Pinboard (robertogreco) https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/ recent bookmarks from robertogreco On Doing Nothing: Finding Inspiration in Idleness, by Roman Muradov (2018) | Chronicle Books 2026-06-27T23:13:55+00:00 https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/on-doing-nothing robertogreco idleness romanmuradov slow productivity optimization philosophy art writing eccentrics creativity walking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6e7d2455d8c7/ Jerry's Map 2026-06-24T07:41:46+00:00 https://www.jerrysmap.com/ robertogreco maps mapping fiction jerrygretzinger obliquestrategies art brianeno henrydarger making imagination creativity rules systems systemsthinking games play gaming worldbuilding arts accretion persistence peoplemakegames lore change random randomness uncertainty unrest future disorder order cards carddecks productivity surpise mortality death collage diaries howwewrite writing memory generativeart generative https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9099a592d543/ He Won’t Stop Building a Map to an Imaginary Place - YouTube 2026-06-24T07:40:50+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N7B9b0GQ robertogreco jerrygretzinger maps mapping fiction obliquestrategies 2026 art brianeno henrydarger making imagination creativity rules systems systemsthinking games play gaming worldbuilding arts accretion persistence peoplemakegames lore change random randomness uncertainty unrest future disorder order cards carddecks productivity generativeart generative https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6ac8c23a8f07/ Address to Revolutionaries of Algeria and of All Countries | libcom.org 2026-06-12T01:37:06+00:00 https://libcom.org/article/address-revolutionaries-algeria-and-all-countries robertogreco"Proletarian revolutions . . . pitilessly scoff at the hesitations, weaknesses and inadequacies of their first efforts, seem to throw down their adversary only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again formidably before them, recoil again and again before the immensity of their tasks, until a situation is finally created that goes beyond the point of no return." --Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Comrades, The collapse of the revolutionary image presented by the international Communist movement is taking place forty years after the collapse of the revolutionary movement itself. This time gained for the bureaucratic lie -- that supplement to the permanent bourgeois lie -- has been time lost for the revolution. The history of the modern world pursues its revolutionary course, but unconsciously or with false consciousness. Everywhere there are social confrontations, but nowhere is the old order destroyed, not even within the very forces that contest it. Everywhere the ideologies of the old world are criticized and rejected, but nowhere is "the real movement that suppresses existing conditions" liberated from one or another "ideology" in Marx's sense of the word: ideas that serve masters. Revolutionaries are everywhere, but nowhere is there any real revolution. The recent collapse of the Ben-Bellaist image of a quasi-revolution in Algeria is a striking example of this general failure. The superficial power of Ben Bella represented the moment of rigid balance between the movement of the Algerian workers toward the management of the entire society and the bourgeois bureaucracy in the process of formation within the framework of the state. But in this official balance the revolution had nothing with which to further its objectives -- it had already become a museum piece -- whereas those in possession of the state controlled all power, beginning with that fundamental repressive instrument, the army, to the point of finally being able to throw off their mask, i.e. Ben Bella. Two days before the putsch, at Sidi Bel Abbes, Ben Bella added the ridiculous to the odious by declaring that Algeria was "more united than ever." Now he has stopped lying to the people and the events speak for themselves. Ben Bella fell as he had reigned, in solitude and conspiracy, by a palace revolution. He was ushered out by the same forces that had ushered him in: Boumédienne's army, which had opened the road to Algiers for him in September 1962. Ben Bella's regime ratified the revolutionary conquests that the bureaucracy was not yet able to repress: the self-management movement. The forces so well hidden behind the "Muslim Brother" Boumédienne have this clear goal: to eliminate all self-management. The June 19th Declaration sums up the policy of the new regime with a mixture of Western technocratic jargon and bombast about enforcing Islamic moral values: "We must put a stop to the current stagnation, which is already manifesting itself in lowered productivity, decreasing profitability and a disturbing withdrawal of investments," while "keeping in mind our faith, our convictions and the secular traditions and moral values of our people." The astonishing acceleration of practical demystification must now serve to accelerate revolutionary theory. The same society of alienation, of totalitarian control (here the sociologist predominates, there the police), and of spectacular consumption (here the cars and gadgets, there the words of the venerated leader) reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated creativity, the project of everyone's control of all levels of their own history. This is the demand in acts of all proletarian revolutions, a demand until now defeated by the specialists of power who take over revolutions and turn them into their own private property. To revive and bring into the present this inseparable, mutually illuminating project and critique entails appropriating all the radicalism borne by the workers movement, by modern Western poetry and art (as preface to an experimental research toward a free construction of everyday life), by the thought of the period of the supersession and realization of philosophy (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx), and by the liberation struggles from the Mexico of 1910 to the Congo of today. To do this, it is first of all necessary to recognize, without holding on to any consoling illusions, the full extent of the defeat of the entire revolutionary project in the first third of this century and its official replacement, in every region of the world and in every domain of life, by delusive shams and petty reforms that camouflage and preserve the old order. The domination of bureaucratic state-capitalism over the workers is the opposite of socialism -- this is a fact that Trotskyism has refused to face. Socialism exists wherever the workers themselves directly manage the entire society. It therefore exists neither in Russia nor in China nor anywhere else. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were defeated from within. Today they provide the Western proletariat and the peoples of the Third World with a false model which actually serves as a mere counterbalance to the power of bourgeois capitalism and imperialism. A resumption of radicality naturally requires a considerable deepening of all the old attempts at liberation. Seeing how those attempts failed due to isolation, or were converted into total frauds, enables one to get a better grasp of the coherence of the world that needs to be changed. In the light of this rediscovered coherence, many of the partial explorations of the recent past can be salvaged and brought to their true fulfillment (the liberating content of psychoanalysis, for example, can be neither understood nor realized apart from the struggle for the abolition of all repression).(1) Insight into this reversible coherence of the world -- its present reality in relation to its potential reality -- enables one to see the fallaciousness of half-measures and to recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the operating pattern of the dominant society -- with its categories of hierarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes -- reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation. Moreover, the material development of the world has accelerated. It constantly accumulates more potential powers; but the specialists of the management of society, because of their role as guardians of passivity, are forced to ignore the potential use of those powers. This same development produces widespread dissatisfaction and objective mortal dangers which these specialized rulers are incapable of permanently controlling. The fundamental problem of underdevelopment must be resolved on a worldwide scale, beginning with the revolutionary overcoming of the irrational overdevelopment of productive forces in the framework of the various forms of rationalized capitalism. The revolutionary movements of the Third World can succeed only on the basis of a lucid contribution to global revolution. Development must not be a race to catch up with capitalist reification, but a satisfaction of all real needs as the basis for a genuine development of human faculties. New revolutionary theory must move in step with reality, it must keep abreast with the revolutionary praxis which is starting up here and there but which yet remains partial, mutilated and without a coherent total project. Our language, which will perhaps seem fantastic, is the very language of real life. History continues to present ever more glaring confirmations of this. If in this history the familiar is not necessarily known, it is because real life itself only appears in a fantastic form, in the upside-down image imposed on it by the modern spectacle of the world: in the spectacle all social life, including even the representation of sham revolutions, is written in the lying language of power and