clips are like AI summaries in that they seem to promise a way to master content overload, but achieve this by making people passive consumers of an ever more superficial stream of disconnected fragments
think of my posts here as "clips" from longform essays (that I happen to never write)
In an essay on X last week, Ed Elson, host of the Prof G Markets podcast, defined the “clip” as something distinct from “short-form content,” writing, “They are specifically snippets of long-form content — things like podcasts, livestreams, and TV shows — a byproduct of something else. In other words, every clip is short-form content, but not all short-form content is a clip.” He argued in a followup post that, counterintuitively, even though a clip, according to his definition, is a slice of a larger product, they have become the main product for the majority of audiences. And the entertainment industry has noticed.
popularity of "clipping" suggests people like consuming highlights, even of (or mostly of) things they wouldn't care about in its full form www.garbageday.email/p/what-happe...
if you take "relevant" to mean "relevant to the ruling class," then it seems clear that tech companies and the lackeys who promote AI's usefulness are imposed generative models as this kind of "discourse network," setting boundaries on what will be transmissible
sounds a bit like Kittler's "discourse network": "the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and produce relevant data"
"there is no such thing as photography" (if photography is understood as neutral documentation)
it calls into question what, if anything, people want from "real" documentary images of events in the context of social media, where they are required to be "iconic" in some way (e.g. "this image of the war room is like a classical painting," etc.) to circulate
these sorts of fakes also shape expectations of what events should look like, and reinforce the expectation that all events should be reducible to images
“Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything” nowadays, a.k.a. vibe-living, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square to prevent contagion, and then A.I. should resurrect you virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.
"vibe-living" is good Orwellian term for when people have been made too anxious to make any decisions for themselves about anything www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...
the people touting "agency" in the abstract are obviously reifying something that is experiential, but also misses the Hegelian point that being capable of doing nothing but giving orders makes you weak and empty
abstracting "agency" from specific contexts is a lot like when "creativity" is discussed in the abstract — as if what one created was beside the point. the goal is "agency" you can consume without really doing anything, taking responsibility for anything
It’s exactly this dynamic that seems to preoccupy some of our most obsessively agentic individuals. There’s a common prediction among those hoping to outstrip their ovine, mimetic peers: The A.I. models, they say, will eventually supply all of the effort, training and expertise that have historically stood between humans and our ability to simply make things happen. Once all those annoyances are pushed out of the way, the only thing separating the world’s winners from its losers will be the sheer motivation to act, the raw ambition to do a thing — pure, bold agency. You run across this notion all sorts of places, sometimes as a frantically held belief and sometimes as a sales pitch. A sufficiently agentic layperson, someone argues on X, could sit down with an A.I. and produce the same work as a Ph.D student. “In the age of A.I., becoming a super agentic individual is a superpower”; “Being a highly agentic individual is going to be so important with the rise of A.G.I.”; “In the A.I. era, become an ‘agentic individual’ to thrive! Discover how work evolves with A.I. agents. Don’t get left behind!” All that will matter is your own superior drive and will; every other aspect of achievement can be handled, as if by magic, in the guts of some colossal data center.
seems that "AI" makes "you can just do things" and "you can't do anything" into the same thing, as if they are supposed to be the same goal www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/m...
memes are like fashion trends that people "wear" in media by posting; decoding "what they mean" beyond that verges on folly, like asking what different skirt lengths "really mean"
not optimizing irrational productivity, but orchestrating a "retribalization" to negate the unsettling and overwhelming experience of a "global village:
But seems more that social media connectivity throws everyone into a chaotic "unterritorialized" space and prompts everyone to start looking for ways to feel safe, ways to draw boundaries — memes derive from this, and AI expedites the "territorialization" process
With so much of our world being so rapidly reshaped for such stupid reasons, it’s hard not to feel as if we’re living in one of the canonical A.I. doom scenarios without even noticing it.
this conclusion likens social media meme-making with AI paper-clip maximizing; social media is an engine that turns everything into memes the way AI would catastrophically overoptimize on a pointless goal
memes are less talking than territorializing
the content of memes is often less important than their ability to communicate who is in and who is out of a group; they mark a boundary (rather than attempt to persuade someone else with a rational line of thinking, à la Habermasian speech situation)
the problem with "brain rot" as a term is that using memes makes people feel smart (in on a fast-moving joke) but using language often makes us feel stupid (it can be hard to be articulate and never assured that you will be understood)
In 2024, “brain rot” was selected as the Word of the Year by Oxford University Press, beating out other meme words like “lore,” “demure” and “slop.” Last year, it was “rage bait” — another term for another kind of online distraction — which beat out “aura farming,” another meme. In 2023, it was “rizz,” which beat out “beige flag” — something from TikTok. Since 2021’s “vax,” Oxford has consistently given the W.O.T.Y. to some sort of internet meme. Maybe it’s because the public votes on it, but maybe it’s because this is what our culture produces now. It almost seems like a direct challenge to the idea that language evolves to describe ever more of our world. What if it can instead degrade, or become caught in the gears of a more powerful meaning-making engine?
reminds me of Flusser's claim that communication in images meant that "writing has no future" — this is possibly an intermediate stage in the "death of writing," when language use becomes a matter of mimicking ever more ephemeral coinages
"Total reality decay" is Philadelphia Flyers content injected into everything I read
made me wonder for a second if the image was altered depending on what the browser detected as a reader's interests
guy wearing a Travis Konecny shirt
extremely random that the image in a story about "reality distortion fields" shows a guy wearing a Travis Konecny shirt news.artnet.com/art-world/re...
if more "information" is always flowing in, you never have to worry about synthesizing it or assimilating it — the biggest threat is that the flow will stop and you will have to assess what you now supposedly know
it looks and feels as though you are being informed, and you can take "actions" (place bets, make posts, etc.), but it entails achieving a sublime ignorance that looks like a generated image of "being informed"
think "monitoring the situation" is about aestheticizing information so that you can let yourself give up on being informed
A couple of months ago, Reggie James built a “situation monitor dashboard for the boys,” suggesting the business model of “making every man feel like he’s in the situation room for $50/month.” Borrowing so much of its aesthetic from sports gambling, again, the north star for situation monitoring is not just the 20th-century control room but the casino sportsbook, which truly fulfills the dream of wall-to-wall screens and their relevant metadata (a perfect setting in which to watch March Madness by the way), and the possibility that you could not just absorb it all but actually act upon it—that you, as a human, and not a computer, could take in all that extra information and then do something useful with it
the casino sportsbook as an "informational sublime" where information becomes so perfectly actionable that it becomes useless, like an arbitrage always already played out kneelingbus.substack.com/p/situationg...
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning
includes this ever-more-relevant piece
pdf of Simulacra and Simulation
dn720006.ca.archive.org/0/items/baud...
