Philip Jeffery

Wrong From the Beginning In the first Trump term, we on the New Right felt ready to lead a new conservatism aware of the establishment's failures. What went wrong?

"Perhaps I was never looking for a 'realignment' or for any type of conservatism; perhaps I was really looking for a left."

Philip Jeffery on leaving the New Right:
www.commonwealmagazine.org/trump-new-ri...

Is AI A Ouija Board? No. Or maybe. Five theses about AI

My latest on Substack, in which I attempt to break through the mystification surrounding AI, and find that it was just people all along: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/is-ai-a-ou...

'My Five-Year-Old Could Draw This' Answering everyone's favorite objection to abstract art

My latest on Substack: a defense of abstract art, and an attack on being grown up

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/my-five-ye...

Andrew Wyeth's World Art that makes community; community that makes art

My latest Substack post, on the integral ecology of Andrew Wyeth: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/andrew-wye...

Seeing Red A thought experiment

How many words is a picture worth? I investigate, with the help of a philosophical thought experiment, over on my Substack: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/seeing-red

How To Make A Symbol Andy Warhol's humanism

A visit to Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum sparked some thoughts about labor in artistic production, and how to find humanity in a world of machine-made symbols:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/how-to-mak...

This week on my Substack, we're talking Francis Bacon and the rapture:

"The seed of the modern, in New Atlantis, which flourishes to encompass everything by the time of Left Behind, is the symbol rendered as object, as opus, as commodity."

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/the-gospel...

On this week's edition of Symbol Factory, we're looking at Fredric Jameson's account of the difference between modernism and postmodernism, and asking what art can do

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/modernpost...

Let's try thinking dialectically about how we make symbols - the internet is bad, and the internet is good. It will work itself out, and it will break itself apart. What comes after it will be bad; and it will also be good. After all, it's happened before:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/a-book-of-...

'We Might End Up With Something Revelatory' What kind of thinking do we do on the internet?

Thinking in terms of connection, resemblance, and coincidence may be our only hope of conceptualizing a world where every economy depends on every other. Love it or hate it, the internet is only teaching us how to navigate the world it itself has made.
symbolfactory.substack.com/p/we-might-e...

Introducing Symbol Factory Why write?

I am a worker in the symbol factory - the economy of news, facts, falsehoods, opinions, ads, images, and sounds that is the internet - and I don’t entirely know what that means.

I launched a Substack to figure it out. Join me here:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/introducin...