filtered by its machines. The spectacle is the terrestrial heir of religion, the opium of a capitalism that has arrived at the stage of a "society of abundance" of commodities. It is the illusion actually consumed in "consumer society." The sporadic explosions of revolutionary contestation are countered by an international organization of repression, operating with a global division of tasks. Each of the blocs, or of the spinoff splinters of blocs, ensures the lethargic sleep of everyone within its sphere of influence, contributing toward maintaining a global order that remains fundamentally the same. This permanent repression ranges from military interventions to the more or less complete falsification practiced today by every constituted power: "The truth is revolutionary" (Gramsci) and all existing governments, even those issuing out of the most liberatory movements, are based on lies inside and out. It is precisely this repression that constitutes the most resounding verification of our hypotheses. Revolutionary endeavors of today, because they have to break all the rules of false understanding imposed by the "peaceful coexistence" of reigning lies, begin in isolation, in one particular sector of the world or in one particular sector of contestation. Possessing only the most rudimentary conception of freedom, they attack only the most immediate aspect of oppression. As a result, they meet with the minimum degree of aid and the maximum of repression and slander (they are accused of rejecting one existing order while necessarily approving of an existing variant of it). The more difficult their victory, the more easily it is confiscated by new oppressors. The next revolutions can find aid in the world only by attacking this world as a whole. The freedom movement of the American blacks, if it can assert itself incisively, will call into question all the contradictions of modern capitalism; it must not be sidetracked by the "black nationalism" and "black capitalism" of the Black Muslims. The workers of the United States, like those in England, are engaging in "wildcat strikes" against the bureaucratized unions that aim first of all at integrating them into the concentrated, semiregulated capitalist system. It is with these workers and with the students who have just won their strike at the University of California in Berkeley that a North American revolution can be made; and not with the Chinese atom bomb. The movement drawing the Arab peoples toward unification and socialism has achieved a number of victories over classical colonialism. But it is more and more evident that it must finish with Islam, an obviously counterrevolutionary force as are all religious ideologies. It must grant freedom to the Kurdish people. And it must stop swallowing the Palestinian pretext that justifies the dominant policy in the Arab states -- a policy that insists on the destruction of Israel and thereby perpetuates itself since this destruction is impossible. The repressive forces of the state of Israel can be undermined only by a model of a revolutionary society realized by the Arabs. Just as the success of a model of a revolutionary society somewhere in the world would mean the end of the largely sham confrontation between the East and the West, so would end the Arab-Israel confrontation which is a miniature version of it. Revolutionary endeavors of today are abandoned to repression because it is not in the interest of any existing power to support them. So far, no practical organization of revolutionary internationalism exists to support them. We passively watch their combat and only the delusory babble of the UN or of the specialists of "progressive" state powers accompanies their death throes. In Santo Domingo US troops dared to intervene in a foreign country in order to back up fascist army officers against the legal government of the Kennedyist Caamano, simply for fear that he would be overwhelmed by the people he had had to arm. What forces in the world took retaliatory measures against the American intervention? In the Congo in 1960 Belgian paratroopers, UN expeditionary forces and the Mining Association's tailor-made state [Katanga] broke the impetus of the people who thought they had won independence, and killed Lumumba and Mpolo. In 1964 Belgian paratroopers, American transport planes, and South African, European and anti-Castroist Cuban mercenaries pushed back the second insurrectional wave of the Mulelists. What practical aid was provided by "revolutionary Africa"? A thousand Algerian volunteers, victors of a much harder war, would have been enough to prevent the fall of Stanleyville. But the armed people of Algeria had long been replaced by a classical army on lease to Boumédienne, who had other plans. The next revolutions are confronted with the task of understanding themselves. They must totally reinvent their own language and defend themselves against all the forms of cooption prepared for them. The Asturian miners' strike (virtually continuous since 1962) and all the other signs of opposition that herald the end of Francoism do not indicate an inevitable future for Spain, but a choice: either the holy alliance now being prepared by the Spanish Church, the monarchists, the "left Falangists" and the Stalinists to harmoniously adapt post-Franco Spain to modernized capitalism and to the Common Market; or the resumption and completion of the most radical aspects of the revolution that was defeated by Franco and his accomplices on all sides -- the revolution that realized truly socialist human relationships for a few weeks in Barcelona in 1936. The new revolutionary current, wherever it appears, must begin to link up the present contestatory experiences and the people who bear them. While unifying such groups, it must at the same time unify the coherent basis of their project. The first gestures of the coming revolutionary era embody a new content, both visible and hidden, of the critique of present societies, and new forms of struggle; and also the irreducible moments of all the old revolutionary history that has remained in abeyance, moments which reappear like ghosts. Thus the dominant society, which prides itself so much on its constant modernization, is going to meet its match, for it is at last beginning to produce its own modernized negation. Long live the comrades who in 1959 burned the Koran in the streets of Baghdad! Long live the workers councils of Hungary, defeated in 1956 by the so-called Red Army! Long live the dockers of Aarhus who last year effectively boycotted racist South Africa, in spite of their union leadership and the judicial repression of the Danish social-democratic government! Long live the "Zengakuren" student movement of Japan, which actively combats the capitalist powers of imperialism and of the so-called "Communist" bureaucracies! Long live the workers' militia that defended the northeastern districts of Santo Domingo! Long live the self-management of the Algerian peasants and workers! The option is now between the militarized bureaucratic dictatorship and the dictatorship of the "self-managed sector" extended to all production and all aspects of social life. SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL Algiers, July 1965 (circulated clandestinely) [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE] 1. "The discoveries of psychoanalysis have, as Freud suspected, turned out to be unacceptable for the ruling social order -- or for any society based on repressive hierarchy. But Freud's 'centrist' position, stemming from his absolute, ahistorical identification of 'civilization' with repression by exploitation of labor, and thus his carrying out of a partially critical research within an uncriticized overall system, led psychoanalysis to become officially 'recognized' in all its degraded variants without being accepted in its central truth, namely its potential critical use. This failure is of course not exclusively attributable to Freud himself, but rather to the collapse in the 1920s of the revolutionary movement, the only force that could have brought the critical findings of psychoanalysis to some fulfillment. The subsequent period of extreme in reaction in Europe drove out even the partisans of psychoanalytic 'centrism.' The psychoanalytic debris who are now in fashion (in the West, at least) have all developed out of this initial capitulation, in which an unacceptable critical truth was turned into acceptably innocuous verbiage. By surrendering its revolutionary cutting edge, psychoanalysis exposed itself both to being used by all the guardians of the present Sleep and to being disparaged for its insufficiencies by run-of-the-mill psychiatrists and moralists." (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 63.) "Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], who here as elsewhere seems to think that it suffices to speak of something in order to have it, vaguely blathers on about 'imagination' in an attempt to justify the gelatinous flabbiness of his thought. He latches onto psychoanalysis (just as does the official world nowadays) as a justification of irrationality and of the profound motivations of the unconscious, although the discoveries of psychoanalysis are in fact a weapon -- as yet unused due to obvious sociopolitical reasons -- for a rational critique of the world. Psychoanalysis profoundly ferrets out the unconscious, its poverty and its miserable repressive maneuvers, which only draw their force and their magical grandeur from a quite banal practical repression in daily life." (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 79.) Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology)."]]