Category: Social Theory

  • mining our collective childhood for wistful cultural trinkets

    Metaphor is a powerful tool, and I’m a big fan of it, but metaphor is also a magickal working; if you keep describing an angry, capricious god, you’ll sure as shit get one.

  • vibeshifty: on Adam Curtis

    It’s as if he has elected to haunt his own work, which—for someone who is very much a part of the extended Fisherverse—is a curious choice, almost a voluntary diminishment.

  • international police cops

    I have long been aware that the reason spam emails such as 419 scams are so poorly written is to filter for, uh, low-information voters, shall we say—those who are more likely to follow the entire phishing chain, if they’re insufficiently (media) literate to recognise the initial contact as spurious.

  • help us elaborate upon what we are trying to say

    I don’t think it’s difficult to foresee the effects [of LLMs] on academic knowledge production at all, as the effects outside of the academy are glaringly obvious: I mean, have you tried searching the internet recently?

  • easy solutions to problems of unfathomable scale

    Offered without comment: The modern condition consists of a constant self-infantilization, of any number of “non-adulting” activities. The main being, of course, plugging into a dopamine casino right before going to sleep and right upon waking up. At least a morning cigarette habit in 1976 gave one time to look at the world in front…