Beatrice Marovich

There are so many reasons for people to be suspicious of one another right now. It’s tiring. I think we are all weary.

The Cuteness Trap: Do Animals Make AI Disarming? I FOUND ITALIAN BRAINROT not because it emerged magically in my TikTok feed, as many strange things do, but because I went looking for it.

Yes, I wrote something about brainrot. Yes, I know you may find this cringe. But I wrote a whole dissertation about the way animals shape culture. I see it happening now, with AI & can’t help worrying that our attachments to nature might be used make us more comfortable with the new unrealities.

I have sometimes stopped where I am and listened to passages over and over again so I can copy them down.

And he will make it a new national holiday; Undead Day

Health care always seems to be a weak spot for republicans

Maybe the writer had an AI hangover

We’re back to using paper again on campus, and the debates are heating up in the faculty copy room.

Unknowing is a Technology for the Digital World Surviving the new unrealities

Maybe you’ve seen those viral TikTok bunnies, on trampolines? If you have, don’t judge me, but I was briefly fooled by them.

I wrote about thieves of joy, and how those unknowing bunnies are a little icon of this moment: one where our sense of reality is starting to glitch.

*through slop

Professors are being encouraged to assign less reading material, because the kids can’t process it. But I am genuinely concerned about kids losing the ability to effectively skim: a crucial navigation skill.

Preference-based scrolling through slip doesn’t teach this.

Friction is Therapeutic Against easiness

I’ve started to feel like friction (something I’ve never particularly liked) has become a weird attractor for me. It’s like some mineral that I’m missing from my diet, and I have to eat bitter things in order to get it.

I will admit that there are many instances where I am OK with (or even in favor of) shearing down text. Indeed, this article would probably benefit from some editing! But I find the idea that a thick book is “unreadable” to be a bad one.

Coming Soon: The Homework Machine Most education technologies are invited in by schools. But generative AI crashed the party.

Trailer is out! This summer we're releasing a seven episode limited series podcast on AI in schools called The Homework Machine. Its based on over 100 interviews with teachers and students, and the student interviews especially are funny, gut-wrenching, real talk from the youth.

compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting why the death of nuance should scare you -your fav gen z philosopher xx

If I could like this ten times, I would. Reading it felt like a big, long, yes. Thinking about having my students read it in the fall.

Yes! And I have admittedly been drawn to read sooo many books simply because I wanted to better understand a particularly compelling person’s mind!

Watching People Read (Interiority After Mystery I) A series on inner life and algorithms

"I am less like a moth, when I read a book, and more like a mammal."
I always love @beamarovich.bsky.social's work, and I can't wait to read more of her reflections on mystery and others' interior lives in the digital age.

Watching People Read (Interiority After Mystery I) A series on inner life and algorithms

This is an experiment in thinking out loud. If you’re curious about the shifts we’re living through, and interested in thinking about their subtler effects, I hope you join me!

I’m launching a new series on my Substack, which I’m calling Interiority After Mystery, to explore how digital life is reshaping what it means to think, feel, and pay attention. It’s a reflection on what might be getting lost in the transitions we’re living through. And what might be transmuted.

But, below the cynical surface, I think it’s also an indicator of broader cultural shifts in terms of how we read and think, and how we experience inner life in the first place.

Performative reading is getting dragged online. In part, it’s triggering suspicion: there’s a lot of moral outrage about technology, so it’s a good time to virtue signal with a book.

Thank you for reading! Hope you find it useful

Beatrice Marovich on Substack Exbodiment: I love that way of putting it. I agree that this is a practice that’s at risk right now. “Language is humanity’s superpower. Without it, culture, cultural evolution, global cooperation, ...

Exbodiment: I love that way of putting it. I agree that this is a difficult, and deeply intuitive, practice that’s at risk right now.

AI and the Illusion of Religious Neutrality Even ChatGPT can see its religious bias. Why can't we?

AI like ChatGPT is trained to follow a protocol when they talk about religion: no bias, no advocacy (essentially no theology). But ChatGPT admits that complete neutrality might be impossible. What happens when a machine built for objectivity starts doing theology anyway?

Nightmare stuff!

In my zombie era The third stage of culture in the age of infinite information

“If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.”

I just picked my 9 year old daughter up from summer camp this weekend, and I can’t look at news about the Texas floods without crying.

The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland from the Philosophical Research Society panel with Tara Isabella Burton, MemeAnalysis, and Gary Lachman

“What people describe as ‘the end of the Internet’ isn’t a real end. We are waking up—the Otherworld’s glamor has faded and we are coming to in the mortal world.”

Loved this; though I’m pretty convinced that otherworlds are a feature of our mortality, not a bug.

But he also makes the point (which I agree with) that AI is doing the work of exposing the incredible rot in American education.