> situationist 1965 algeria revolution thirdworld mexico congo workers left repression society radicalism capitalism commodities abundance antoniogramsci oppression blacknationalism blackmuslims kurds dominicanrepublic africa latinamerica southafrica japan corneliuscastoriadis keknabb psychoanalysis dictatorship denmark spain españa barcelona franco houariboumédiène mauricempolo patricelumumba franciscocaamaño mulelists islam hierarchy hierarchies china russia ussr sovietunion imperialism socialism hegel ludwigfeuerbach totalitarianism creativity life living consumption consumerism sidibelabbes ahmedbenbella sidibelabbès freud karlmarx https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ce4fc6dd5c08/ idle.news — On the Difference Between Rest and Idleness 2026-06-09T21:27:15+00:00 https://idle.news/blog/on-the-difference-between-rest-and-idleness/ robertogreco“Rest is permitted because it returns you improved. Idleness is suspect because it might not return you at all.” — House Rule."]]> idleness unproduct nonproduct rest capitalism production productivity slow unschooling time wastingtime leisure artleisure leisurearts freetime stillness performance boredom creativity work labor https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ac17ef018faf/ Hurry slowly 2026-06-09T07:11:20+00:00 https://austinkleon.com/2017/11/08/hurry-slowly/ robertogreco2017 austinkleon slow creativity festinalente coritakent davidmccullogh thoreau jocelynglei lyndabarry robinsloan sistercorita slowness waltermurch aldusmanutius erasmus johnsteinbeck junotdíaz https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9b5877687c61/ Trauma is a Time Machine: A Cinematic Primer with Kwasu D. Tembo - YouTube 2026-06-08T05:32:55+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1-hhZUcGJY robertogrecoKwasu D. Tembo unites approaches from disciplines as wide-ranging as physics, mathematics, cinema, philosophy, and media theory to pose critical questions concerning time, change, and (un)becoming in contemporary time-travel cinema. In his analyses of 21st-century cinematic time-travel narratives, Tembo situates human life in time as a palimpsest, with time acting as scriptor and stylus. A time machine, then, functions as a fantasy that allows for this pace to be slowed or accelerated so as to appear entirely suspended, with the potentials of the “Now” (re)opened to the traveler. As the manipulation of time lends the traveler increased agency-and perhaps the conditions to see themselves more clearly amid a claustrophobic sea of information and content-Tembo contends that we must carefully consider the psycho-emotional affectivity of both the motivations and the potentially traumatic consequences of such a jarring shift in perspective. The results lend critical insight into human understandings of how we experience time and, ultimately, what these understandings permit and disallow in terms of how (it is) to be in time. Phasmid Press: https://phasmidpress.org/ "]]> timetravel film fiction sciencefiction scifi trauma acidhorizon 2026 kwasutembo philosophy death temporality therapy experience healing lajetée chrismarker agency freewill determinism nihilism physics filmtheory value chronomics responsibility capitalism longnow accelerationism charlesdickens now present labor work nostalgia backtothefuture gillesdeleuze deleuze robertasparrow donnydarko enternalsunsetofthespotlessmind twelevemonkeys coherence inception interstellar primer runlolarun upstreamcolor horsegirl looper minorityreport mrnobody thejacket momento anotherearth predestination meetcute everythingeverywhereallatonce thebeast projectalmanac timecrimes timelapse safetynotguaranteed darkcity tenet sourcecode itfollows chronologicaltime continuities continuity discretion memory change individualism choice improvisation contingency disruption looping quantumphysics stephenwolfram loops repetion complexity luddism neoluddism evolution henribergson andreasmalm wimcarton future entropy computing computation g https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:98ea222f781e/ Pluralistic: Refining humanity (05 Jun 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow 2026-06-07T00:57:07+00:00 https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/05/defining-humanity/ robertogrecoBlackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'? Prince George: Ohh…'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, it’s coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, I’ve got it! B: What? PG: Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it? B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything." I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words: https://archive.org/details/the-oxford-english-dictionary-all-volumes_202208/The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20Volume%201%20-%20A%20to%20B/page/n25/mode/2up Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered. For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter." Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child. To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables"). I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever. But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles." Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness. That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it. This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are. But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself. In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process. Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do. Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions. But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player. What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human. For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person. I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious": https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/ (If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" – your mileage may vary.) For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so. Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity – not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines." Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it. But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves – making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe. One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor"). Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub! This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter. AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity. An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before": https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb That isn't to say that AI art is any good. AI may produce things that are aesthetically interesting, but it can't produce things that mean anything: https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/ But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI – like all software – is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore – but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special."]]> corydoctorow 2026 humanity rowanatkinson blackladder samueljohnson explanation computers computing literalism alphabetization databases civilization software digitization systems systemsthinking binaries spectrums agency context flexibility society societies chess creativity deeplearning ai artificialintelligence consciousness redchiang personhood corporations corporatism animals tools. submarines language morality introspection brianeno peterschmidt obliquestrategeies markzuckerberg social socializing socialization art generativeai genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:81331b45a7d7/ Twenty Five Years After Imagined Worlds, What World Are We Living In? | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review 2026-06-07T00:41:06+00:00 https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/twenty-five-years-after-imagined-worlds-what-world-are-we-living-in robertogreco eriklarson freemandyson 1995 2022 web internet online computers computing centralization decentralization bigtech thomaskuhn siliconvalley neuroscience bigdata napoleon google facebook instagram twitter freedom creativity liberty carlotaperez tolstoy anarchism openweb anarchy innovation society liberation kevinkelly 1998 coldwar rand maxplank alberteinstein ai artificialintelligence henryford quantummechanics quantumtheory quantumphysics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:567a8595579a/ How ACRONYM Changed Design: An Hour with Errolson Hugh - YouTube 2026-06-05T09:12:15+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdsGXd5enKg robertogreco errolsonhuh kensakata 2025 acronym fashion creativity design snowboarding clothing apparel 1990s 2000s williamgibson martialarts taste identity belonging uniform autonomy agency independence overengineering https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fb28762a6e7a/ Detroit Music, Creativity, Capital, & the Working Class with Hanif Abdurraqib - YouTube 2026-06-03T20:27:18+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vinqz2Fs0zA robertogreco detroit labor gentrification music 2026 hanifabdurraqib motown hiphop techno djs docuseries tv television documentary cities us art artiists musicians spaces infleunce culture culturemaking greatmigration curiosity creativity bluecollar work workers workingclass class midwest musichistory musicalhistory jaredware makc livemusic community performance venueloss musicvenues affordability urban urbanism olympia washingtonstate lineage legacy punk underground undergroundresistance place gatekeeping audience audiences radio collegeradio mentorship mentoring undergroundradio guerillaradio generations knowledge knowledgesharing intergenarational