Yes. Because we know Trump wants to make sure this comes back into the news cycle. 🙄

I felt this in my soul.

New Signal Loss episode.

The first half discusses the debacle that was the DoorDash Grandma Oval Office press conference.

The second half discusses the marketing of The Drama (light spoilers - just go see it.)

open.spotify.com/show/6zsBnCU...

I'm glad you liked it so much, and I really enjoyed your review! You did a good job of talking about it without, you know, *talking about it.*

Do you feel that it's a movie that people outside of a certain generation range might not fully get? (In particular, related to Emma and the internet.)

Ghosts Stuck in the Shell

Signal Loss Episode 3: Ghosts Stuck in the Shell.
I discuss chat bots as a closed system, and how they difer from closed communities like Facebook groups.
Later, I break down the rhetoric of Trump's "Open the Fuckin' Strait" tweet.
open.spotify.com/show/6zsBnCU...

I think you're really onto something here: this approach is just not suited well to the medium of film. Cinema works best as a closed system, with things like visual motifs that bookend a movie. Not when a film feels like the equivalent to a table-top RPG lore book.

I wish backstories and worldbuilding had stayed out of the blockbuster sphere and where they justly belong: in doorstop books that the nerdiest fans devour and everyone else can ignore

I know it's been said, many times, many ways, but Ilhan Omar is actually a fairly normal House member who codes as radical simply by virtue of being a brown hijabi woman in America

Absolutely. Distortions to reality become ambience and architecture. Misinformation is integral to how so many aspects of our media landscape function.

Misinformation in the previous era was viral. This peaked during the pandemic. Chatbot hallucinations are local. Still, if there are system-wide errors, this may result in the remapping of human cognition.

Ghosts (Stuck) in the Shell: Towards a New Era of Information Technology AI anxiety is diffuse. Hallucinations are seen as a threat to the ontology of truth. But we are now beyond the peak of viral misinformation. What comes next?

We are exiting the golden age of disinformation. Anxieties remain high as AI is perceived as an ontological threat to the category of truth. What comes next?

New Signal Loss essay.

open.substack.com/pub/robingra...

Algorithms and big tech companies are far from blameless. But, they produce the infrastructure in which subjects repeat the ideology of advertising.

Social media is an extension and possible endpoint of the language of commodity. It does not exist in a vacuum.

Signal Loss # 2: Midiagnosing Social Media, Misdiagnosing Crisis

Social media companies are losing lawsuits. The truth is, addiction at the hands of the algorithm is only part of the story.

Also, the Trump administration's shifting rhetoric for justifying war with Iran.

Listen now, and enjoy the drift.
open.spotify.com/show/6zsBnCU...

The power of the algorithm is overstated.

The most intense acceleration occurs within closed spaces.

Signal Loss #2: Social Media and the Language of the Commodity Recent lawsuits frame big tech platforms as a singular villain. The reality is far more diffuse and unstable.

Recent lawsuits frame social media as the cause of mental illness, but social media is not a new system.

Social media is the language of the commodity, internalized and reproduced by individuals.
New Signal Loss:
open.substack.com/pub/robingra...

The '39 adaptation of Wuthering Heights is kind of amazing in how badly it treats the source material. I don't mind that it changes content, but it completely misses the spirit of the novel, and in so doing, has become what people think Wuthering Heights is.

Signal Loss Episode 1: The Death of Authorship; Wuthering Heights and the Problem of Adaptation

Signal Loss #1 is up.

The removal of Shy Girl, AI authorship, and a crisis of meaning.

Plus: Wuthering Heights (1939) and how adaptation rewrites the text.

open.spotify.com/episode/6crr...

Took a break, but trying to get back on the platform and start posting about film again with more regularity!

There were non-sci fi options the week before Christmas 1984, including a movie that had opened a few weeks earlier and was still doing gangbusters at the box office: Beverly Hills Cop

Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest are both both sustain unease, but rest within more legible genre territory. Birth sets up expectations that it might be a thriller, or a ghost story, and deliberately denies the audience the pleasure of resolution in those frameworks.

Twenty two years later, Birth is still the most anti-commercial movie to receive a wide release by a Hollywood studio this century.

It does nothing to reassure the audience, resting in a permanent state of unease.

The cinematic equivalent of chewing on ice - a landmark film.

This isn't about AI - this is about the collapse of verification. The accusation becomes indistinguishable from the act.

Signal Loss #1: The Death of Authorship in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Signal Loss.

The accusation a book was generated by AI is impossible to verify.

The consequences are material.

We have moved beyond the death of the author.

open.substack.com/pub/robingra...

This has me crying in real life 😂😂😂

🦁

Catherine O'Hara? Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck this year.

Make it viral.

photo of an anti-smoking billboard that shows a painting of a baby smoking a cigarette. text says "You're not the only one smoking. Secondhand smoke contains over 7000 chemicals, including 70 known to cause cancer. Text QUITSMOKING or QUITVAPING to 66819 or call 800-300-8086 KICK/T Brought to you by Ihya County Tobacco Education Program California" There is a green street sign in front of the billboard that says PA HA LANE.

damn that baby looks cool as hell

Morbidly pleased to look this up and find it to be literally true.

Roddy Doyle was an absolutely terrible choice to be the chair for The Booker. Flesh winning feels like the two white guys on the panel decided to go for the least literary, most masculine of the books.