Julien Porquet

Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help

Interesting application of Berkeley anthropologist Alexei Yurchak's theory of "hypernormalization" (developed for 1980s USSR) to the USA over the past few months www.theguardian.com/wellness/ng-...

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

Starting my conference marathon this Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Semiotic Anthropology Conference (online).

"From artists’ hands to clients’ words: Styles, Text-to-Image algorithms and the division of creative labor."

Next stop, Vienna and Paris!

www.upennsemioticslab.com

Organizer guide to fighting data centers — Kairos Fellowship

This data center organizing guide from @kairosfellows.bsky.social and @mediajustice.bsky.social is so f’ing good: concise, informative, and beautifully designed. Print it out, make a zine, etc www.kairosfellows.org/fightdatacen...

I'll be talking about experimental ethnography and HCI over there next week!

Thank you Florian!

Little academic milestone: this week I got my first ever citation in another paper!

And I couldn't be happier that it's about artists, creative labor and machine learning.

🎉📚

“The A.I. is huge. A tsunami. But it’s not me. It can’t touch my me-ness. It doesn’t know what it is to be human, to be me.”

Oh good, I'm glad to know students and profs in ivy league universities don't feel that their individual "me-ness" is threatened by "AI".

🙃

Copying style, Extracting value: Illustrators' Perception of AI Style Transfer and its Impact on Creative Labor | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

After sharing the preprint, here is our officially published #CHI2025 paper:

𝐂𝐨𝐩𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞, 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞: 𝐈𝐥𝐥𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬' 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐫

with @sitong-wang.bsky.social and Lydia Chilton

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Tattoos, the State, and the Powers of Illegibility When seeing like a state means everyone looks guilty

Tattoos, the State, and the Powers of Illegibility 👀

Oooh this is exciting, looking forward to reading it!

The full report by the Tony Blair Institute is out, in which they detail how copyright should be "rebooted" in the AI age. It reads like a big tech lobbying document. I hope they will be asked serious questions at its launch in London today.

Some very brief highlights:

🧵 1/8

So, @elsevierconnect.bsky.social added an AI question and answer to my article in Computer & Education.

The answers are wrong!
They did not ask permission!
The answers are WRONG!

How is this science?!

Hello, I finally updated my website to include my research.

julienposture.com/research-1

Important resource re: Mandalay earthquake in Myanmar. ⬇️

Hi Elliott, the link doesn't seem to work, can you check?

Donate to Help Survivors of Earthquake in Mandalay, organised by Ye Myint WIN Hello, I am Nickey Diamond, originally from Mandalay, Myanmar, but now based in … Ye Myint WIN needs your support for Help Survivors of Earthquake in Mandalay

If you want to help victims of the earthquake in Myanmar, I recommend donating to smaller initiatives:
1. Better Burma (www.gofundme.com/f/emergency-...)
2. Advance Myanmar (www.advancemyanmar.org/myanmar-eart...)
3. My PhD student from Mandalay is collecting funds www.gofundme.com/f/donation-t...

Thank you!

Further readings on the topic: @eze3d.bsky.social @kortizart.bsky.social @rahll.bsky.social @eryk.bsky.social @bcmerchant.bsky.social

On Looking | Julien Posture | Substack Letters on visual culture. Click to read On Looking, by Julien Posture, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

And if you curious about style, the creative industry, genAI, ways of seeing, capitalism, and more, I write a newsletter on these topics!

julienposture.substack.com

If you want to know more about the AI side of style transfer and how it aligns with capitalist extraction in the creative industry, take a look at our #chi2025 paper:

arxiv.org/abs/2409.17410

If this week has taught us anything, is that styles are never "just" styles.

They are at the core of our cultural, political and economic lives and how we think about, and do things with them has a tremendous impact on our lives.

(A real Miyazaki sketch to cleanse your feed.)

Roman Muradov on Substack Style is not aesthetics. Style is substance. It grows out of thoughts, experiences, and labor. You can’t take work out of art—what you get is an empty shell. The generated result may resemble somethin...

But styles are not natural resources, they are the product of human labor.

As illustrator Roman Muradov put it "The generated result may resemble something real, but it bypasses the labor, and says nothing, adds nothing. The process is the thing"

substack.com/@bluebed/not...

But styles are also not surfaces to apply anywhere indiscriminately

What genAI models generate is not style, it's a superficial veil designed to benefit capitalist extraction of value from artists' labor

As styles become detached from artists, they become construed as natural resources up for grab

When the White House publishes this image, style becomes a weapon.

As it turns the dehumanizing labor of ICE into a cartoonish parody, the image distances us further from any empathy and precluding any potential revolt.

Styles are sticky, and that's what make them powerful.

By copying "Ghibli style", people get to imbue whatever images with the emotions and values attached to the original.

Most of the time it's family pictures, other times it's to much darker effect.

First off, it is not random that OpenAI decided to make an example of beloved animation studio Ghibli. Culturally, Ghibli stands for craft, integrity, and humane stories against Open AI corporate, mechanistic slop. Here, copying style = appropriating/displacing cultural value.

a sketch by Miyazaki of the cat bus in Totoro

This week the world got Ghiblified, pointing once more that styles are more than mere surface, but essential parts of our cultural, political and economic lives.

My PhD is about the political economy of how humans and machines see style in the US illustration industry, and I have thoughts!

🧵1/

Truly heartbreaking news, I'm sorry. I've been following his work from afar since my undergrad in Montreal and have been diving back into The Audible Past for my PhD. Such a generous scholar to think with.

I made this image!
It's always a treat to illustrate some nerdy neuroscience.