Categories
writing

how to write with an LLM (without losing your voice)

The apparent speed of generation can obscure how much judgement, rejection and restructuring the process still requires. The labour has not disappeared; it has shifted.

Categories
Philosophy

political sponsors of populist grievance

A movement founded on representing those with the least power increasingly depends upon support from those with the most.

Categories
Philosophy

our collective future

The objective function of civilisation is not wealth, growth or power. It is the continual reproduction of the conditions that make civilisation itself possible.

Categories
Philosophy

institutional conservatism and the failure of inquiry

The result is a civilisation increasingly confronted by novel problems, yet repeatedly encouraged to admire the elegance with which it preserves the assumptions that produced them.

Categories
Philosophy

how AI accelerates the evolution of language

AI accelerates language’s own tendency to reproduce its most probable forms through us.

Categories
power

the strange ontology of power

Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.

Categories
Philosophy

question authority

Institutions do not merely preserve knowledge. They determine what knowledge is permitted to become visible.

Categories
life

brief candle

Political absurdity generates the volatility through which technology acquires influence, while technology increasingly reproduces the conditions that keep political absurdity alive.

Categories
cybernetics

simple, simpler, simplistic

The persistence of populist political narratives as a function of transmissibility explains how and why verifiable truth becomes secondary in public debate.

Categories
Philosophy

enlightenment

Enlightenment begins where the search for certainty ends.

Categories
cybernetics

selling subscription selves

We no longer simply use technology, we now continuously rebuild ourselves and our lives into forms it can recognise, predict and sell.

Categories
cybernetics

dire straits: the economics of delay

Mechanisms created to manage a recurring condition may become dynamically coupled to, and dependent upon, the continued existence of that condition.