Francis Spufford's interpretation is the best I've read - that even in utopia there is an irreducible measure of tragedy and disagreement - newhumanist.org.uk/articles/418.... Also the revelation in a later book that the Culture itself is ephemeral, a speck of froth in universal time.
fair enough!
Thanks - very interesting
I'd misunderstood your initial post as suggesting that he ought to be impeached on the basis of this statement, which seemed to me unlikely to do much good.
Yes but the politics of this suggest that a very old quote at second hand is not the best basis for a new impeachment.
in principle sure but isn't this quote nearly a quarter of a century old?
if i were a politician, i'd prefer the trail of slime headline meself.
also a relic of the time when you could publish a small to midsized book as an article in top sociology journals (now you are limited to the equivalent of an over extended novella)
one thing which is not well-known about these systems in big tech is that they are virtually always underresourced, and in my discussions with my counterparts at other companies, lack of slack capacity in these teams is an important defensive move.
The reference to black holes supports my crank theory that the von Neumann origin story for the Singularity is ex-post cover-up, and that the actual ur-source for Vinge/Kurzweil etc is this 1975 Cthulhu Is On His Way essay by noted Mussolini fancier Jerry Pournelle (scroll down to p.97)
unsurprisingly I endorse this endorsement.
And do hope we meet some day.
I am so delighted that it was useful!
The New York SantaCon website describes the event as a “nonsensical Santa Claus convention” to “spread absurdist joy” and urges participants not to vomit, litter, fight, urinate on the street, climb on cars or deface property.
The closing para of this FT piece on the Santacon scam arrest is enjoyably dry. www.ft.com/content/7365...
I'll be at #ICML2026 on July 10-11 in Seoul to speak at the Workshop on Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology.
The workshop is currently accepting submissions, with humanities, ML, HCI, and social/cognitive sciences all welcome.
Submit papers by May 1! Join us in Seoul! 🇰🇷
it's a very good book.
Comrades, the Great Convergence foreseen in the Yglesias-Cowen Symposium Issue of Monthly Review (Greek) that I brokered nearly twenty years ago has at last begun to reveal itself.
our revealed collective preferences are at least as much a function of how we aggregate them as they are a function of underlying individual preferences. the "will of the people" always depends upon how we are asked, for the same people and preferences can cover a tremendous range of difference.
sure! fair enough! i just worry that the shorthand leads to a kind of pessimism, a belief we are fundamentally terrible people rather than badly organized people. the latter can be ameliorated by better institutions. the former maybe not.
Inside every audience subcategory is a voting bloc struggling to be born.
A serious question - what is the crucial difference between voting blocs and audience subcategories these days? Don't want to be too Extremely Online, but I do think that democratic publics are, for better or worse, mostly by-products of the technologies through which we and their members see them.
there has to be some more onomatopoeic word for that ...
The Raw Story read-this-next sidebar for that link leaves no doubts about the business model they are optimizing on
On the other hand, Chinese companies argue they cannot be forced to comply with EU laws (FSR) that set them up to breach Chinese laws (data security, safeguarding safe secrets etc)
It's a new front in geo-regulatory statecraft - and it comes to a Luxembourg court tomorrow
Case comes in context of new rules in China that allow officials to punish foreign individuals and entities if Chinese companies are denied market access.
EU firms complain that there's no way to comply with EU rules while also complying with Beijing's
x.com/fbermingham/st...
Some great weird books back in the day - I've thought of The Embedding quite often since the term took a leap from linguistics into machine learning.
Was talking about this last week with the students in my Democracy and AI course. Short version - actual priests are hard to disintermediate as actual relationship to divine is a formidable moat, but the more commercial flavors of pop-evangelicism are absolutely vulnerable to blitzscaled disruption.
The FT 'copy a sentence from one of our pieces and you will get four sentences of finger-wagging copyright-copypasta along with it' is one of the banes of my life as a poaster.
