Category: Art
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mixing McLuhan and Marx (Butlerian coda)
Sometimes you write a thing in a fit of emotional response, and then the universe sidles up, says “oh, that pushed your buttons, did it?” and offers you another hit, and you demonstrate your own weakness to yourself once again, returning like a dog to its own vomit, because it’s just too damned perfect an…
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Butlerian jihad (slight return)
I have mostly tried to avoid both consuming and contributing to The “AI” Discourse, having in essence made my point almost a year ago and encountered little since then that has served to do anything but reinforce my feelings on the matter. But I’m breaking that fast for this observation, which is really (and perhaps…
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a fundamental shift in our understanding of where ecofiction might productively occur
Some interesting thoughts at LARB from one Martin Dolan on open-world games like the new Zelda as ecofictional media. I haven’t played any of the Zelda games—and as I remarked to Jay Springett a while back, I sometimes feel like the only person in the universe who has never been involved with that franchise, though…
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political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level
After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…
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being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things
Via yer man Jay Springett, a gloriously excoriating piece of writing by Sam Kriss. After quoting a Warhol interview snippet which ends with Andy agreeing with the interviewer that Pop Art is all about “liking things”, and that liking things is being like a machine, “because you do the same thing every time. You do…