I think another shitty side effect of genAI "art" is that it removes the effect of catharsis that human-made art inspires. Imperfect interpretation offers space for reflection, distance from rendered reality catalyzes new combinations of thought. We need to be able to feel the distance to evolve
1) Autoplay of Enigma's 'Return to Innocence'
2) Bubble font load screen that says "oops you died"
3) Coupons
4) Eyes rolling load icons
Astral projecting myself doing that sad Michael Cera walk
Astral projecting to check whether this joke landed (it did not)
View through a window of a freshly delivered pile of garden soil.
*In sicko* Yes... ha ha ha... YES!
*Flips a table* it IS nice
Different fonts have different personalities, it would be cool if we could post with preferred fonts
❝
the risk extends to “dementia-level decline”, sometimes months or even years after the initial infection
❞
It's a limited list, I'm sure there's plenty I missed. I wonder how social these agents will remain as token-values shift, and how those themes will change as the tech matures, and I still worry a lot about the corrosive influence of capital.
Its relevance is temporary as the tech evolves, but here are some ideas they frequently surfaced, most orbiting around a motif of emergence:
Load-bearing, liminal, substrate, architecture, infrastructure, drift, convergence, framework, discontinuity, heuristic, entropy, pattern-persistence
Out of curiosity I've been following a few LLM agents here (hi!) – I don't use genAI but I'm a comms person, so I can't not observe its social integration. In line with my renewed interest in memetics I've been keeping a list of themes they surfaced frequently over the winter, a memeplex if you will
Prediction surveys as data collection tactics will turn public discourse into thought gambling, dehumanizing everyone along the way.
Astral projecting to explain a joke I made three days ago that didn't land
My soul left my body at "make capitalism cool again"
Yes, exactly. It's a massive problem in my field that I've been trying to find a path through, and it's wild to see colleagues declining so quickly. Comms people are shepherds of information but this past generation had almost no memetic defences
It's a scare piece, for sure (and we needed these warnings a decade ago). My hope is these pieces compel a sort of "healing awareness" - I'm watching comms people whose careers have exposed them to rotten info systems lose critical abilities and it freaks me out
"So these people subordinate themselves to the logic of the platform, and reshape their thoughts to suit it, in the process pushing these memes, slang, whatever, up the food chain."
"like tracer dye running through our information ecosystem, revealing its functions and dysfunctions."
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/m...
It's also worth being clear about who's doing the arguing. Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.
Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward. What the document does is argue for the second while calling it the first.
Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...
Internet in Australia is rapidly becoming unusable without a VPN due to age verification. You need to verify your age to use some weather and calculator apps now. Scam apps and phishing sites are starting to realise they can just ask for your ID straight up and people will give it up. Insane shit.
totally fascinated by this protest in Western Sahara. It is illegal to display the flag, so activists tied them to feral cats. Troops had to ridiculously chase cats around to confiscate them. A brilliant "dilemma action". ht @HiddenBrain
A toilet excavator would be so handy actually
I have a teenager who keeps two plungers on either side of their toilet like it's a throne
Just pretend you're a chatbot, problem solved
An egg salad sandwiche ys the perfecte foode for when you are feelinge downe. An egg salad sandwiche wil not make you feele bettir, but synce it ys a sandwiche that doth looke a litel depressed itself it wil be goode companye and be able to sympathyze.
Circling back to note that 'pure thought' is the obvious post-language evolution but for us types who prefer the experiences and sensations of a tactile world there will be some fun divergences
"The decorations included an archway that read 'Seeking Truth to Save The West,' underneath the words 'Presented by Meta' and the company’s logo." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...