products For You. But the fine line between aspiration and relatability that has always fueled the American entertainment and advertising industries—and that has always been most available to white Americans for toeing—remains their stimulus for sales.

To imagine one’s recommendations as wholesale “generic,” rather than generic to one’s demographic, is a step stranger. It may be a tacit acknowledgment of one’s own claim to cultural domi­nance—the world might look flat if you are looking at it from above—or a concession to one’s own frictionless passage through space, online and off. A U.S. passport, white skin, straightness, cis-masculinity: it is easy enough to attach these characteristics to the internet itself, along with its cultural output. Most histories of the internet do, aligning The Algorithm with its most famous found­ers and profiteers: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and so on and so on.

Whatever culture is to Chayka—whether individual “pieces” or dominant aesthetics—it seems to exist outside of politics, which is why it can be said to grow “organically” or to be debased by a technological invention, rather than by the social and institutional forces guiding its development and distribution.

Why should any of us trust a black box to define our tastes? One could argue that taste has always been a black box and that having it has always depended less on liking the right things than on aligning oneself with the right peo­ple. But even though Chayka spends a chapter on theories of taste that passes through Pierre Bourdieu, he does not seem to believe this.

The “social media” frame allows us to see how The Apparatus transforms existing communication technologies. Yelp makes restaurants more social, sure. But higher education is more social thanks to the efforts of the U.S. News & World Report. And books are more social thanks to Goodreads, sure, but this is simply an intensification of a trend that includes the New York Times Bestseller List.

The most important technological component of social media is quantified audience feedback. Indeed, I think this is the correct definition of “social media.” It’s not a binary—media is more social the more the audience is present, the more that the media object facing the consumer is co-created by the original author and their audience.

This is an ideological explanation for why “The Algorithm” is a bad answer. Ideological explanations are red meat for the kind of people who read Substacks, tweets, and The New Yorker, which is why I led with that. But the problem is more fundamental.

But sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it--a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have one’s learned helplessness excused. Articles and books in this vein (and I have written plenty of them!) tend to emphasize the power, scale, novelty, and opacity of the platform giants, and to de-emphasize user agency, statistical context, historical precedent, and even little things like “the economy” and “the world outside.”

the genuinely contradictory movement of globalization: Not a second-law-of-thermodynamics-style constant and unvaried overall increase in homogeneity, but an unpredictable and spiky process in which difference emerges from uniformity and uniformity from difference. Chayka is extremely attentive to the narrow and often class-bound domains in which “algorithms” hasten and expand homogenization. But he is less interested in the ways in which they complicate and redirect it, or even retard and reverse it.

making the paint is easy - you add binder to the pigment and mull it and pour it where you want it to dry. the drying process takes a couple of days. don't ask me for actual measurements because i'm an italian american not otherwise categorized.

The Cimicidae family, to which bed bugs belong, comprises about 100 species. Almost all prefer to bite animals other than humans, often birds. Biologists have observed cliff swallow chicks jumping to their deaths from heavily infested nests rather than enduring the bites.

The problem is that all human preference and pleasure, even flavor, are contingent on context and experience. And one important context is that we like some cultural products more when we work to acquire them. This is likely related to status: at an unconscious level we connect the belabored discovery process with scarcity. Time is an important signaling cost. Algorithmic culture that effortlessly pushes culture to you, therefore, is bound to create less meaningful and valuable culture. Chayka writes, “I worry that [lean-back consumption’s] fundamental passivity is devaluing cultural innovation as a whole, as well as degrading our enjoyment of art.” That’s correct! So what will we do about it?

Summerson called his second category of ornament subjunctive architecture—that is, “as if something were otherwise than it is.” Among the oldest examples of such ornament are the leafy column capitals that originated in ancient Egypt (palm fronds and lotus buds), were adopted by the Greeks (acanthus leaves), and were further refined by the Byzantines, whose diaphanous marble capitals are so delicately carved that they appear to be made of lace. Whether palm fronds or flowers, such insubstantial forms have the effect of making the beams above seem to float. Pilasters, which are flattened columns with no structural function, are another example of subjunctive architecture. So are Renaissance frescoes, which often include putative arches and columns. This was partly a question of cost—painted columns were cheaper than the real thing—but it also had to do with the curious appeal of trompe-l’oeil, literally “tricking the eye.” We see one thing, yet we intellectually know another. I’m not sure why this is so beguiling, but it is.

If you’re a regular reader of The Verge, you might have noticed some changes to our author bylines in recent months: they’re a lot longer, with more details, name-dropping, and quantifying our professional experiences. You can thank Google for that.

To understand what pure SEO-optimized writing looks like, I put my recent story about Google-optimized local businesses through an SEO tool called Semrush that’s reportedly used by 10 million people.  Among its suggestions: write a longer headline; split a six-sentence paragraph up because it’s “too long”; and replace “too complex” words like “invariably,” “notoriety,” and “modification.” Dozens of sentences were flagged as being confusing (I disagree) — and it really hated em dashes. I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader. I finally chose one thought per sentence, broke up paragraphs, and replaced words with suggested keywords to get rid of the red dots signaling problems.  The result feels like an AI summary of my story — at any moment, a paragraph could start with “In conclusion…” or “The next thing to consider is…” The nuance, voice, and unexpected twists and turns have been snuffed out. I’m sure some people would prefer this uncomplicated, beat-by-beat version of the story, but it’s gone from being a story written by a real person to a clinical, stiff series of sentences. Now imagine thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing.

Companies like Mediavine, a popular ad-management company, released web design frameworks optimized for this new Google metric and Stimac Bailey, like many others, switched and redesigned her site. But she found the new theme “sterile,” she tells me, and it lacked customization options. It didn’t feel like part of her brand.

Let a dude lift weights and hit a heavy bag for a while and then put him in a room full of unathletic people and he will be seized by an almost paralyzing desire to assert his own will, because he knows that he could kick everyone’s ass in there. Put that same dude in a room full of New York Jets linebackers, and he will suddenly come to feel that reasonable discussion is the only humane method of solving disagreements. This is essentially what you will learn in a college Introduction to Ethics class, although it’s possible the professor would have some additional details.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

The Reply merges the public and private lives of the internet into something unruly and unstable. Among friends, it is a performance: bantering on the timeline instead of in private messages is saying, “Look at us. Wouldn’t you like to join?” Among strangers, the Reply begs to be noticed, and thus bleeds into abjection. The Reply is a cry for attention, a voice in the wilderness, a shout into the void.

Once a comedian I used to follow tweeted that she was looking for suggestions for “breakfast soup” and then spent hours in the reply section belittling anyone who suggested either Asian soups commonly eaten for breakfast (because she wanted “American” breakfast) or soups featuring eggs (because she didn’t like eggs). I read the entire thread. I couldn’t look away. It was incredible to watch a person behave, in real time, as if the failure of strangers to perfectly intuit her unstated preferences was an affront that merited rudeness in reply. I kept thinking—but you asked! You asked about the breakfast soup!

What goes into a work is selected and by virtue of its selection becomes necessary to the work. It is not unnecessary. It is not nonessential. For some experiences and reads of a given text, those things are critical.