waajeed craft communalism mtv care caring bobseger atlanta sterlingtolles guiltysimpson nickspeed jdilla boldyjames maps mapmaking ethnography landscape soniclandscapes anthonybourdain memphis houston boston rap gregtate learning howwelearn solidarity politics radicalism radicalpolitics trust artmaking absurdity iloveboosters bootsriley thecoup tonimorrison dialecticalmateria https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:32e3861c6683/ Living for the City - YouTube 2026-06-03T20:27:05+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsjRzm4m1SLECMzBb96XQLA robertogreco detroit labor gentrification music 2026 hanifabdurraqib motown hiphop techno djs docuseries tv television documentary cities us art artiists musicians spaces infleunce culture culturemaking greatmigration curiosity creativity bluecollar work workers workingclass class midwest musichistory musicalhistory livemusic community performance venueloss musicvenues affordability urban urbanism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4df3b29ef103/ Opinion | How to Be Old - The New York Times 2026-05-28T05:21:16+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/opinion/aging-advice.html robertogreco rules aging oldage rogerrosenblatt 2026 elderly wisdom relationships life living virginiawoolf despair compromise benitomussolini mussolino fascism mccarthyism loyaltyoaths italy italia us mistakes failure wonder shorrow gratefulness attention well-being wellbeing immortality philiplarkin ephemerality love beauty creativity awe stuggle confidence self-realization satisfaction https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0a4418782f4e/ Sara Hendren: Who Is the Built World Actually Built For? - Art of Inquiry | Podcast on Spotify 2026-05-05T14:11:09+00:00 https://open.spotify.com/episode/11zlpahmklfgr8YOUrtLnY robertogreco sarahendren 2026 architecture design disabilities disability accessibility art bodies prosthetics sofiaodeh mayaeinhorn engineering making socialpracticeart science inquiry history conflictkitchen edibleestates socialpractice online internet covid-19 pandemic coronavirus offline social slow small audiencesofone socialjustice ai artificialintelligence technology time perception politics genai generativeai activism poetry human humanism humans howwewrite writing teaching pedagogy highered highereducation culturemaking culture life living howwelive socialmedia being waysofbeing modernity method patternrecognition krzysztofwodiczko downsyndrome interrogativedesign careers purpose meaning meaningmaking children parenting arts humanities friendship relationships leisure artleisure leisurearts identity passion expression objects affect emotions embodiment awe wonder buildings senses spirituality sacredness codeswitching artifacts translation language communication howwemake fabrication ramps risd olincollege builtwo https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0a421ccc8594/ Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling - YouTube 2026-05-03T19:43:34+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrpSp8anQM robertogreco vickyosterweil ip intellectualproperty culture film disney 2026 entertainment technology medicine popularculture imagination howwewrite writing howweread reading anarchism storytelling looting law legal policestate police policing filmmaking characters marvel monopolies music books covid-19 coronavirus pandemic vaccines pharmaceuticals consolidation markets capitalism innovation constitution us pirating literature copyright productivity creativity suppression francises nintendo matel videogames sequels hegemony ideology nuclearfamily individualism politics propaganda china homogenization finance financialization franchises merchandising ows occupywallstreet fandom freddiegray 2000s 2018 2012 thailand 2014 censorship hungergames guyfawkes resistance revolution davidgraeber stuarthall art artworld commodification gamegate starwars fans fanculture johnboyega daisyridley labor work workers power control socialfabric fanfiction communities community mutualaid 2020 philadelphia losangeles waltdisney mccarthyism son https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5393b930b1ac/ The Music Video Is Dead, Long Live The Music Video (Season Premiere) - YouTube 2026-04-18T22:46:27+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQB2mvUvROw robertogrecopatrickwillems film filmmaking 2026 1990s mikemills spikejonze michelgondry musicvideos music mtv jamiroquai jonathanglazer heelys biggiesmalls smashingpumpkins backstreetboys georgesméliès moby davidfincher michaelbay antoinefuqua jonathandayton valeriefaris markromanek francislawrence zacksnyder simonwest conair rickrolling memes russellmulcahy sightonsound buggles hanszimmer stevebarron direstraights marylambert jean-baptistemondino tobehooper bobrafelson briandepalma johnlandis martinscorsese johnsingleton 1980s lassehallström hollywood goreverbinski ridleyscott tonyscott alanparker adrianlyne propagandafilms creativity dominicsena davidlynch maximililianpotter stevegolin alexproyas fgarygray charlesstoneiii paulhunter josephkahn hypewilliams internet web online okgo napster markwebb markfischbach palmpictures chriscunningham davemeyers gusvansant trishsie sarahboardman ads advertising promotion cinema video audio imagery art shortfilm productplacement samuelbayer melinamatsoukas daniels danielkw https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:85a1d400bf47/ Ten years of "Alaska": Maggie Rogers on going viral and singing for 200,000 protestors - YouTube 2026-04-18T04:31:04+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK5y9N1kuNk robertogreco maggierogers 2026 music songwriting musicmaking pharrell charlieharding switchedonpop fame lyrics virality stephencolbert activism art fear protest rest creativity writing collaboration howwewrite howwework protestsongs hope artmaking courage well-being wellbeing oppression donaldtrump freespeech utopia resistance dancing community solidarity togetherness social meaning meaningmaking systems change adaptability innovation growth life living meditation slow time productivity stockandflow rejuvenation goals work divinityschool gradschool society education conviviality solitude process prince spirituality joanbaez https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:af8943c86286/ Graphic design schools are teaching tech, but are they teaching taste? 2026-04-16T04:00:18+00:00 https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/pov-graphic-design-schools-are-teaching-tech-not-taste-creative-industry-150426 robertogreco design graphicdesign graphics education designeducation work creativity taste tardeschools technology labor liberalarts purpose industry https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:04f361d15a38/ Oakland and the Ghosts of Urbicide 2026-04-06T19:45:24+00:00 https://placesjournal.org/article/oakland-and-the-ghosts-of-urbicide/ robertogreco brandisummers oakland bayarea 2206 geography racialcapitalism capitalism race racism blackness urban urbanism cities place power plunder inequality joy pride recovery reclamation history urbicide rootedness space socialexperience experience martincoward location michaeldawson oppression indentity lakemerritt lyndonjohnson lbj ronaldreagan billclinton georgehwbush warondrugs waronpoverty jamesbaldwin katherinemckittrick washingtondc baltimore detroit stephengraham urbanrenewal waronterror waroncrime crime drugs us policy politics placelessness averygordon greatmigration sanfrancisco westernaddition hunterspoint migration bayview ww2 wwii violence fillmoredistrict fillmore housing ingleside economics police policing discrimination sfsu blackpanthers blackpantherparty blackpower contracostacounty alamedacounty liberalism progressive progressivism schools schooling publicschools oaklandraiders jeanquan bobbyseale tupacshakur hiphop creativity language blackoakland bellhooks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c5f653d95ee5/ Flea | Where Everybody Knows Your Name - YouTube 2026-03-29T16:03:38+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM402KmkXOk robertogreco flea woodyharrelson teddanson spirituality 2024 prayer life living creativity relationships losangeles trauma experience providence clarity music rhcp redhotchilipeppers art arts emotions vulnerability teamcoco religion fpjourne watches bach humility howwework jazz trumpet yoga surfing basketball striving care caring presence yearning franciscogoya prado duality lausd ronaldreagan prop13 proposition13 musiceducation publicschools education horacetapscott listening love pain suffering gratitude self-love drugs meditation silverlakeconservatoryofmusic https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a195e89b20b9/ Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom | Open Culture 2026-03-25T03:14:30+00:00 https://www.openculture.com/2026/03/lynda-barry-how-the-smartphone-is-endangering-three-ingredients-of-creativity.html robertogrecoThe phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. — Lynda Barry In the spring of 2016, the great cartoonist and educator, Lynda Barry, did the unthinkable, prior to giving a lecture and writing class at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She demanded that all participating staff members surrender their phones and other such personal devices. Her victims were as jangled by this prospect as your average iPhone-addicted teen, but surrendered, agreeing to write by hand, another antiquated notion Barry subscribes to:
The delete button makes it so that anything you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so nothing new has a chance. Writing by hand is a revelation for people. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a different way of thinking that goes along with them.
