Anatomy of an AI Coup
Elon Musk and DOGE's AI plans are not at all about efficiency, but about centralizing power to a small group of technical elites. A sample:
Eryk Salvaggio
A Fork in the Road
AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches.
spawning
Are Other AIs Possible?
We are seeing a generation of tools built without critically rethinking the purposes they are meant to serve or their role in the broader world. Could we do it differently?
The Ugliest Thing San Francisco Ever Built
I have a new article in Tech Policy Press about infrastructure, AI, urban renewal projects and other public works efforts that ended up creating social and physical burdens due to overreach. Here's how it starts: A day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump was joined in the White
A Culture Inside
On David Lynch, AI, and the Myth of Automated Interiority My closest real-life encounter with David Lynch was getting into a Lyft that had just dropped him off at the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return. A friend and I had planned a trip to Snoqualmie, WA to go to
barthes
Data Prior to Language
If the author is dead, why isn't the LLM?
Dance Like You Don't Have a Body
When Disembodied Systems Want You to Move Note: The following video contains images of AI-generated bodies which some have found deeply un-nerving. If that's not your bag, don't click. In my early 30s I came to realize I had lived through severe bouts of depersonalization growing
It's Interesting Because
On NotebookLM, Fauxthority & Science Fiction 💡Design is storytelling meant to orient people to strange new tech by anchoring them in familiar terms. In that sense, it is a kind of science fiction. Whenever I talk positively about Gen AI, it means going very narrow, at the exclusion of a
Things I Did in 2024
Writing, Talks & Miscellanea A collection of writing, art and sounds I've worked on this year. Writing I've written quite a few pieces for Tech Policy Press this year. The Original Sin of Generative AI Should images of child abuse circulated online be commercialized? If we
Things I Read in 2024
A Partial List of Writing on Generative AI There has been some great critical writing about Generative AI this year. This is a long post with many quotations that tries to give a snapshot of what people – or at least I – was thinking about in 2024. I've broken
Slop Infrastructures 5 & 6
AI Populism and Slop as Symptom 💡This week was an experiment in multi-part publishing. Slop Infrastructures was shared in three parts, this is the third. You can read part one and two here, and parts three and four here. PART FIVE SPARKLE WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGER "Now, I must
Slop Infrastructures 3 & 4
Weaponized Slop If the purpose of a system is what it does, then the purpose of AI infrastructure is the production of AI slop. 💡This week, I'm trying something new. I'll be e-mailing smaller sections of a single piece, Slop Infrastructures, each day. This includes part