Katherine Dee

Come say hi at Pretty Good Fest!

Emotionally manipulative criticisms of social media are products not analysis. Like I'm sorry, the medium won if you're creating "digestible" clips of you crying about how Zoomers don't have community anymore because phone bad.

“Cartography of Generative AI (2024)” shows a sprawling, diagrammatic ecosystem of how generative AI is produced and maintained. The background is light pink with turquoise and yellow highlights. The left side has a turquoise vertical sidebar with labeled sections such as AI imaginaries, Critical expertise, Data sciences, Silicon Valley, and AI harms. The main diagram maps the flow of generative AI development from top to bottom: Top left: A globe icon with arrows represents global energy consumption, linked to servers and calculation power (chips, GPUs, and companies like TSMC). Top center: Rows of red server racks show data centers, connected to big data platforms and pipelines of training data (shown as orange blocks). Top right: Yellow stacks and schematic diagrams depict the supply chain of raw materials (e.g., cobalt, lithium) and scenes of mining. Upper right corner: A vignette labeled digital colonialism shows resource extraction sites and cables crossing oceans. Middle section: Blue isometric office-like spaces labeled AI start-ups and Silicon Valley venture capital, with tiny illustrated workers at desks, computers, and whiteboards. Orange and yellow arrows and blocks represent the movement of datasets, training, and alignment processes. A section labeled human labour shows rows of workers annotating data. Lower section: Gridded platforms in orange and yellow depict data extraction from the internet—social media, images, sound, text—and web scraping from sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, YouTube. Groups of small figures interact with large wireframe cube models labeled generative AI engines. Other vignettes show AI products (like chatbots), digital gig work, and consumer use. Far right: Layers of stacked chips show advanced chip production and global supply chains. A blue network node diagram illustrates the infrastructure economy behind AI technologies. Boxes at the bottom describe research and governance structures.

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

Ask Me Anything (About Internet Culture) Remember when Substack used to do "threads"?

Ask me anything on this thread about e-culture no matter how creepy, obscure, TMI, or out there.
default.blog/p/ask-me-any...

tbh the success of the "let's shit on social media" cottage industry is a strong signal those pundits are looking backwards and not at the present

LIVE NOW: Call-in Show #22: Alien Abductions Katherine Dee on Substack

We're live.
open.substack.com/live-stream/...

So excited for this one

‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case A chart-topping jazz album! Loads of Spotify and Apple Music plays! Just one problem: The success might not be real.

Went deep on the first AI streaming music fraud case. Mike Smith, the defendant, had more ties to the industry than you'd think. He worked with Snoop Dogg and RZA. And his former business partner suspects he'd been up to sneaky stuff for a while: www.wired.com/story/ai-bot...

Tonight...

This is an excellent takedown of a lot of popular "phone bad" sentiment, which sits at the intersection of moral panic and nostalgia for the precise time in your life you were a carefree young person.

LMAO

Yeah, I think for most people it's just a passing thing, like any other form of intimate roleplay

Preliminary thoughts up on Substack, but as a "note" not an article. The preview image is of a person I'm disagreeing with -- not my own views!
substack.com/@defaultfrie...

would you say it’s more of a role play or identity? I think I grok what you mean re fetish — like my identity as a woman has something to do w how I have sex but it’s mostly just who I am in a broader sense

People on twitter keep dming me about puppygirls. I’ll write about the new paper! If you are or know a puppygirl who can chime in, please dm. Bedtime now though

What’s the rp scene like?

Happy Bisexual Awareness Week. Have a fanfiction where Milo Yiannopoulos tries to take down Nick Fuentes in a devious plot involving two of Nick's most famous ex-boyfriends, Jaden McNeil and Patrick Casey
archiveofourown.org/works/71224056

I contributed to this!

Nick Fuentes' Body, Our DeviantArt Account thought digest, 09.30.2025

Nick Fuentes has a lot of fans *on the left.* Over the past couple of weeks, I've been getting to know them.
default.blog/p/nick-fuent...

Should unlikable people be able to survive in society? Should they be able to thrive?

It's rare for dreamers of better socities to confront those questions, but I think they are the ones that matter the most.

I feel like the “sigh” is what was (mildly, admittedly) bad faith- like you were mocking me after we actually talked and you got a better sense of who I am

I WAS joking and you’re welcome to respond to me in any capacity but I feel like after a phone call it’s reasonable to include me in this stuff

The latter…? You said I pontificate from a conservative pov. Curious what you disagreed w in the article

A portrait of those who have never been to libraries Nearly half (48%) of Americans visited libraries in the past year. Roughly a third (32%) say they have used libraries at one time or another, though not

Pew Research Center has done many surveys about libraries. A consistent surprise to me is about 1 in 5 US adults have NEVER visited a public library.

Here's a 2016 look at the never library crowd https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/a-portrait-of-those-who-have-never-been-to-libraries/

This is what I mean! Folks, I don’t bite! I’m happy to talk to anyone. Just drop me a line.

You could have reached out, Cas. (I was of course kidding and did not receive a new one for free nor did I buy one!)

Curious about what you disagreed with or why that quote reads as inherently conservative to you

I’ve been writing about these topics a long time and because I’m in the trenches in a way few others are, I understand them uniquely. I know some people on here are suspicious of me, but I’m much more open to discussion & criticism than you might expect. We probably agree on more than you think!

Adam Lanza Fan Art My foray into the online world of true crime fandom, where people treat school shooters and serial killers not as criminals but like characters from their favorite movies or novels

If you want to understand Internet-native nihilism, I recommend default.blog and this piece I did late last year:
www.tabletmag.com/feature/adam...

"The internet is a parallel dimension layered over our reality. It’s a place where thoughts take on form, distortions masquerade as truths, and some people return damaged from staying too long. It’s not just a metaphor; it’s a way to understand why online life feels haunted".