Barry—who told the Onion’s AV Club that she crafted her book What It Is with an eye toward bored readers stuck in a Jiffy Lube oil-change waiting room—is also a big proponent of doodling, which she views as a creative neurological response to boredom:
Boring meeting, you have a pen, the usual clowns are yakking. Most people will draw something, even people who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And everybody has something they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my little guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eyeballs, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doodle during those meetings?” I believe that it’s because it makes having to endure that particular situation more bearable, by changing our experience of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the difference between, if you’re not doodling, the minutes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doodling, it’s more like Brillo. It’s not much better, but there is a difference. You could handle Brillo a little longer than the cheese grater.
Meetings and classrooms are among the few remaining venues in which screen-addicted moths are expected to force themselves away from the phone’s inviting flame. Other settings—like the Jiffy Lube waiting room—require more initiative on the user’s part. Once, we were keener students of minor changes to familiar environments, the books strangers were reading in the subway, and those strangers themselves. Our subsequent observations were known to spark conversation and sometimes ideas that led to creative projects. Now, many of us let those opportunities slide by, as we fill up on such fleeting confections as funny videos and all-you-can-eat servings of social media. It’s also tempting to use our phones as defacto shields any time social anxiety looms. This dodge may provide short term comfort, especially to younger people, but remember, Barry and many of her cartoonist peers, including Daniel Clowes, Simon Hanselmann, and Ariel Schrag, toughed it out by making art. That’s what got them through the loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom of their middle and high school years.
"The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form." - Adrian Tomine, introduction to 32 Stories
Barry is far from alone in encouraging adults to peel themselves away from their phone dependency for their creative good. Photographer Eric Pickersgill’s Removed imagines a series of everyday situations in which phones and other personal devices have been rendered invisible. (It’s worth noting that he removed the offending articles from the models’ hands, rather that Photoshopping them out later.) Computer Science Professor Calvin Newport’s book, Deep Work, posits that all that shallow phone time is creating stress, anxiety, and lost creative opportunities, while also doing a number on our personal and professional lives. Author Manoush Zomorodi’s TED Talk on how boredom can lead to brilliant ideas, below, details a weeklong experiment in battling smartphone habits, with lots of scientific evidence to back up her findings. [embed: "How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas | Manoush Zomorodi | TED" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c73Q8oQmwzo "Do you sometimes have your most creative ideas while folding laundry, washing dishes or doing nothing in particular? It's because when your body goes on autopilot, your brain gets busy forming new neural connections that connect ideas and solve problems. Learn to love being bored as Manoush Zomorodi explains the connection between spacing out and creativity."] But what if you wipe the slate of digital distractions only to find that your brain’s just… empty? A once occupied room, now devoid of anything but dimly recalled memes, and generalized dread over the state of the world? The aforementioned AV Club interview with Barry offers both encouragement and some useful suggestions that will get the temporarily paralyzed moving again:
I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I never know. I oftentimes have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start drawing the pictures as if I can… I hear a sentence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the beginning of the first sentence, then I just… I write really slow. So I’ll be writing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the panel. Then, when it gets to the end, usually I’ll know what the next one is. By three sentences or four in that first panel, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the drawing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on another page! Or when I’m drawing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say something, but then I’ll hear Marlys say something back. So once that first sentence is there, I have all kinds of choices as to where I put my brush. But if nothing is happening, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start messing around.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017."]]> lyndabarry slow smartphones creativity loneliness uncertainty boredom technology productivity art artmaking 2016 2026 manoushzomorodi 2017 howweread howwewrite howwemake making drawing observation noticing https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:91d02c342f88/ The Human Skill That Eludes AI - The Atlantic 2026-03-21T21:38:59+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-creative-writing/686418/ robertogreco jasminesun ai artificialintelligence 2026 creativity writing howwewrite https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e0f9667f44d8/ Post-Industrial Hardcore: LOT-EK’s love of leftovers – KoozArch 2026-03-21T05:03:09+00:00 https://www.koozarch.com/interviews/post-industrial-hardcore-lot-eks-love-of-leftovers robertogreco lot-ek adatolla giuseppelignano shumibose architecture design environment reuse materials creativity shippingcontainers art https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e1fdd5a7030e/ A Conversation with Jerome Bruner - Beautiful Eccentrics 2026-03-13T05:09:02+00:00 https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-jerome-bruner robertogreco jeromebruner pablohelguera 2026 learning howardgardner cognition reggioemilia children childhood education knowledge dialogue process howwelearn nielbohr bauhaus imagination creativity wendywoon play playfulness curiosity art experience https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:866d3ac4654a/ Why Suno Won't Produce the Next Charlie Parker 2026-03-10T06:32:08+00:00 https://timrequarth.substack.com/p/why-suno-wont-produce-the-next-charlie robertogreco music ai artificialintelligence generativeai musicmaking jazz 2026 timrequarth charlieparker lesteryoung countbasie marylouwilliams kansascity 1930s theloniousmonk effergeware kennyclarke scottjoplin tomturpin erikhoel consumption creativity lizpelly spotify brianeno jonhopkins vienna ccgong culture genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e49038b4990f/ 3,000 languages are dying, but more are being invented 2026-03-09T23:12:20+00:00 https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/3000-languages-are-dying-but-more robertogreco karsonelmgrenn 2026 language languages diversity culture communication grammar jargon slang esperanto jamesflynn russian chinese mandarin english hindi civilization society hermanmelville eskimo oldirish change humanities psycholinguistics online internet web spanish español tevfikesenç caucasuses ubykh johncolarusso memes communities welsh finnish suzetteelgin johnquijada ithkuil ethnolingusitics cicero linguistics community french conlangs margaretransdell-green invention creativity orkish elvish adamaleksic tokipona hopi kinyarwanda quenya tuyuca turkish sonjalang culturaldiversity metaculus guuguyimithirr tzeltal romanjakobson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:593024dc6f3b/ Symbiotic Resonances: Sounding More-than-human Worlds | Center for the Study of World Religions 2026-03-09T19:00:17+00:00 https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/publications/plants-fungi-2025/symbiotic-koeva robertogreco via:javierarbona 2025 sound morethanhuman multispecies listening elitzakoeva plants fungi anthropocene sympoiesis ursulaleguin ursulakleguin donnaharaway lynnmargulis scottgilbert birdsong birds animals sensors senses plankton stevenfield acoustics acoustemology epistemology trees daviddunn isabellestengers monicagagliano heidiappel rexcocroft zoëschlanger resonance riccupples communication oceans atmosphere ryuichisakamoto environment music activism ecology buddhism andreitarkovsky shirotakatani christiansaedet biosignals worldmaking improvisation risk speculative human-animalrelations human-animalrelationships human art wind water coexsitence solidarity hope haptics participatory restoration foucault michelfoucault resistance bodies humility openness stefanhelmreich creativity sounds audio indeterminacy johncage yellowmagicorchestra jenniegottschalk https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6952e2446ab8/ Instrumentalisation is making everything