@moiraweigel.bsky.social wrote one of the most enlightening (and earliest) pieces on Alex Karp's fashy PhD. She now has written this luminous piece that gives a persuasive materialist account of the right wing assault on theory. Truly brilliant stuff.
direct.mit.edu/octo/article...
wait wut: “In the past there was a group called ‘Dire Straits.’ It’s a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy."
Reading "Transcription"
Alice G. Brand, 1987, "The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process": "We may sometimes think of ourselves as if we are computers. But computers do not grow. They do not learn with practice or understand what they do. And computers do not feel."
Or, as Read puts it: "For all the revolutionary, transformational promises of A.I.--for good and for ill--the problems it causes all seem quite familiar."
I like @maxread.info's piece because it articulates what I've been thinking of as the Giuseppe di Lampedusa theory of LLMs and writing: that everything must change in order for everything to stay the same.
Looking forward to learning what Ben Lerner thinks about everything that's happened since 2019
Reading something in which a writer refers to their personal life as their "private sector"
i'm always surprised people haven't done more with ngai's idea of stuplimity, "a strange amalgamation of shock and boredom"
great piece
Abstract As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text. This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the “conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work. Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of authorship and interpretation.
new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...
I keep coming back to the idea of cultivating interpretive powers. Not sure where it lies on the continuum between skill and virtue. But interpretation is definitely a mode of human freedom and therefore of human flourishing. @cnewf.bsky.social's lecture at Penn helped me think about this
"At a party, knowledge matters less; it’s a space governed by impulses, not thoughts. And yet the club can also be a site of discovery, where you step onto the electric wires of epiphany."
Aria Aber on what the club taught her.
typo/parapraxis of the day: "faulty" for "faculty"
Technofeudalism (Varoufakis, Durand) Too Late Capitalism (Kornbluh) Muskism (Slobodian & Tarnoff) End Times Fascism (Klein & Taylor) Vectoralism (Wark) Gutenberg Parenthesis (Sauerberg, Jarvis) TESCREAL (Gebru & Torres) Neofeudalism (Dean) Tech Fascism (Duran) Platform Capitalism (Srnicek) Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) Klepto-Keynesianism (Seybold)
The thing is, I think these are all fundamentally correct & completely reconcilable political economies of the contemporary.
‘I never see a news sheet or hear the news in the morning: that is a point of principle with me, a punctilio.’
The structuralist thesis about AI (as constructive realization of subjectless minds) was already put forward in 1994 by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book about cybernetics and cognitive science.
Barthes on his daily routine: write from 9:30-1; lunch; play the piano at 2:30; paint a bit.
New paper w/ @teddyroland.bsky.social on "How fiction powers generative AI systems." We designed a computational experiment to test the impact of the vast amount of fiction in LLM training data on how LLMs communicate, w/ implications for both AI design + literary theory. arxiv.org/abs/2603.01220
St Louis is such a weird and interesting city. I'm still waiting for at least one reference to Provel cheese. So many missed opportunities in this show so far.
Thinking, for no particular reason, about the first line of Marie Darrieussecq's "Being Here is Everything": "She was here. On Earth and in her house."
It’s almost like being a historical subject given the Big Data distant reading treatment sucks.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!
"Don’t you think . . . that we all stammer? That is to say before we encounter truth, before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say?"
the computer should have never left this room. we have to go back
Hypothesis: AI writing is bad primarily because in general what makes writing good is the specificity of what it communicates and its information density, so the prompt that produced good AI writing would be as long as the output.
