BlogFlock

Twitter never was a “global town square,” as much as pundits and executives liked the metaphor. Elon Musk liked it enough that, after buying the site and rebranding it X, he had the official account reiterate the idea. But “town square”? Not really. Twitter was a large…

Did you hear? There’s a new iPhone — and it’s thinner! Exactly what everyone has been asking for.

I joke, of course. Real people want phones that are durable, have a decent camera, and allow them to get through the day without charging — not ones that compromise on all…

Greetings friends,

I know there’s been a lot of coverage in these pages of the dark side of commercial AI systems lately: Of how management is using AI software to drive down wages and deskill work, the psychological crises that AI chatbots are inflicting on vulnerable users, and, the failure…

Technology's Distortions of Language

Language is a vessel through which meaning is mutually constructed. From this shared imagination, we learn how others understand and aim to understand them. We also navigate how much of ourselves to put into this space. The imagination space is therefore negotiated through language: our thoughts…

Greetings all,

Hope everyone in the states who got to take a long weekend enjoyed the respite. I did my best to do exactly that—spent a few days with some old friends in a cabin off the grid, even—and I’m quite glad I did. Even if it means I didn’t…

Disconnect is back on Ghost!

Yes, that’s right. After a 9-month experiment of going back on Substack, I simply couldn’t stomach being on that Nazi-infested platform any longer and came back to the friendly terrain I was used to. You’ll notice the website has a fresh coat of paint and…

Puppetry as Dream Analysis for AI Anxiety

This is a discussion between Camila Galaz, Emma Wiseman, and Eryk Salvaggio, collaborators behind an experimental workshop linking puppetry and generative AI that took place at RMIT in Melbourne this summer at the invitation of Joel Stern and the National Communications Museum. We…

Just a warning, this post contains a discussion of teenage suicide and mass shootings, and the forces that abet both.

I want to put it plainly, to make sure we’re all clear about what’s happening, before the tech industry leaders attempt to invoke AI mythology to hijack the narrative or…

Donald Trump is a busy man. He’s invading his country’s capital city, taking over cultural institutions, restricting democratic rights, running an influence campaign inside a supposed allied nation, and seemingly preparing to attack Venezuela as he continues to enable Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and that’s just…

Greetings all,

Hope everyone’s week is off to a solid start, or that it’s at least off to a better one than mine. I was kept up all night by an endlessly circling helicopter, a phenomenon that is all too well-known to anyone who lives in the metropolitan Los Angeles…