This feels like something that is wrong with the way we read or conceptualize our reading rather than a thing that is wrong with a text or a story or a movie or a novel or even a relationship with another human being.

Often, what feels necessary or unnecessary in art is as simple as our own preferences and whatever agenda governs our engagement with a given work. And what feels necessary to you on this read might not feel necessary on the next because your attention has shifted slightly. When someone says that something was not necessary to the text, I imagine that what they are saying is that they personally found it boring as a reader or they found it disengaging or alienating and are unable to consider that alienation is an aspect of engagement. It's like a long conversation with someone you are getting to know. There are these pockets of inattention, sure, moments when your focus goes soft and slack, when you are less receptive to what they are saying and so you let them blur slightly. But that doesn’t mean that those moments are unnecessary. They are just places where you stop paying attention, and where, upon reflection or revisitation, you might actually find a lot of value or insight.

Explicit secunda pars The second part ends ____________________________ Sequitur pars tercia The third part follows

That oon of you, al be hym looth or lief,                    That one of you, whether he likes it or not, 1838        He moot go pipen in an yvy leef;                    He must go whistle in an ivy leaf;

She woot namoore of al this hoote fare,                    She knows no more of all this passionate business, 1810        By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare!                    By God, than knows a cuckoo or a hare!

And softe unto hymself he seyde, "Fy                    And softly to himself he said, "Fie 1774        Upon a lord that wol have no mercy,                    Upon a lord that will have no mercy, 1775        But been a leon, bothe in word and dede,                    But be a lion, both in word and deed, 1776        To hem that been in repentaunce and drede,                    To those who are in repentance and fear, 1777        As wel as to a proud despitous man                    As well as to a proud, spiteful man 1778        That wol mayntene that he first bigan.                    Who will persist in what he first began. 1779        That lord hath litel of discrecioun,                    That lord has little sound judgment, 1780        That in swich cas kan no divisioun                    That in such cases knows no distinctions 1781        But weyeth pride and humblesse after oon."                    But considers pride and humility equal."

Two woful wrecches been we, two caytyves,                    Two woeful wretches are we, two miserable people, 1718        That been encombred of oure owene lyves;                    Who are burdened down by our own lives;

Whan ech of hem had leyd his feith to borwe.                    When each of them had laid his faith as a pledge.

Nere it that thou art sik and wood for love,                    Were it not that thou art sick and mad for love,

For ire he quook; no lenger wolde he byde.                    For anger he trembled; no longer would he wait.

And now I am so caytyf and so thral,                    And now I am so wretched and so enslaved,

Whan that Arcite hadde romed al his fille,                    When Arcite had roamed all his fill, 1529        And songen al the roundel lustily,                    And sung all the rondel cheerfully, 1530        Into a studie he fil sodeynly, nbsp;                  He fell suddenly into a state of anxiety, 1531        As doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres,                    As these lovers do in their strange manners, 1532        Now in the crope, now doun in the breres,                    Now in the tree top, now down in the briars, 1533        Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.                    Now up, now down, like a bucket in a well. 1534        Right as the Friday, soothly for to telle,                    Exactly like the Friday, truly for to tell, 1535        Now it shyneth, now it reyneth faste,                    Now it shines, now it rains hard, 1536        Right so kan geery Venus overcaste                    Just so can fickle Venus sadden 1537        The hertes of hir folk; right as hir day                    The hearts of her folk; just as her day 1538        Is gereful, right so chaungeth she array.                    Is changeable, just so she changes her array. 1539        Selde is the Friday al the wowke ylike.                    Friday is seldom like all the rest of the week.

But sooth is seyd, go sithen many yeres,                    But truly it is said, since many years ago, 1522        That "feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres."                    That "field has eyes and the wood has ears." 1523        It is ful fair a man to bere hym evene,                    It is very good for a man to act calmly, 1524        For al day meeteth men at unset stevene.                    For every day people meet at unexpected times.

Welcome be thou, faire, fresshe May,                    Welcome be thou, fair, fresh May, 1512        In hope that I som grene gete may."                    In hope that I can get something green."

Who koude ryme in Englyssh proprely                    Who could rime in English properly 1460        His martirdom? For sothe it am nat I;                    His martyrdom? In truth it is not I; 1461        Therfore I passe as lightly as I may.                    Therefore I pass on as quickly as I can.

That wood out of his wit he goth for wo?                    That he goes mad, out of his wits because of woe?

For he was yong and myghty for the nones,                    For he was young and mighty indeed, 1424        And therto he was long and big of bones                    And moreover he was tall and strong of bones

Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye                    Not only like the lover's malady 1374        Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,                    Of Hereos, but rather like mania, 1375        Engendred of humour malencolik                    Engendered by the melancholic humor 1376        Biforen, in his celle fantastik.                    In the front lobe, in his imagination.

His slep, his mete, his drynke, is hym biraft,                    He is bereft of his sleep, his food, his drink 1362        That lene he wex and drye as is a shaft;                    So that he became lean and dry as is a stick;

So muche sorwe hadde nevere creature                    So much sorrow never had creature 1360        That is, or shal, whil that the world may dure.                    That is, or shall (be), while the world may endure.

I noot which hath the wofuller mester.                    I know not which has the more woeful task.

1319          And whan a beest is deed he hath no peyne;                    And when a beast is dead he has no pain; 1320          But man after his deeth moot wepe and pleyne,                    But man after his death must weep and lament, 1321          Though in this world he have care and wo.                    Though in this world he may have (had) care and woe. 1322          Withouten doute it may stonden so.                    Without doubt such is the case.

1259          Infinite harmes been in this mateere.                    Infinite harms are in this matter. 1260          We witen nat what thing we preyen heere;                    We know not what thing we pray for here

Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence?                    Why didst thou cry out? Who has done thee offence?

Bright was the sonne and cleer that morwenynge,                    The sun was bright and clear that morning

1039          I noot which was the fyner of hem two --                    I do not know which was the finer of them two --

The pilours diden bisynesse and cure                    The scavengers took great pains and worked hard

And rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter;                And tore down both wall and beam and rafter;

He wolde doon so ferforthly his myght                (That) he would do his might so completely

945        And wol nat suffren hem, by noon assent,                And will not allow them, not at all, 946        Neither to been yburyed nor ybrent,                Neither to be buried nor burned,

That she ne hath been

And of this cry they nolde nevere stenten                And of this cry they would not ever stop

But al that thyng I moot as now forbere.                But all that matter I must now forgo. 886        I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,                I have, God knows, a large field to till, 887        And wayke been the oxen in my plough.                And the oxen in my plow are weak. 888        The remenant of the tale is long ynough.                The remnant of the tale is long enough.

If even-song and morwe-song accorde,                  If what you said last night agrees with what you say this morning,

766         Fayn wolde I doon yow myrthe, wiste I how.                  I would gladly make you happy, if I knew how

741         Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede,                  Also Plato says, whosoever knows how to read him, 742         The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.                  The words must be closely related to the deed.

But alderbest he song an offertorie;                  But best of all he sang an Offertory;

637         And whan that he wel dronken hadde the wyn,                  And when he had drunk deeply of the wine, 638         Thanne wolde he speke no word but Latyn.                  Then he would speak no word but Latin.

