Robot Vaudeville
Something human encrusted in the mechanical
Culture
Summer Lightning.
Essays on temporal shifts in culture and technology.
Recent essays
28 of 28Phreaks, Packets and Prompts
Introducing kit time, the brief moments of unstructured space and time where technology gets interpreted and changed
Body Politic Keeps The Score
The body politic has two bodies
The Two Memories
Text-first vs phone-interrupt, private vs public memory
Immutable Skills
How knowledge redevelops at higher levels of abstraction, and why its still dependent on properties of the printing press
Annealing of Exuberance
Why both action (Hannah Arendt) and exuberance (Bataille) fail on the internet
Everyone Is On Something
Free Energy Principle, AI agents and general economy of surplus
Chat, Is This Bloodsport?
Reviewing Among The Thugs, YouTube Streamers and Carnival Bloodsport
Thermal Memory
How technological memory affects different layers of civilization
General-Purpose Technologies as Annealing Agents
Towards a more technology informed theory of social acceleration.
Work-Hardened Archetypes
Memetic and Mnemonic Archetypes, revisiting sons-of-soil arguments and...Saint Nicholas
Carnival Time, Hardness, and the Machines That Process Excess
LLMs as carnival processing machines
Manufactured Present
Casino Time, Craft Time and expression of time in risks x consequences
Knowledge Chronotopes
AI has no default sense of tempo, but neither does common law or religious texts
Devices For The Crafty
Looking at 19th century distinctions between gambling and speculative investment
Metabolizing Monsters
Online swarms and social web as unprocessed monsters
Long Goodbye
Twentieth century imagery of cars
Why Does AI Development Look Like 1980s Software Planning?
Conway's Law and Coase theorem applied to AI
Social Web to Royal Machine
Metaphors for LLMs and meatspace as anti-environments
Cozyweb Animals
Cozyweb as collective self-regulation in the permaweird
Life is a Room with a TV
Star Trek as paracosmal living room
Prophetic Soft Technologies
Prediction markets as media that blunts the loss of narrative.
Revenge of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes and the new voice of god
Walking The AI Ecology
Locating care in working with LLMs
Archival Time
Looking at LLMs through Bakhtin's notion of carnival time
Minimum Viable Reality
Gambling in simulated realities as an extension of culture
Anarcho-Capitalist Kurosawa Summer
Kurosawa's influences and an LLM analogy
Scent of Media
Technology as tertiary memory and 4K restorations.