a means to an end | Aeon Essays 2026-02-24T18:02:56+00:00 https://aeon.co/essays/instrumentalisation-is-making-everything-a-means-to-an-end robertogreco meaning meaningmaking goodlife life livign progress modernity instrumentalization values liberation living 2026 julianbaggini gretchenrubin happiness truth longevity creativity deborahjenkins utllity philosophy purpose weatlh health success nature art friendship aristotle money augustenburroughs elizabethlindsey mentalillness mentalhealth anxiety kant nietzsche flourishing naturalworld antonchekhov value efficiency optimization capitalism enlightenment commonsense self-expression self-determination democracy consumptions consumerism reducationism economics psychology society socialbonds social joy culture davidhume relationships immanuelkant hume https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8f778abe6892/ Highlights from Stanford's AI+Education Summit 2026-02-21T21:44:00+00:00 https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/highlights-from-stanfords-aieducation robertogrecoIn the last year or so, it’s really started to feel like we have 45 minutes together and the together part is what’s really mattering now. We can have screens involved. We can use AI. We should sometimes. But that is a human space. The classroom is taking on an almost sacred dimension for me now. It’s people gathering together to be young and human together, and grow up together, and learn to argue in a very complicated country together, and I think that is increasingly a space that education should be exploring in addition to pedagogy and content." ... "Look—this is more or less how the same crowd talked about MOOCs ten years ago. Copy and paste. And AI tutors will fall short of the same bar for the same reason MOOCs did: it’s humans who help humans do hard things. Ever thus. And so many of these technologies—by accident or design—fit a bell jar around the student. They put the kid into an airtight container with the technology inside and every other human outside. That’s all you need to know about their odds of success. It’ll be another set of panelists in another ten years scratching their heads over the failure of chatbot tutors to transform K-12 education, each panelist now promising the audience that AR / VR / wearables / neural implants / et cetera will be different this time. It simply will."]]> danmeyer 2026 ai artificialintelligence edtech education schools schooling learning howwelearn teaching howweteach chatbots miriamrivera learningloss michaeltaubman llms openai khanacademy googel anthropic chatgpt cuilhermelichand creativity humanism pedagogy society johnhennessy moocs rebeccawinthrop susannaloeb neeravkingsland shantanusinha human humans learnlm mooc https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:feda499f59bb/ An AI-Maxi New Year - by afra - Concurrent 2026-02-18T16:34:33+00:00 https://afraw.substack.com/p/an-ai-maxi-new-year robertogreco china ai artificialintelligence future jiazhangke society technology seedance 2026 afrazhaowang afrawang unitree bytedance robots automation film filmmaking benfleck mattdamon creativity siliconvalley claude anthropic ip intellectualproperty copyright openclaw technooptimism palmerluckey fredgao llms generativeai xiaokai liangzhu alibaba dongbeirenaissance rustbelt genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:68f846b97be9/ Do You Need a Writer’s Room? | The New Yorker 2026-02-18T07:23:51+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-you-need-a-writers-room robertogreco writing howwewrite 2026 joshuarothman creativity https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7f690dbd69a2/ A Tale Of Two First Thursdays — Roborant Review 2026-02-16T04:08:22+00:00 https://www.roborantreview.com/reviews/a-tale-of-two-first-thursdays robertogreco johnvochatzer 2026 art arts sanfrancisco via:subtopes theater museums culture housing ellisact tenderloin galleries firstthursdays tenderloinartwalk lowerpolk sffirstthursday civicjoyfund intothestreets mannyyekutiel katybirnbaum mothbellygallery mothbelly sfmoma financialdistrict abraallan marketstreet artwalk chrislarsen tlcbd artwashing billionaires waymo gentrification urban urbandevelopment development asgerjorn situationist situationistinternational 1964 2020 daniellurie money power conviction compassion homelessness lowerpolkartwalk doordash corporations corporatism diy corporatization commerce capitalism creativity artmaking sros technology lowernobhill nobhill westernaddition property realestate raimondoforlin government governance streetart hobbies 2021 nepotism moralbankruptcy castro 2022 bayarea storefronts harveymilkdemocraticclub lowkeyskateshop tiltedbrim fleetwood rosebudgallery richmonddistrict vacanttovibrant oewd bobfisher mariekerothschild 2023 downtown 2024 2025 bushwick brooklyn losangel https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:29198ed9f000/ Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future - YouTube 2026-02-09T16:51:18+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk robertogreco adamneely suno ai artificialintelligence art artmaking music musicmaking slow friction chatgpt howwethink thinking loneliness narcissism work labor effort isolation friendship influences copyright deskilling learning howwelearn humanism human humans tecnhooptimism movefastandmakethings futurism technology songwriting culture relationships community movefastandbreakthings efficiency impatience patience optimization dystopia craft mikeyshulman howwemake making howwewrite writing rickrubin taste skill skills rolemodels inspiration lineage influence improvisation alanjacobs evil techmooptimism siliconvalley arthurcclarke ip intellectualproperty streaming internet web online creativity sharedexperience experience disruption fun humanity chess play craftsmanship turingtest jamming sychophancy capitalism technodeterminism technologicaldeterminism tressiemcmillancottom control power marketing mohinidey education vc venturecapital artseducation musiceducation italianfuturism filippomarinetti marcandreessen nickland pr https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:33c7ccb6fe11/ Why So Many Writers Are Athletes - The Atlantic 2026-02-05T04:48:45+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/01/writing-exercise-movement-creativity/685634/ robertogreco bonnietsui writing howwewrite bodies exercise creativity athletes 2026 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c6742aa80d6f/ True mastery demands going beyond the rules to learn for yourself | Aeon Videos 2026-02-04T21:35:16+00:00 https://aeon.co/videos/true-mastery-demands-going-beyond-the-rules-to-learn-for-yourself robertogreco 2026 taoruspoli rules heidegger hubertdreyfus philosophy jazz music creativity predictability being time thinking waysofbeing risk human humans humanism technology flamenco 2010 film documentary experience interaction art education skills risktaking mastery https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c747247cb42b/ Sure, AI can ‘do’ writing. But memoir? Not so much | Aeon Essays 2026-01-25T03:27:16+00:00 https://aeon.co/essays/sure-ai-can-do-writing-but-memoir-not-so-much robertogreco computers computing ai artificialintelligence 2026 richardbeard human humans humanism alanturing geoffreyjefferson chatgpt clude generativeai llms royalsociety writing howwewrite sydfield imagination creativity christophervogler maxbennett literature philipsidney philipstone adalovelace charlesbabbage mariannemoore gregbaxter art artmaking denisdiderot shakespeare intelligence memoir life living experience existence senses andrewhodges turingtest memory biography stories storytelling self consciousness genai diderot georgesperec https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1d7ec65c6a77/ Why the Do Nothing Challenge Doesn’t Do Much for You 2026-01-18T06:03:46+00:00 https://nautil.us/why-the-do-nothing-challenge-doesnt-do-much-for-you-1262005/ robertogreco donothing boredom creativity jamesdanckert attention agency 2026 meaning meaningmaking rawdogging woopsyang tiktok distraction overstimulation self-control https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e6ed3ad20bbf/ San Francisco's Tech Billionaires Don't Care About Your Art School 2026-01-18T01:07:51+00:00 https://hyperallergic.com/san-franciscos-tech-oligrachs-dont-care-about-your-art-school/ robertogreco christianfrock arteducation via:javierarbona cca sanfrancisco billionaires highered highereducation education art artschool vandebilt davidhowse millionaires inequality wealth wealthdisparity artists philanthropy crypto cryptocurrencies humanities shaliniagrawal bayarea siliconvalley westcoast grassroots us barackobama creativity culture chrisjohnson ccac history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2d2c36bd4ee4/ How Creators Are Preserving Oral Traditions in the South - YouTube 2026-01-16T08:06:14+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu-5Qqr2Ss0 robertogreco south oraltradition storytelling 2026 music us documentary culture history memphis jeremysimien bryanrobertson yobreezye appalachia creativity pride community