582         In honour dettelees (but if he were wood),                  In honor and debtless (unless he were crazy

573         Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace                  Now is not that a very fair grace of God 574         That swich a lewed mannes wit shal pace                  That such an unlearned man's wit shall surpass 575         The wisdom of an heep of lerned men?                  The wisdom of a heap of learned men?

At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.                  At wrestling he would always take the the prize.

Bothe of his propre swynk and his catel.                  Both of his own labor and of his possessions.

510         To seken hym a chaunterie for soules,                  To seek an appointment as a chantry priest (praying for a patron)

Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.                  Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.

But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.                  But she was somewhat deaf, and that was a pity

441         And yet he was but esy of dispence;                  And yet he was moderate in spending; 442         He kepte that he wan in pestilence.                  He kept what he earned in (times of) plague.

In sangwyn and in pers he clad was al,                  He was clad all in red and in blue,

The cause yknowe, and of his harm the roote,                  The cause known, and the source of his (patient's) harm, 424         Anon he yaf the sike man his boote.                  Straightway he gave the sick man his remedy.

If that he faught and hadde the hyer hond,                  If he fought and had the upper hand,

He rood upon a rouncy, as he kouthe,                  He rode upon a cart horse, insofar as he knew how,

And eek hir wyves wolde it wel assente;                  And also their wives would well assent to it; 375         And elles certeyn were they to blame.                  And otherwise certainly they would be to blame.

But al be that he was a philosophre,                  But even though he was a philosopher, 298         Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;                  Nevertheless he had but little gold in his strongbox;

But, sooth to seyn, I noot how men hym calle.                  But, to say the truth, I do not know what men call him.

For unto a povre ordre for to yive                  For to give to a poor order (of friars) 226         Is signe that a man is wel yshryve;                  Is a sign that a man is well confessed;

Or swynken with his handes, and laboure,                  Or work with his hands, and labor, 187         As Austyn bit? How shal the world be served?                  As Augustine commands? How shall the world be served? 188         Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!                  Let Augustine have his work reserved to him!

71         In al his lyf unto no maner wight.                  In all his life unto any sort of person.

67         And everemoore he hadde a sovereyn prys.                  And evermore he had an outstanding reputation

29         And wel we weren esed atte beste.                  And we were well accommodated in the best way.

13         And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,                  And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores, 14         To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;                  To distant shrines, known in various lands;

For the most part my efforts at sculpting a musical identity were fueled by an esotericism that disdained common and easily accessible genres. I can see now that this was all largely epiphenomenal to a deeper and “more real” navigation of class identity. I was surrounded in those years mostly by poor white metalheads—a Judas Priest T-shirt, feathered hair, and acne were the default traits of the human male—while at the same time belonging to a white middle-class family perched dangerously close to the lower-class boundary, ever in danger of slipping beneath it. Musical cultivation, in this context, was a sort of currency by which one might hope to maneuver into an imagined aristocracy through seeking out the most obscure representatives of the narrowest genre niches.

Why are YouTube comments such rich terrain? Here’s my theory. Watching a YouTube video, perhaps reading the comments at the same time, the feeling is “sitting side by side, facing the same direction”—as in a theater, or, better yet, a moving car. Contrast that with the feeling of “facing each other straight-on”: the death stare of social media. YouTube’s users aren’t stuck looking at each other; rather, they look at this other thing (perhaps a scratchy dub of a music video that played on MTV in 1987) together. Perhaps that arrange­ment suggests different, and generally better, ways of speaking online.

What happened? Economic consider-ations cannot account for the differ-ence: for the upper class, money was noobject. For the poor, both meals wouldhave been far out of reach. Well intothe 19th century, they subsisted on veg-etable soups and gruels with bread orporridge. Novel foodstuffs from theNew World do not explain the shift indiet either, because with the exceptionof turkey, the dishes at the second ban-quet depended not on new ingredientsbut on new uses of long familiar ones.The clue to this transformation in eat-ing habits between the 16th and 17thcenturies must be sought instead inevolving ideas about diet and nutri-tion— which is to say, in the history ofchemistry and medicine.

Thanks to an abundant supply of local stone—sandstone for the pillars and fieldstone and quarry stone for the walls—around 300 cross-vault stables were built, almost exclusively within Rheinhessen’s borders, between 1830 and 1870. Beneath their curved, whitewashed ceilings, cattle stood facing their troughs at the wall, with their backsides, in the case of those cowsheds featuring two rows of columns, pointing toward a central aisle for efficient mucking out. With a playful nod to their sacred appearance, these cross-vault stables later became known as “cow chapels” (or kuhkapellen, in German).

The reason our cities are filled with so much of the same kind of building is because it’s the cheapest way to build an apartment. In this case, that’s light-frame wood construction, which often uses flat windows that are easy to install; a process called rainscreen cladding to create the skin of the building; as well as Hardie panels, a facade covering made from fiber cement. The need to cut costs limits facade options, says Black. Hardie Panels run roughly $16 a square foot, roughly the same cost as brick. The next upgrade, metal siding, costs from $25 to $50 a square foot, potentially more than triple the cost.

I’m not sure our lives would be that much better if the stick that is beating the people came in a tar.gz with a makefile.

Whether they’re representations of the self, projections of fantasy, or verging on the parasocial, the concentration of aesthetics coupled with the ability to focus one’s tastes on a single object is a powerful sensation. But it is just this height of manifested desire that, I think, triggers an ick for the image of the dolls and the people who like them.

A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.They are also central to modern politics and governance, and the ways we talk about them. That in itself represents a shift. Discussions that were once about values and beliefs – about what a society wants to see when it looks at itself in the mirror – have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data, statistics.

One way to make it highly improbable that you will enjoy outstanding academic success is to enter contemporary debates in moral philosophy as either a Thomist or a Marxist.

The first is that of producing a PhD dissertation intended to be publishable in either article or book form by those at an age at which almost no one has as yet anything genuinely of interest to say, something easily confirmed by reading large numbers of recent dissertations in moral philosophy.

We do not expect serious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have never studied law. But there is not even a hint of a suggestion that courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of sociology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in moral philosophy. (It was my great good fortune as a student at Manchester that I was required to take a course in anthropology with Max Gluckman and was driven by my resistance to Gluckman’s views to an engagement with the work of very different anthropologists, such as Franz Steiner, and of such sociologists as Tom and Elizabeth Burns.) Yet without such courses no adequate sense of the varieties of moral possibility can be acquired. One remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing. And the particular form that that imprisonment now takes is that of an inability to recognize, first, that the contemporary morality of advanced capitalist modernity is only one morality among many and second, that it is, as a morality of everyday life, in a state of disorder, a state of fragmentation, oscillation, and contradiction.

The widespread loss of a shared practical grasp of the teleological structure of human nature and activity at the threshold of the modern world not only led to the theoretical fragmentation that I described in After Virtue but was itself the result of a prior loss of a shared mode of practical life. And there is no way to make the relevant concepts and arguments once more compelling except within some restored and contemporary version of just such a mode of practical life. Detach those concepts and arguments from the contexts of social practice from which and within which they draw their intelligibility and they too become mere debatable theoretical constructions.

