Rob Horning

that users could prefer a generated simulation to actual old clips for nostalgia purposes clarifies how nostalgia is about consuming "decontextualization" in itself — nostalgia negates history under the auspices of longing for it

social platforms are the last place one should go to try to find out "what people are saying" (though they may give hints on what your data suggests companies think you should believe to make you most manipulatable)

any "social platform" seems likely to be overrun by generated text that enacts "new conspiracism"/parasocial participation in ideas that carry a libidinal charge

the new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs.” Outlandish and pointless fantasies, like the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared, and repeated. Engagement — and revenue — is all.

"new conspiracism" doesn't explain anything but is a means for isolated individuals to experience "social validation" on demand, in the absence of a verifiable public — a way to intensify the gratification of parasociality www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...

“infinite video” means not infinite entertainment but infinite boredom; the death drive incarnate

it's perhaps self-evident that generative video makes the world more boring, but one could hope it would re-enchant those forms of visual experience that resist simulation

the idea that some videos are intrinsically interesting to watch (regardless of whether they have any reference to events or things in themselves, any kind of auratic appeal) feels like it can't survive generative models, which makes all forms of mere seeing trivial

but it seems like there is something too naked about it; how does ideology work when it has not even a flimsy alibi? How do people enjoy overt simulations? What makes Disneyland fun?

generated video allows consumers to inoculate themselves against events and representations that don't conform to their schema by instantly offering alternatives that soothe them and match their expectations: They can enjoy their own ideological interpellation as a movie, or an endless feed

to some extent, all media does this — pattern reality ideologically and make some kinds of events seem normal and others unrepresentable; make some explanations for why things happen seem obvious and others inconceivable

The imaginary of power is not, therefore, a 'theory' that comes along after the fact to provide the analytical explanation of the images circulating around us. Rather, it is a set of schemas that we experience insofar as we use them. It is a set of imagos, of 'expansive forms' (patterns, Gestalt) that shape our expectations inasmuch as we are able to reconfigure them. They are spectacles that help us see 'reality' only by filtering what we see of it.

this from Yves Citton's Mythocracy is maybe useful for thinking about Sora 2 and other slop feeds: Generated video constitutes an "imaginary of power" that gives consumers pictures of how they've been trained to believe things are "supposed to be"

everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’

wonder if the ease and rapidity with which "AI" can generate right-wing fantasy images and propaganda makes them more convincing for their consumers — as though one shouldn't have to use their own imagination to manifest the bigotry they insist on www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

agree, just think some find this kind of text reassuring—confirmation that they are right not to care about reading, writing, or any conventional sort of literacy

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

you can help generate so much slop that "the ear" would be deafened forever, and no one could ever call your own into question, and you can make all your necessary "discoveries" elsewhere, through some other means, in some realm of only right and wrong answers that makes "discovery" moribund anyway

if all writing can be made merely functional and perfunctory, then the aesthetic quality that seemed inherent to it (what it takes an "ear" to appreciate) could be eradicated; no more écriture, just code

if you don't experience "writing as discovery," LLMs allow you to experience the negation of that, and possibly even take joy in seeing others chagrined by the apparent invalidation of that cliche

many people are not interested in "writing to discover what they are thinking," or to refine their thinking, etc. because they are not interested in making such discoveries or taking on the burden and the narcissism of having them

For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots. Notice the poverty of the latter’s style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing. So far this has been about as easily done as said. Until AI systems stop gaining in sophistication, it will become measurably harder. Required will be a new kind of literacy, an adaptive practice of bullshit detection.

not bad advice, but presumes that most people read and write to experience "charm, surprise, and strangeness" when the opposite may be the case www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

"Not Supposed to Break Down"

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

What does it mean to "optimize" for this condition — to train users to enjoy it? Why is it most profitable for companies to train us in wanting to pay attention as a way of avoiding rather than seeking meaning? www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...

But perhaps the function of disappearing is a vital one. Perhaps this is how we react as living beings, as mortals, to the threat of an immortal universe, the threat of a definitive reality. So this whole array of technology could be taken to mean that man has ceased to believe in his own existence, and has opted for a virtual existence, a destiny by proxy. Then all our artefacts become the site of the subject’s non-existence, of his desire for non-existence. For a subject without an existence of his own is at least as vital a hypothesis as that of a subject decked out with such metaphysical responsibility. Seen from this angle, technology becomes a marvellous adventure, just as marvellous in this case as it seems monstrous in the other. It becomes an art of disappearance. It might be seen as aiming not so much to transform the world as to create an autonomous world, a fully achieved world, from which we could at last withdraw. Now, there can be no perfecting of the natural world, and the human being in particular is a dangerous imperfection. If the world is to be perfect, it will first have to be made. And if the human being wishes to attain this kind of immortality, he must produce himself as artefact also, expel himself from himself into an artificial orbit in which he will circle forever. So we dream of a world carried along miraculously, without our intervention, and of autonomous beings which, far from escaping our will, as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, might fulfil the desire we ourselves have of escaping our will.

This is what is at stake in Virtuality. And there can be no doubting its absolute ambition. If it were brought to completion, that radical effectuation would be the equivalent of a perfect crime. Whereas the ‘original’ crime is never perfect and always leaves traces (we ourselves as living, mortal beings are the trace of that criminal imperfection), future extermination – that extermination which would be produced by an absolute determination of the world and its elements – would leave no trace. We would not even have the time to disappear. We would be disintegrated in Real Time and Virtual Reality long before the stars went out. Fortunately, all this is literally impossible. Very High Definition, with its ambition of producing images, sounds, information, bodies in microvision, in stereoscopy, as you have never seen them before, as you will never see them, is unrealizable. As is the phantasy of Artificial Intelligence: the brain’s becoming a world, the world’s becoming a brain, so as to function without bodies, unfailing, autonomized, inhuman. Too intelligent, too super-efficient to be true.

seems indicative of how stagnant the ideas behind "AI" are that Baudrillard could write a critique of them in 1995 (The Perfect Crime) and none of it seems dated

While Ralph Lauren is an early adopter of AI technology, many fashion brands are building their own apps, says Shelley Bransten, corporate VP of global industry solutions at Microsoft. She says that the fashion industry is now shifting from “scroll-based” shopping, which involves looking through rows of thumbnails, to “goal-based” shopping, which deploys AI to surface results based on the customer’s specific needs at that moment. “The shopping experience is going to be more personalized, relevant, and more tied to the customer’s intent,” she says.

And how does the machine know your intent, you might ask? Well by constant surveillance.

Just kidding, the machine does not “know” your fucking “intent.”

when people consume content in environments that place them under individual surveillance, they experience content as discipline, binding them to predicted outcomes, expected experiences; to experience art as freedom—as unanticipated possibility—one must reject those environments as much as possible

maybe people like consuming algorithmic recommendations because it allows them to feel like an engineered object themselves; they can be both the consumer and the product

"thought" becomes even more associated with a sterile rationalism, while surrendering to being controlled seems more like an exuberant irrationalism

exposure to algorithmic recommendation erodes our ability to form desires while preserving our ability to be manipulated into various emotional states — algorithmic systems divorce feeling from thought and will

Originally, the service had generated recommendations based on a five-star system of user ratings, but in 2017 Netflix abandoned this in favour of the altgenre-based system. “Moving from explicit to implicit recommendations was the big shift,” said Yellin. “Recommendations based on behaviour – what you actually watched and consumed, versus what you said you liked.”

algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...