louisiana https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:44dba776e3d4/ We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone | Well actually | The Guardian 2026-01-15T20:52:16+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped robertogreco future psychology theresamacphail progress 2026 polycrisis stevehimmelstein overstimulation news economics instability politics creativity hardship thinking howwethink meaning meaningmaking viktorfrankl crisis halherschfield emotions behavior imagination geopolitics environment climate climatechange globalwarming socialscience predictability danielgilbert danielknight greece 2010 community timeframe time greatplague compassion https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f3058b9084bc/ Manic technology 2026-01-14T21:18:32+00:00 https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/manic-technology/ robertogreco robinsloan ai artificialintelligence coding manic 2026 depression bubbles howwethink thinking creativity llms deanball chatbots https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b4035476c8ab/ McSweeney’s Books: A Q&A with Tucker Nichols and McSweeney’s Art Director Sunra Thompson about the New Book, Mostly Everything: The Art of Tucker Nichols - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency 2026-01-13T16:54:13+00:00 https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-q-a-with-tucker-nichols-and-mcsweeneys-art-director-sunra-thompson-about-the-new-book-mostly-everything-the-art-of-tucker-nichols robertogrecotuckernichols books art 2025 creativity sunrathompson publishing artmaking artmarket https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a01b5bbf58a2/ Everything Was Already AI - YouTube 2026-01-09T19:34:30+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg robertogreco ai artificialintelligence unlearningeconomics llms evolution context language naturalselection economics capitalism economy culture slop aislop marketing film filmmaking music freemarkets friedrichhayek markets behavior circulareconomy adaptation morality generativeai privateequity technology information arvindnarayanan sayashkapoor dandavies graceblakeley timo'reilly elonmusk openai chatgpt stockmarket herbertsimon jamescscott seeinglikeastate data stevekeen markschatzker decisionmaking prediction nathantankus accounting benjaminkuipers institutions culturaltechnologies states edzitron geoffreyhinton alexanderavila commodification timcook markzuckerberg peterthiel satisficing satisfaction loxalmaxima culturaltechnology simplicity massproduction familiarity complexity exploitation finance conventionalwisdom experimentation trevornoah jeromepowell communication interpretation languages conformity bubbles aibubble lossiness idiosyncrasy art humanity enshittification chatbots bots media corporations corporatism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f6f026e3046d/ Substack's Stacked Debates: Utopia - Should Robots take our jobs? - YouTube 2026-01-01T04:26:57+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Agss3ldWw robertogreco noahsmith brianmerchant 2025 robots automation work labor ai artificialintelligence aislop slop managment capital capitalism darioamodei samaltman anthropic openai chatgpt claude profits control surveillance wealth wealthconcentration inequality writing translation mediocrity creativity generativeai socialsafetynet jobs economics economy luddites luddism technophobia neoluddites neoluddism society democracy genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3283e8b4efa1/ Still Asking Berry’s Question - Front Porch Republic 2025-12-30T20:14:19+00:00 https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2025/12/still-asking-berrys-question/ robertogreco andypetro wendellberry 2025 modernity economics economy labor life living automation progress humanism human humans humanity drudgery liberation attention ai artificialintelligence technology luddism neoluddism luddites neoluddites slow small efficiency friction work vocation meaning meaningmaking abstraction disconnect disembodiment embodiement allthesenses outsourcing dehumanization knowledgework society aimlessness addiction politics despair hysteria mechanization ubi universalbasicincome christianity play hardfun seriousplay relationships leisure art artleisure leisurearts creativity narcissism theology agency industrialism subservience tools righteousness local systems opacity systemsthinking smallness transparency responsibility purpose algorithms belonging authority morality idols idolatry monetization capitalism humanresources hr stewardship place upskilling consumption consumerism farming cars families canon replacement spirituality interdependence god business machineintelligence craft craftsmanship https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cc540d34cbe1/ The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want - The American Prospect 2025-12-25T16:39:33+00:00 https://prospect.org/2025/12/11/sinners-hit-hollywood-didnt-want/ robertogreco ryancoogler film aadowd racism capitalism hollywood 2025 sinners creativity race warnerbros profitability formulaity us blackart art artmaking slop marvel https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8cc1dc7a7480/ I was eating a bacon egg and cheese scallion pancake when a bloke handed me a waffle man I'm overcooked 2025-12-25T16:22:06+00:00 https://aadillpickle.substack.com/p/i-was-eating-a-bacon-egg-and-cheese robertogreco socialmedia 2025 internet online maincharactersyndrome process art performance charilixcx brainrot dopamine attention behavior media cigarettes smoking counterculture culture society howweread howewrite reading writing sitclub weirdness homogeneity heterogeneity creativity place situated https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cdd84709c5a3/ Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?—Asterisk 2025-12-24T06:28:54+00:00 https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/is-the-internet-making-culture-worse robertogreco celinenguyen 2025 criticism culture decline wdavidmarx creativity art alexkitnick chaimgingold seeinglikeastate adammorgan christinesmallwood françoistruffaut emiliebickerton claudechabrol jean-lucgodard jacquesrivette éricrohmer frenchnewwave film aoscott edfancher triciaromano peterschjeldahl viviangornick lynnyaeger belllabs kitrachlis maryperotnichols danwolf robertcaro richardgoldstein janejacobs robertchristgau gregtate jazz music susanbrownmiller davidschneiderman luciantruscottiv anildash internet web onlibe jeffbezos laurenepowelljobs hiltonals ai artificialintelligence lauriestone siamichel adlanjackson richardbrody thurstonmoore lukeottenhof charolotteklein cthinguyen vc venturecapital merveemre ryanruby bendavies reubenson theoellinballew franlebowitz davidantin johanafateman online artcriticism siliconvalley jamescscott https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6b2db304813f/ Extended interview: Ethan Hawke - CBS News 2025-12-15T06:53:32+00:00 https://www.cbsnews.com/video/extended-interview-ethan-hawke/ robertogreco ethanhawke 2025 film acting art poetry theater broadway deadpoetssociety tracysmith realitybites standbyme riverphoenix leonardodicaprio jacknicholson ai artificialintelligence generativeai creativity performance human humans humanism writing howwewrite robinwilliams genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3c8de911354b/ Ethan Hawke on "Blue Moon," and taking nothing for granted - CBS News 2025-12-15T06:53:18+00:00 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ethan-hawke-on-blue-moon-and-taking-nothing-for-granted/ robertogreco ethanhawke 2025 film acting art poetry theater broadway deadpoetssociety tracysmith realitybites standbyme riverphoenix leonardodicaprio jacknicholson ai artificialintelligence generativeai creativity performance human humans humanism writing howwewrite robinwilliams genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:af2c844c6404/ From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production under Capitalism, by Michael Chanan (2022) - Pluto Press 2025-12-04T06:47:31+00:00 https://www.plutobooks.com/product/from-printing-to-streaming/ robertogreco 2022 michealchanan marxism culture culturalproduction digitalage consumption culturecreation cultureconsumption technology photography soundrecording news printing orality capitalism karlmarx creativity labor commodification countercurrents analog digital autonomy aesthetics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:af1702fdbab8/ Blank Spaces, Radicalized Offlineness, Curious Protagonists — Roden Newsletter Archive 2025-11-29T00:18:11+00:00 https://craigmod.com/roden/109/ robertogrecoThe first step in reversing cultural stagnation is to accept that artistic invention is a social good. And like so many other social goods, it isn’t necessarily going to have its production prioritized by the market. We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than overly market-tested products. Reading Blank Space didn’t necessarily “radicalize” me, but it made me overtly grateful for the work I’m doing: work grounded in the world, physicality, relying