Samuel Thomson

The phenomenon of free-market-loving marketing consultants...

I thought Thatcher was an ork in the 40k universe.

In 5 years time there's going to be a lot written about Ireland's creative industries boom.

A quote relevant to today : "the problem with constantly taking from someone is one day that someone will end up with nothing to lose"

So-called #genAI means the abolition of the future through the proliferation of endless streams of stochastically rendered generic pasts. Having turned large parts of the cultural archive into training data, it now traps us in a foreverized pastness, a 24/7 nostalgia for a past that never existed

poets.org/poem/houses-0

You did amazing! Incidentally, Khalil Gibran describes comfort as "A guest, that becomes a host, and then a master".

...there are countervailing cultural winds - the gallery is no longer the apex cultural space. The kinds of cities that previously held space for artists have been redeveloped. Audiences are fragmented. Crypto is better for laundering money. But you can only sell so much novelty "bad painting".

Fine Art is nebulous, but the idea of a field of activity unmored from necessity, goals, etc, should be radically liberating. The problem is that human power dynamics impinge on this space and squash it into another impression of millionaire vanity.

Hauser & Wirth’s UK profits slide 90% as global art market struggles Gallery with branches in Mayfair and Somerset blames decline on ‘lower secondary-market sales’

I won't embarrass the artist, but I saw a Hauser and Wirth show recently and it was rock-bottom garbage painting of the kind you'd only show out of nepotism. And this year's John Moore's Painting Prize went to a facile attempt made at a summer school owned by the judge.
www.ft.com/content/1001...

Doughnut 3.0 is here | DEAL The Doughnut, updated, now monitors global trends in social shortfall and ecological overshoot over the 21st century

The world is heading towards ecological catastrophe while leaving billions in poverty. doughnuteconomics.org/news/doughnu...

America is now one big bet on AI It’s seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy

Ai and fascism are both fundamentally alienating. People are instrumentalised, boredom breeds boredom, creativity is choked off, and you're left with warmed-over metrics-driven culture that's supposed to somehow inspire without being transformative.

www.ft.com/content/6cc8...

I think I'd need 5000 words to express how I feel about the current state of videogame innovation.

But Natalie Clayton once said "Games are when there's a little guy". And I think about that a lot.

what if I told you that taking accountability for your actions was traditionally considered a load-bearing feature of masculinity?

Exactly why Gavin Newsom is not the answer.

I don’t really understand the people who think we shouldn’t situate the current moment in context of the last 25 years in American politics, including the actions of the three Democrats who were president during that time

Please take 10 minutes to fill out the consultation on allowing trans people access to outdoor swimming in London:

(They ignore intersex people completely, so not hoping for great things from this).

hampstead-heath-bathing-ponds.commonplace.is/en-GB/propos...

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

Pictures of his face have been foisted upon me repeatedly and non-consensually throughout my life and I'm not ok with that.

I don't think the "personality cult" is a left invention. It's a right-wing invention that's used to malign Greta Thunberg. That's what I mean by an "away game" that the left can't win.

If it doesn't already exist, we need to innovate the social technology to do this. We need more stories like Greta's, but also different and adjacent stories.

Partly this is a "technologia" problem, because we're fighting the "suggestions" algorithms that have the famous "long tail" effect, and we're also fighting editorial decisions of legacy media. But we need to focus on a wider range of, for want of a better term, young influencer activists.

Well yes exactly, but the left shouldn't be going with single icon personality cult. There are plenty of activists, including young activists, who we need to promote and know about. We need to know their names and stories. While one person is so uniquely iconic, the left are playing an away game.

Who is it? It's amazing, I thought it was *possibly* ai but maybe just really auto-tuned.

Makes sense!

Those don't really get the connotation of deliberate intent that "sinister" does. I also think some people would view those terms as not very mental-health aware.

bail amount remaining is $1,000 arrested for “disturbing the peace” and “Disorderly Conduct”
PP blacktranstexas
Cashapp $bttconnection

Relatedly, I try to take particular care not to use words like "dark" or "black" to connote questionably motivated things ("dark arts", "black humour", simply "dark"), but one of my go-to replacements, "sinister", means "left-handed". Any alternative suggestions?

Say what you want about search, that's actually what I was going for.