We need to begin again and to do so by returning to the social context in which we learned the use of good and its cognates. What we first had to learn was how to make the distinctions between what we desire and the choiceworthy, and between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy. We characteristically and generally learn—or fail to learn—to make these distinctions, as we emerge through and from the family into the life of a variety of practices: such practices as those of housework and farmwork, of learning Latin and geometry, of building houses and making furniture, of playing soccer and playing in string quartets. What we can learn only in and through such practices is what the standards of excellence are in each type of activity and how our desires and feelings must be disciplined and transformed and our choices guided by the standards of excellence in each type of activity if we are to achieve such excellence and through it the goods internal to each type of practice.

On the expressivist view, when I assert that “doing such and such is bad,” the meaning of the asserted sentence is such that it gives expression to the speaker’s sentiments of disapproval. But suppose that someone says tentatively, “If doing such and such is bad, then so and so.” Then, since no sentiments of disapproval are expressed, “Doing such and such is bad” as a constituent of this conditional must have a quite different meaning from that which it has when asserted. But if this is so, then inferences of the form “If doing such and such is bad, then so and so, but doing such and such is bad, therefore so and so” must be invalid, which is absurd. So the expressivist account of the meaning of such sentences must fail. It was Peter Geach who argued this thesis powerfully, thereafter referring to it as “the Frege point.”

For while, so far as I could judge, Ayer, Stevenson, and other expressivists had provided a compelling account of the characteristic uses to which moral judgments were now put in a particular culture, they had taken themselves to have provided an adequate account of the meaning of moral and evaluative sentences as such, whatever the culture.

Marx and Engels had argued that every morality is the morality of some particular social and economic order and that every moral philosophy articulates and makes explicit the judgments, arguments, and presuppositions of some particular morality, either in such a way as to defend both that morality and the social and economic order of which it is the expression, or in such a way as to undermine them. And my acknowledgment of the truth of this thesis was reinforced by my encounters with social anthropology, especially first with the work of Franz Steiner and later with that of Rodney Needham. I therefore asked: What is the distinctive morality of this social and economic order that I inhabit, and how does contemporary moral philosophy stand to that morality? And in pursuing an answer to this question I was guided not only by Marx and Engels but also by John Anderson, who had urged that, if we were to understand social institutions and relationships, we should ask not what function or purpose they serve but to what conflicts they give expression. This suggested that both the morality and the moral philosophy of the present age are best understood as milieus of conflict, sites of disagreement. But those disagreements find significantly different expression in the arenas of philosophical debate on the one hand and in those of everyday moral and political practice on the other.

I had become and to this day remain convinced of the truth and political relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism and of his historical insights as presented in the narrative of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

In the middle are things that are not quite alive, but definitely not dead. I’m not talking about zombie things being kept alive out of sentiment or sunk-cost fallacies. Those are activities you just haven’t admitted are archival. I am talking about things that are sort of adjacent to living, and might enter (or reenter) the realm of the living at any time. This is the universe of KTLO things. KTLO-space, or K-space, is sort of like the dungeon dimensions of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Fantastical things lurk there that might burst into our world at anytime.

Blogs are an indicator species for a world that features a robust public commons. Not just an indicator species, but a charismatic megafauna type indicator species. The health of blogs says things about the health of the public sphere the way the health of polar bears says things about the health of the North Pole. Even where they replicate the affordances of blogs, newsletters and static websites represent other worlds that I don’t care for as much (platform media world and cozy world respectively).

I think all the time about a passage in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You, in which the protagonist—a young, newly famous author—laments a viral tweet complaining about her boyfriend, who hadn't read her books: At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally and intellectually inferior, and the more books you read, the smarter and better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally—and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it’s normal! It’s normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be—intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity—are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasised to fill the emptiness left by religion. A sort of malignant growth where the sacred used to be.

Salt pork. This savor-bomb is responsible for the distinctive richness intrinsic to traditional New England beans, regardless of baking technique. Lumber camp cooks used as much as 2½ pounds of salt pork to season 2 pounds of beans; in other settings, a half-pound might be used.

Even if this lumberjack ate tons of protein and that one had a sweet tooth, they all ate strikingly similar weights of baked beans each day, from a pound to a pound and a half, furnishing from 10 to 16 percent of their 6,000 to 8,000 daily calories and one-fifth to one-third of their protein intake.

While a single, long, log-built structure provided virtually all the domestic accommodation for a 50- to 60-man camp—dormitory, cookroom, dining hall, and food storage—only one daily function, besides the outhouse, warranted its own structure, and that was the lean-to protecting the bean-hole. Each day a cookee (the cook’s helper) would fire up the pit and parboil a batch of soaked beans over the cookroom fire—just until the skin would wrinkle when blown upon. He’d then layer them in the bean kettle with salt pork, onions, and maybe dry mustard, drizzle on a big spoonful of molasses, put the lid on tight, bury the kettle in the bean-hole under hot coals and dirt, and leave it to be dug up before breakfast next day. Then, he’d do it all again.

as the 20th century dawned, the “coarse fare” that was still the backbone of rural diets was increasingly marginalized by “respectable” indoor people. Baked beans epitomized the very coarsest fare imaginable to most Americans, and they ruled the logging camp.

Fanouropita itself is a spiced snacking cake, often studded with nuts, raisins, or both. It’s always vegan, or, as referred to in the church, “Lenten,” meaning that it can be eaten on holy fast days because it doesn’t contain eggs or dairy. Variations abound, but in general, the recipe is olive oil-based, scented with orange juice and spices like cloves and cinnamon, then dusted with confectioners’ sugar to serve. The number of ingredients also matters. Depending on who you ask, people claim it should be seven, nine, or other numbers significant in the church. (Some people say you should serve it to seven people as well.)

The transactions vary from single digits to the tens of thousands of eels. One enormous transaction shows that Ely Abbey, now known as Ely Cathedral, paid Thorney Abbey 26,275 eels to rent a fen (similar to a wetland), according to rare transaction records on parchment fragments held by the British Library.

Beguine thinking may have influenced notions of purgatory as a process of purification (rather than a place of punishment) that brought sufferers closer to God. Swan traces a special call many beguines felt toward the souls in purgatory, which perhaps grew naturally from their care of the dead. The beguine Agnes Blannbekin, for example, had a vision of purgatory in which there was no punishment at all except the yearning for God. Christina the Astonishing, who claimed to have seen purgatory, wrote that “nothing made God weep more with mercy for sinners than when sinners are moved by mercy toward their neighbors,” presumably including their “neighbors” in purgatory, whose thirst to be with God could be slaked by the merciful prayers of living sinners.

At the heart of beguine mysticism, says Swan, was a special devotion to Christ as lover and sufferer. The triune God, wrote one beguine, was Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.

As their learning increased, beguines took a lively interest in theology, wrote their own meditations, and even translated Bible stories into the vernacular. They embraced a lively form of worship that involved singing and spontaneous dancing.

The availability of textile work and the establishment of schools by the countesses Joan and Margaret of Flanders helped beguine communities to coalesce, writes Swan.

