Links this week: 4
A thin batch over this holiday week, but quite representative of the topics I’m interested in:
- The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz – Looks at the rise of compulsive, celebratory consumers of pornography and how they represent the ideal customers of the big internet companies, passive consumers of content anchored in front of the screen. When you can have anything you want, what will you choose to consume? To what will you grant your attention, and are you in control of your attention? In the last hundred or so years, we have gone from being surrounded by and paying attention to the physical world around us (aside from time spent with books or paintings) through cinema and TV being able to transport us to other places and now to the telephone in our pockets with which we can see essentially anything in the history of culture to now, with AI, anything imaginable or promptable.
- SPACE TYPE GENERATOR – A wonderful tool for producing strange, animated text. I spent quite a bit of time playing with AI image generation this week, imagining “Slow Like Whisky” transforming from art deco to high-tech typography upon a background of synapses morphing into computer circuitry, but these experiments talk to me much more
- The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman – I also spent a lot of time experimenting with Claude Code. I am not a programmer, but with this tool, for the first time in my life, I can produce rich web applications. But I begin to experience Gorman’s point about how converting my imagined use cases into programmable concepts is not as simple as it seems.
- Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life – Dead center of what I’m thinking about here and what it means to be conscious in this overwhelmingly online world. Here, checking your social media updates is like smoking, achieving an immediate satisfaction that leaves you back at square one 30 minutes later. Yet these thin desires and their optimized release are being funneled to us through our phones and other screens. Contrast this with the “think desires” that are inconvenient, that take time, but which move us forward.
Leave a Reply