If one is at a dinner party in London or New York, one is plunged into an abyss of dullness. There is no subject of general interest; there is no wit; it is like waiting for a train. In London one overcomes one´s environment by drinking a bottle of champagne as quickly as possible; in New York one piles in cocktails. The light wines and beers of Europe, taken in moderate measure, are no good; there is not time to be happy, so one must be excited instead. Dining alone, or with friends, as opposed to a party, one can be quite at ease with Burgundy or Bordeaux. One has all night to be happy, and one does not have to speed. But the regular New Yorker has not time even for a dinner-party! He almost regrets the hour when his office closes. His brain is still busy with his plans. When he wants “pleasure,” he calculates that he can spare just half an hour for it. He has to pour the strongest liquors down his throat at the greatest possible rate. Now imagine this man — or this woman — with time available slightly curtailed. He can no longer waste ten minutes in obtaining “pleasure”; or he dare not drink openly on account of other people. Well, his remedy is simple; he can get immediate action out of cocaine. There is no smell; he can be as secret as any elder of the church can wish. The mischief of civilization is the intensive life, which demands intensive stimulation. Human nature requires pleasure; wholesome pleasures require leisure; we must choose between intoxication and the siesta.

These churches provided a clean slate on which Christians could write in the language of ritual. The building became a symbol for the new religion. It was more than just a different location from those frequented by pagan celebrants and inhabited by their demonic deities. It was a new concept of place particular to Christianity – cleansed of demons, consecrated to that special creator god who does not inhere in his creation (trees, rocks, springs) and should not be worshipped through it.

The character Niceta questions how it is possible to distinguish between Jesus’ miracles and claims to divinity as put forth in the Gospels from those that Simon Magus and false prophets generally proffer. The answer to Niceta’s question emerged from an unexpected quarter. In Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth demonstrates Jesus’ preeminent and singular authority over other itinerant preachers and healers. According to the Patristic interpretation of these two gospel passages, the virginity of Mary was the critical sign that Jesus was not just another prophet, but the Christ called Immanuel. That Jesus was born of a virgin, thus fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, was the most demonstrable evidence of his godhood.

Christian and pagan approaches to death differed starkly. For pagans, the grave was a feared, polluted and haunted space from which the living recoiled. Early Christians fashioned a new kind of hallowed place where the dead and the living commingled, and these shrines were protected from the infiltration of the insidious demonic powers swirling around the tombs because they were protected by the supervision of the Church.

Purple parchment or purple vellum refers to parchment dyed purple; codex purpureus refers to manuscripts written entirely or mostly on such parchment. The lettering may be in gold or silver. Later the practice was revived for some especially grand illuminated manuscripts produced for the emperors in Carolingian art and Ottonian art, in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere. Some just use purple parchment for sections of the work; the 8th-century Anglo-Saxon Stockholm Codex Aureus alternates dyed and un-dyed pages.

A trained odor panel determined significant differences between polyester versus cotton fabrics for the hedonic value, the intensity, and five qualitative odor characteristics. The polyester T-shirts smelled significantly less pleasant and more intense, compared to the cotton T-shirts. A dissimilar bacterial growth was found in cotton versus synthetic clothing textiles.

I think that, while useful, internet culture’s intense focus on user interface has been a real damaging factor for the free and open internet. User interface does matter, but the discipline has gotten so complex that the companies that do it most effectively are often willing to pay top-dollar for good design that can shape a better experience. And in some cases, it leads to UX that works directly against the user.

But, ultimately, I think end users deserve a little real talk here: You’re not going to get the internet culture you want if you also expect a Disney World-style controlled-climate experience. You are going to have to deal with janky interfaces, built by people who love and care about what they’re doing, but who don’t have the money or research capabilities of your favorite local billionaire. If we are going to protect the good, interesting, chaotic parts of the internet, we need to be willing to tell people to suck it up and experience some jank.

Learning styles are also not permanent, although many teachers and students act as if they were. In fact, it is important for a learner to develop a repertoire of learning styles, and it is important for teachers to encourage that development. I occasionally have a student, usually male, who complains (not necessarily in these words) that our course does not accommodate his preferred learning style, which includes working alone and being rewarded or penalized solely on his own ability to �solve problems,� not to write about the process. Such a student is seldom swayed by the argument that he will have to make a living by working with other people and by explaining his work to others -- that it is time to learn how to do those things. I can empathize, because I retained the working-alone mode for much of my professional career -- never letting others see me make mistakes if I could avoid it. My professional life became much richer when I learned that I could share work and learning (and mistakes) with other people, and I can quite honestly recommend that my student not wait as long as I did to make this discovery. I see no disservice in requiring that student to work with others and to explain what he is doing.

In her essay “Art Is for Seeing Evil,” the philosopher Agnes Callard explains that she teaches novels and poems to her students “neither to improve their moral character, nor to offer them literary entertainment” but because it is only in literature that one can find the sort of fear, pain, loss, injustice and cruelty necessary to think about, say, death or courage. If normal life, organized by practical concerns—“aiming, achieving, improving”—is burdened by positivity and the instinct to make the best of things, art succeeds in “suspend[ing] our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad.”

Plebs was the official organ of the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC), a workers’ educational organisation with close ties to the trade union movement. By turns both serious-minded and irreverent, with spiky cartoons and anti-capitalist jokes, Plebs facilitated an astonishing range of educational opportunities. Readers of Plebs were encouraged to learn subjects ranging from socialist and Marxist theory (naturally), to history, economics, psychology, English, mathematics and so on. Day schools, week-end schools, teach-yourself books and correspondence courses were all offered at affordable prices. Each edition would contain suggestions for new books to read, a large book review section, and adverts for all kinds of booksellers and pamphlets. The NCLC movement saw education and reading as the path to a better and more hopeful world, encouraging workers to think independently and understand the world as it really was. The slogan of its correspondence courses — “Don’t be a Robot! Think for Yourself” — catches the spirit of the whole movement well.

During the seminars, some of us questioned whether Nabokov could have possibly kept consciously in his mind such a multiplicity of allusions and reminiscences, fusing them in packed images that so deftly entrapped his readers and laying semantically explosive mines in the dense field of his prose. Could our overzealous interpretations lead us to unintentionally presumptuous fallacies? One of the puzzled students, unable to restrain himself, once exclaimed: “But even if half of what we discover here is true, then Nabokov’s mind had to be a kind of computer!” Timenchik instantly retorted: “Then a computer he was.”

People seeking news no longer have a central place to go to follow current events. There is no current events monoculture.My job is to follow the news closely, and it has become incredibly difficult – and nearly impossible – to stay informed with context and nuance. I can no longer count on the algorithms and the tastes of the journalists and others I follow to surface the news for me. There is no delivery mechanism of consequence.

Matt Stone, quoted in Anatomy of a Breakthrough: “What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is either the word therefore or but.” He sketches the structure using a more concrete example: “You come up with an idea, and it’s like this happens’ and then ‘this happens… .’ No, no, no. It should be, this happens, and therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens. We’ll write it out to make sure we’re doing it.” Stone continues, “There are so many scripts we see from new writers, where it’s like ‘this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens…,’ and that’s when you’re, like, ‘What the fuck am I watching this for?’”

Evidently, it is difficult not to feel religious in King's College Chapel, Cambridge, or otherwise than profoundly sceptical and Pagan in St. Peter's, at Rome, with its “East” in the West, its adaptation of a statue of Jupiter to represent its patron saint, and the emphasis of its entire architecture in bearing witness that its true name is Temporal Power. Gothic is the only mystic type; Templar and Byzantine are only religious through sexuality; Perpendicular is more moral than spiritual – and modern architecture means nothing at all.

Late in the following afternoon he woke, and sent Cremers, whom he had turned into a drudge, to telegraph to Balloch to come over, and to bring her friend Butcher to see him.      Douglas had previously refused to see this man, [237] who was a Chicago semi-tough. He ran a fake Rosicrucian society in America, and thought that Douglas could give him power over the elusive dollar.

an American woman of the name of Cremers.      Her squat stubborn figure was clad in rusty-black clothes, a man's except for the skirt;

they must drink unfermented grape-juice – the vilest of all black magical concoctions, for it implies the denial of the divine beatitude, and affirms God to be a thing of wood

“Utter the Word of Majesty and Terror!      True without lie, and certain without error,      And of the essence of The Truth. I know      The things above are as the things below,      The things below are as the things above,      To wield the One Thing's Thaumaturgy – Love.      As all from one sprang, by one contemplation,      So all from one were born, by permutation.      Sun sired, Moon bore, this unique Universe;      Air was its chariot, and Earth its nurse.      Here is the root of every talisman      Of the whole world, since the whole world began.      Here is the fount and source of every soul.      Let it be spilt on earth! its strength is whole.      Now gently, subtly, with thine Art conspire      To fine the gross, dividing earth and fire.      Lo! it ascendeth and descendeth, even      And swift, an endless band of earth and heaven;      Thus it receiveth might of duplex Love,      The powers below conjoined with those above,      So shall the glory of the world be thine      And darkness flee before thy SOVRAN shrine.      This is the strong strength of all strength; surpass      The subtle and subdue it; pierce the crass      And salve it; so bring all things to their fated      Perfection: for by this was all created. [196]      O marvel of miracle! O magic mode!      All things adapted to one circling code!      Since three parts of all wisdom I may claim,      Hermes thrice great, and greatest, is my name.      What I have written of the one sole Sun,      His work, is here divined, and dared, and done.”

hey were pale, semi-transparent, with oval (but rather flattened) heads quite disproportionately large, thin, match-like bodies and limbs, and snake-like tails attached to the base of their skulls. They were extraordinarily light and active on their feet, [193] and the tails kept up a lashing movement. The whole effect was comic, at the first sight; one might have said tadpoles on stilts.      But a closer inspection stayed her laughter. Each of these creatures had a single eye, and in this eye was expressed such force and energy that it was terrifying.

Cyril Grey had once said, speaking at a Woman's Suffrage Meeting:      “Woman has no soul, only sex; no morals, only moods; her mind is mob-rule; therefore she, and she only, ought to Vote.”      He had sat down amid a storm of hisses; and received fourteen proposals of marriage within the next twenty-four hours.

The second trouble was his little quarrel with Douglas. Vesquit was Senior in the Black Lodge, and Douglas overthrew him by “carelessly” leaving, in a hansom cab, some documents belonging to the Lodge, with Vesquit's name and address attached to them, which made some exceedingly grim revelations of the necromantic practices carried on in Hampden Road.

I can read Homer, but I can only prove the fact to another man by teaching him Greek; and he is then obliged to do the same to a third party, and so on. People generally acquiesce that some men can read Homer because – well, it's their intellectual laziness. A really stout intelligence would doubt it.

You are terrified of our technologies because your power holds no sway.

We do not bow to monopolists, surveillance capitalists, or philosopher-kings.

We have no single leader, nor will we have one, so we address you with no greater authority than that with which the public itself always speaks.

You are in rude health, and yet you are hysterical; you are fascinated and subdued by all things weird and unusual, though to the world you hold yourself so high, proud, and passionate. You need love, it is true; so much you know yourself; and you know also that no common love attracts you; you need the sensational, the bizarre, the unique. But perhaps you do not understand what is at the root of that passion. I will tell you. You have an inexpressible hunger of the soul; you despise earth and its delusions; and you aspire unconsciously to at higher life than anything this planet can offer.

At the same time, thanks to this ambiguity about who the “real” audience is, there’s no adult institutional mediation between 12-year-olds and their content creators besides whoever is tweaking the recommendation algorithms. There are no hallmarks of young-adult entertainment; YouTube videos have no winking adult jokes inserted for a presumable audience of half-attentive parents, no moral lessons woven in to signal wholesomeness--just pure, unhinged, what-will-12-year-olds-click-on[-within-the-context-of-the-present-algorithmic-settlement] content.

I think YouTube would be much more comprehensible in general if every video had a large banner at the top saying “THIS VIDEO IS FOR 12-YEAR-OLDS,” but at the same time, admitting explicitly that your content is for 12-year-olds would make it much less interesting to the 12-year-olds who are increasingly in command of their own content consumption.

Because the audience online so wildly over-samples 12-year-olds relative to the population, and because all social platforms work like highly competitive marketplaces, you are constantly being disciplined into creating content that is essentially, though not explicitly, for 12-year-olds.

Cardea or Carda was the ancient Roman goddess of the hinge (Latin cardo, cardinis), Roman doors being hung on pivot hinges.

In the mathematical theory of knots, a flype is a kind of manipulation of knot and link diagrams used in the Tait flyping conjecture. It consists of twisting a part of a knot, a tangle T, by 180 degrees. Flype comes from a Scots word meaning to fold or to turn back ("as with a sock").

“So often when we try to define a national food culture in the U.S., it’s really difficult to do so,” says Smithsonian food historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young. “In the modern context, people often cite things like McDonald’s or international fast food cultures. But if you go back to the 1800s or even through 1950, when you would ask someone to define American culture, they would go through regional cultures, and the hot dog was a regional food that was gaining popularity outside of the Northeast.”

The academic researchers who compiled the Shutterstock dataset acknowledged the copyright implications in their paper, writing, “The use of data collected for this study is authorised via the Intellectual Property Office’s Exceptions to Copyright for Non-Commercial Research and Private Study.” But then Meta is using those academic non-commercial datasets to train a model, presumably for future commercial use in their products. Weird, right?

I was happy to let people remix and reuse my photos for non-commercial use with attribution, but that’s not how they were used. Instead, academic researchers took the work of millions of people, stripped it of attribution against its license terms, and redistributed it to thousands of groups, including corporations, military agencies, and law enforcement.

(A whole article could be written on Peterson’s close intellectual relationship with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.)

They even had a word for such impulses, according to a former employee of the Center for Applied Rationality, Leah Libresco Sargeant, who writes regularly on how rationalism led her to her Catholic faith.

He longed to form genuine friendships based on mutual affinity and understanding, rather than by screening potential friends for qualities that would “make them a good ally, which will contribute to you both working on existential risk together in an effective way.”

Some of these shows were excellent. But enough of them were not excellent that it started to seem as if making good art was not necessarily the aim of the people who made shows like these. The real aim was to deploy the external trappings of good art in a bid to capture the rewards that go to people who make good art: the Emmys and the New Yorker profiles and the high cultural status. Art wasn’t the point; prestige—that word, again—was. Talking about “prestige TV” rather than good TV became a way to take the thorny question of aesthetic value out of the conversation. It was a way to sidestep difficult political discussions about representation and genre and how we distribute cultural spoils. But the faint derisiveness of the term also seemed to mark its user as more in the know, hipper, less naive about human motives. It was a way to talk about art that showed you weren’t enough of a sap to think art was really the goal. It showed you understood that the only things people really care about are gossip and money. And I think that’s why I feel a little queasy about the term “prestige TV.” It seems to contain its own quiet cynicism. It’s so dismissive of the artistic potential of the medium of television, something I’d very much like writers and showrunners to go on believing in.

Over time, of course, these shows would be critiqued for moral, political, and aesthetic shortcomings that were largely invisible to us at the time, maybe because we didn’t want to see them: their obsession with male antiheroes, their frequent confusion of violence and profundity, their cultish elevation of showrunners who were later included in accounts of harassment and other misdeeds, the sort of White Boomer Dad Getting Down to the Real Shit vibe that many of them (OK, all of them) seemed to possess.

Succession wanted us to see that our persecutors are often not evil geniuses with complex master plans. They’re hapless babies, consumed by their own emotions and acting on spur-of-the-moment impulses.

It would be difficult to overstate how popular this stuff was, or how difficult it would have been to counter the influence it had before recordings gave artists like Armstrong a chance to speak to the masses with their own voice.This is why Armstrong loved to record himself and the other important people in his life. He believed recordings would allow them to be remembered as they actually were. As long as his recordings endured, he thought, ignorant whites wearing cartoonish disguises would never be able to twist his story into a narrative that reinforces the lie of white supremacy. His life and works would never become raw material for propaganda designed to undermine his very humanity. “Authenticity” is treated like more of an abstract concept in music today, but to Armstrong, it was all-important. To him, the idea that authenticity matters was the silver bullet that killed the minstrel tradition. Ever since then, Black music has been America’s most beloved and significant cultural export. It’s basically the only thing the rest of the world likes about us, and they experience it primarily through records.

The less valuable recordings are, the less special artists become.

The artist model and the platform model are not just incompatible, but actively corrosive to one another. They cannot co-exist. I’m not arguing that one is better than the other, I’m saying that no living person will be able to do both effectively at the same time. The artist-as-platform model isn’t an evolution of the recording artist concept as we currently understand it, but a completely different proposition that would change the sound and character of popular music just as much as recordings themselves did during the “great music shift” of the fifties and sixties if it ever becomes dominant. For Vocaloid Drake to thrive, Drake the “recording artist” would almost certainly need to be destroyed. This is what advocates of “AI” are pushing for when they call for established artists to “open-source” their names, voices, and likenesses. They don’t understand how any of this works, and they don’t want to. They’re just here to break things. It’s all they know how to do.

Producer and songwriter Max Martin has always justified clunky, nonsensical lyrics like the chorus of Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by arguing that the legibility of a lyric does not matter if the words sound good together. That’s the part that’s tricky to replicate, which is why Martin’s brand remains so sterling despite the infamously fickle, pernicious nature of the record business.

The entire idea of a “recording artist” itself is younger than Joe Biden. It’s a business model that was made possible by specific technology, and it didn’t really enter the mainstream public consciousness until after that technology achieved mass adoption. Even our modern conception of what a “singer” is owes much more to the invention of amplified condenser microphones in the twenties than anything people were doing with their voices before that. The notion of a special, unique talent who makes recordings of themselves for a living made the most sense in the sixties, when vinyl albums could move millions of units at a price point equivalent to sixty dollars in today’s money.

It was taken for granted that everyone was talking about everyone else all the time. A central concept was the Latin term fama, which encompassed rumour, reputation, gossip and news: Fama herself was often imagined as a winged goddess, with ears and eyes covered and tongues extending from her palms. These images were a visual representation of what it was like to live under constant surveillance by one’s neighbours as well as the authorities

The problem with BeReal isn’t that it is commodifying our authentic selves into “so-called authenticity,” but rather that it is participating in a broader overvaluation of an “authentic self” that is presumed to be detachable from its surrounding conditions and capable of transcending the compromises and complicities that the fallen world of capitalism imposes on us. The app stages a shared moment where everyone expects everyone else to perform their authenticity, reveal their essence, as if to guarantee these things indefatigably exist, even if they prove to be boring. Of course, you have to sneak up on your authenticity because it is conceived as a remainder, as what is left of you when you strip away your conscious intentions and ambitions, and all the efforts made to accommodate other people. BeReal asks you to make a spectacle of your own thoughtlessness in conformity with everyone else’s, under the auspices that this species of “honesty” is something to be mutually celebrated.Almost every contemporary appeal to “authenticity” can be construed as an expression of what Herbert Marcuse disparaged in a 1937 essay (included in this collection) as “the affirmative character of culture,” a mode of excusing the status quo by separating our “essential nature” from its effects.

Arendt taught thinking—and she taught that thinking requires what she called a “world.” Just as the student needs a teacher, the thinker, in order to think at all, needs a community whose members she can address and argue with. It is not a question, of course, of creating a community out of thin air, or of taking an abstract, universal humanity as one’s audience.

The dominant, continuing search for anoiseless channel has been, and will alwaysbe no more than a regrettable, ill-fateddogma.

I call them the “grind challenges.” Unlike the grand challenges that transfix communities with big, bold targets that push the frontiers of achievement, grind challenges are the myriad interlocking tasks that keep our highly engineered world functioning. They involve testing, inspections, standards, compliance, quality work, care work, and all the nuances of negotiating to move load-bearing bureaucracies. Essential though these tasks are, few people beside the workers who regularly wrestle with the details are aware of them. Despite their low profile, grind challenges are tremendously important, and they are defined not by their blue-sky idealism, but by how well they accommodate nearly impossible constraints on—and in—the ground.

Engineering tends to valorize the lofty ideals of grand projects, but it is in the daily grind that the deeper pact between engineering and society plays out. Adapting any older system to a newer reality comes with a Gordian tangle of considerations. And it is in these tangles, where proper social accountability for the consequences of the work resides, that we can find an accurate and grounded view of engineering.

My children live with an unconscious fear that they may not live out their natural lives. I am not saying that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal with that anxiety. An architecture that puts its head in the sand and goes back to neoclassicism, and Schinkel, Lutyens, and Ledoux, does not seem to be a way of dealing with the present anxiety. Most of what my colleagues are doing today does not seem to be the way to go. Equally, I do not believe that the way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures to make people feel comfortable, to preclude that anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react against anxiety or see it pictured in his life? After all, that is what all those evil Struwwel Peter characters are for in German fairy tales. CA: Don't you think there is enough anxiety at present? Do you really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in the form of buildings?

I would hope, Chris, that we are here to present arguments. These people here are not people who have rings in their noses, at least as far as I can see, and they can judge for themselves whether I am screwing up the world or not. If they choose to think I am screwing up the world, they certainly would not come here. These are open forums. For you to determine arbitrarily that I am screwing up the world seems self-righteous and arrogant.

The thing that strikes me about your friend's building -- if I understood you correctly -- is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity. PE: That is correct. CA: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world. Audience: (Applause) PE: Precisely the reaction that you elicited from the group. That is, they feel comfortable clapping. The need to clap worries me because it means that mass psychology is taking over.

At least my experience tells me, that when a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable in such and such a situation, their opinions about it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they're making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won't agree. But if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that kind of harmony.

Le Corbusier once defined architecture as having to do with a window which is either too large or too small, but never the right size. Once it was the right size it was no longer functioning. When it is the right size, that building is merely a building. The only way in the presence of architecture that is that feeling, that need for something other, when the window was either too large or too small.

The simplest explanation is that you have to do these others to prove your membership in the fraternity of modern architecture. You have to do something more far out, otherwise people will think you are a simpleton. But I do not think that is the whole story. I think the more crucial explanation -- very strongly related to what I was talking about last night -- is that the pitched roof contains a very, very primitive power of feeling. Not a low pitched, tract house roof, but a beautifully shaped, fully pitched roof. That kind of roof has a very primitive essence as a shape, which reaches into a very vulnerable part of you. But the version that is okay among the architectural fraternity is the one which does not have the feeling: the weird angle, the butterfly, the asymmetrically steep shed, etc. -- all the shapes which look interesting but which lack feeling altogether. The roof issue is a simple example. But I do believe the history of architecture in the last few decades has been one of specifically and repeatedly trying to avoid any primitive feeling whatsoever.

Actually, I don't even know what that work is dealing with, but I do know that it is not dealing with feelings. And in that sense those buildings are very similar to the alienated series of constructions that preceded them since 1930. All I see is: number one, new and very fanciful language; and two, vague references to the history of architecture but transformed into cunning feats and quaint mannerisms. So, the games of the Structuralists, and the games of the Post Modernists are in my mind nothing but intellectualisms which have little to do with the core of architecture. This depends, as it always has, on feeling.

If you want your divine revelation to do more than rage through the population like a rapid viral contagion and die out just as quickly, you need all the dull stuff. Organization. Rules. All the excitement – the arbitrariness; the sense that reality itself is yielding to your will – drains into abstruse theological debates, fights over who gets the bishopric, and endless, arid arguments over how best to raise the tithes that the organization needs to survive.

When the fan’s mounting was modified, the standing wave disappeared—as did the lab’s oppressive feeling and sense of ghostly presence. Tandy and a fellow professor at Coventry University wrote up his experiences and subsequent speculations on the mechanisms of low-frequency hauntings in a short paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research that remains one of the prizes in my collection of obscure PDFs. Tandy went on to conduct large-scale experiments on the physical properties of hauntedness. I think about the vibrating foil blade every time anyone mentions engagement.

Though I do feel like generative AI will mean that decoration, ornament and filigree becomes cheap again? And maybe we’ll move into an aesthetic in which our furniture, white goods, and accessories superficially resemble the busy-busy arts and crafts era - but actually it’s because, well, it costs almost nothing to do (it’s just software) and it makes the object look NEW.

Insofar as your thoughts are valuable to share, they’re often better shared with someone you care about, rather than performed for no one/everyone in hopes of scoring points that can’t be cashed out.The smallest simplest piece of practical advice that could change your life is this: instead of tweeting, text it to a friend.

The dynamic fluidity of thought is mummified, reduced to a dead static statement to be evaluated numerically.But your thoughts need not be this way. Your opinions don’t have to be announced at all times, for they change constantly. Oftentimes it’s common to not have an opinion at all, much less codify it into stone for others to judge you by. When life makes you laugh, it is important to first laugh before trying to envision the Tweet that would cause you to accurately imagine what you just experienced.

When a private opinion, joke, or idea floats through your mind, and your hands unconsciously reach for your phone to immediately mutate it into a tweet, that thought is no longer your thought. Your very experience of Thinking is being co-authored by Twitter’s incentive structure. Offhand opinions on random topics are suddenly worthy of performance on a stage. An absurd experience that brought whimsy to your day needs to be crammed into a character limit. And for creative people (all people), ideas are aborted before they’re fully formed.There is a false feeling of completion to your thoughts once they are embalmed as tweets. There is a sense you have done something.

By making “having children” an active choice, and not a self-evident, unconscious behaviour, the children become less-than-human; they become objectified, they become Objects.

Last week, I wrote on Twitter that sometimes the problem is governance, but usually the problem is power. What I meant with this remark was that organizational problems that appear as inadequacies in the formal system of governance are most commonly just the manifestations of an underlying problem that has arisen from the informal exercise of power by members of that organization, outside of (if not in direct contradiction to) the formal rules of governance of the organization.This is also one of the key lessons of Franklin’s quote: a system of governance is only as good as the behavior of those who are governed by it, especially their commitment to follow its strictures. This behavior is not controlled by the governance system, but by the norms of those who implement it. If they choose to act outside the formal processes of governance, and not to hold one another accountable when they do, the governance system itself cannot do anything about it. It is a document describing a procedure, after all, which is not agentive.

For the majority of people, a website on Neocities is a crafts project. Something small to mess around with. People may stay there for a week, maybe even a few months, but the novelty inevitably wears off and they go back to where their friends and followers are. Despite this, people go on and on about "bringing back the Old Web", despite lacking the commitment it needs from the general populace to actually go anywhere.

But for others? Maybe they've gotten used to posting their work in such a way that it fits social media. Or maybe they're actively trying to earn a living from their work, which necessitates an audience. Maybe they don't really create anything to begin with and just want to socialize with people, or to consume their daily dose of me-mes. In that case, why would there be a need to create a website, if a large majority of your operation is done on social media? These people are better off just finding better social platforms to interact with others instead of making their own site. Some people on Neocities use their site merely as an advertisement for their social media accounts, instead of the other way around. In that case, the site is nothing more than a personal Linktree or a Carrd. A valid website, sure, but a city populated with sites like these isn’t a “web revival” by any stretch of the imagination. How can it be? One foot is in their websites, but their hearts are still in social media.

The key qualitative leap that ChatGPT represents is a system that is at least somewhat capable of compositionality. This is something that the full past decade of work on chatbots — Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant — have tried and completely failed to achieve. This is why all such voice assistants can still only operate within one domain or app at a time, and still cannot do anything that usefully combines two apps or functionalities, for example, finding all the songs that a friend has texted you and then compiling them together into a playlist.

They are concerned that the models being trained on racist and sexist data means that they will produce racist and sexist output. This is obviously true. But where this group is incorrect is in their assumption that such racist and sexist output will necessarily perpetuate racism and sexism in society. That is only true if we assume that people are in general stupid and will simply believe whatever content they’re exposed to.

But then again, even an evolutionary paradigm may not lead to something that’s deserving of being considered sentient, either: Plants are certainly living, but we don’t worry about their sentience.

But of course, the flipside to this is that we lose much of the sense of the “commons” that has characterised the Internet so far. You lose a lot of the serendipity that comes from logging on and suddenly talking to someone in another country, who maybe shares an interest in adventure games with you but is otherwise quite different. And once people are in smaller groups, then in-group norms can shift and become more accentuated from each other. If these are norms that seem kind of harmless then this is called a filter bubble and journalists wring their hands in The Atlantic about how it’s happening to them. And if these are norms that seem kind of racialised or scary then it’s called radicalisation, and journalists wring their hands in The Atlantic about how it’s happening to other people.