on social media as little as possible, operating at “human scale” and creating as many “durable” and “deep” connections as possible, attempting to elevate everyone who’s involved. I’ve been lucky. I’m able to walk, to write, to photograph, and then collate all that into printed books. It’s easier than ever to sell printed books online thanks to companies like Shopify. And it’s easier than ever to form a relationship with a fulfillment warehouse, set up a DHL account, and ship the things around the earth. Global shipping is the 10th wonder of the world. I love that I work with talented printers and binders, paying their employees well. I love that I have readers who are OK with paying what my books cost. I like that the arc of the work is slow and loping, that daily updates might happen in spurts, but they are 2,000-5,000 words spurts, amidst an outsized walk, more like an ascetic ritual, calming, fullness-giving, the opposite of whatever it is you have to access to upload daily TikToks. Work like mine has almost no representation in David’s book. There’s a ruthlessness that’s taken hold across all strata of cultural making (and life itself). Everything turned into a casino, “traps” galore. Billions as the only goal. Achieved celebrity? Start a coffee brand (or gin brand, or tequila brand; I’m shocked nobody is selling their own cigarettes). Leave “nothing on the table.” Epicurean maximizing. That sort of thing. The whole world in a swivet about every dumb breath by some dumdum. AI now turning the future protean. Models upending models within days. Solid ground made liquid for the next decade. David’s book is funny. I mean, it’s heartbreaking, mainly. But you’ll laugh as your soul is pummeled. David quotes all the fools of the last twenty-five years. They are happy to shoot themselves in their own feet, again and again. The book is most tragic when it dips into politics. In our On Margins chat, we mention Obama, how his ascension symbolized some “completion” — “it was love triumphing over hate, and peace over war, and all sorts of things of the way we were told how things were going to play out because of the natural order of the world, that there would be some sort of correction and this was the correction.” It’s surreal now to think of that world in 2010. The iPhone basically still new. Obama in the White House. The full conversion of everything online to brain traps, to teleportation heroin, still years away. Back when you actually had to “follow” folks to see their content. 2010, just fifteen years ago, but about seven generations of mental life. Back when a trillion-dollar company was a pipe dream (Apple being the first to hit that number, in 2018; now it feels like a monthly announcement, Nvidia hitting $5T a month ago), back when you didn’t nab a $100B valuation as a startup before you even launched a product. Back when Apple’s own apps weren’t loaded with ads. Back when not everything was “recurring revenue” driven. Back when even non-institutional investors had a chance to get in on a company like Facebook or Google while they were still in ascendancy. Still, around that (now seemingly Brigadoonish) time, I already had a growing sense of doom / skepticism around how much tech money was being bandied about:
Craig: Early 2008, 2009, 2010, I was very negative on Facebook. Very early because I remember explicitly that Facebook was eating up all the designers, uh, from Brooklyn who were doing genuinely interesting work. I remember being really depressed about that. But if Facebook offers you a million dollar salary — especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, it’s hard to turn down. But it felt like there was this incredible compromise that had started to happen.
And David, expanding on this point:
David: This is a really important point of the 21st century, which is I graduated in 2001, and I don’t think anyone around me, even the money hungry people were like, I’m going to be a billionaire. No, it was just on zero people’s minds. And the best was like, dude, did you know you could go work for an investment bank and within five years you could be making $1 million?
Anyway, you should absolutely read David’s book. It deals with all of this and more. His ability to synthesize vast swaths of history and criticism into sane, compressed chapters is inspiring. It’s a fun read, and may radicalize you, too, in better directions. Or just reaffirm the path you’re already on. Or just get you to step offline for a few moments."]]> craigmod wdavidmarx culture 2025 scale scaling human humanism society creativity internet web online shipping nvidia siliconvalley facebook meta capitalism google hipsters design history criticism art media film tv television writing howwewrite humanscale slow small making makers culturalproduction attention https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2c122488761b/ Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, by W. David Marx (2025): 9780593833995 | Penguin Random House 2025-11-28T23:41:41+00:00 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/769187/blank-space-by-w-david-marx/ robertogrecoThe first step in reversing cultural stagnation is to accept that artistic invention is a social good. And like so many other social goods, it isn’t necessarily going to have its production prioritized by the market. We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than overly market-tested products. Reading Blank Space didn’t necessarily “radicalize” me, but it made me overtly grateful for the work I’m doing: work grounded in the world, physicality, relying on social media as little as possible, operating at “human scale” and creating as many “durable” and “deep” connections as possible, attempting to elevate everyone who’s involved. I’ve been lucky. I’m able to walk, to write, to photograph, and then collate all that into printed books. It’s easier than ever to sell printed books online thanks to companies like Shopify. And it’s easier than ever to form a relationship with a fulfillment warehouse, set up a DHL account, and ship the things around the earth. Global shipping is the 10th wonder of the world. I love that I work with talented printers and binders, paying their employees well. I love that I have readers who are OK with paying what my books cost. I like that the arc of the work is slow and loping, that daily updates might happen in spurts, but they are 2,000-5,000 words spurts, amidst an outsized walk, more like an ascetic ritual, calming, fullness-giving, the opposite of whatever it is you have to access to upload daily TikToks. Work like mine has almost no representation in David’s book. There’s a ruthlessness that’s taken hold across all strata of cultural making (and life itself). Everything turned into a casino, “traps” galore. Billions as the only goal. Achieved celebrity? Start a coffee brand (or gin brand, or tequila brand; I’m shocked nobody is selling their own cigarettes). Leave “nothing on the table.” Epicurean maximizing. That sort of thing. The whole world in a swivet about every dumb breath by some dumdum. AI now turning the future protean. Models upending models within days. Solid ground made liquid for the next decade. David’s book is funny. I mean, it’s heartbreaking, mainly. But you’ll laugh as your soul is pummeled. David quotes all the fools of the last twenty-five years. They are happy to shoot themselves in their own feet, again and again. The book is most tragic when it dips into politics. In our On Margins chat, we mention Obama, how his ascension symbolized some “completion” — “it was love triumphing over hate, and peace over war, and all sorts of things of the way we were told how things were going to play out because of the natural order of the world, that there would be some sort of correction and this was the correction.” It’s surreal now to think of that world in 2010. The iPhone basically still new. Obama in the White House. The full conversion of everything online to brain traps, to teleportation heroin, still years away. Back when you actually had to “follow” folks to see their content. 2010, just fifteen years ago, but about seven generations of mental life. Back when a trillion-dollar company was a pipe dream (Apple being the first to hit that number, in 2018; now it feels like a monthly announcement, Nvidia hitting $5T a month ago), back when you didn’t nab a $100B valuation as a startup before you even launched a product. Back when Apple’s own apps weren’t loaded with ads. Back when not everything was “recurring revenue” driven. Back when even non-institutional investors had a chance to get in on a company like Facebook or Google while they were still in ascendancy. Still, around that (now seemingly Brigadoonish) time, I already had a growing sense of doom / skepticism around how much tech money was being bandied about:
Craig: Early 2008, 2009, 2010, I was very negative on Facebook. Very early because I remember explicitly that Facebook was eating up all the designers, uh, from Brooklyn who were doing genuinely interesting work. I remember being really depressed about that. But if Facebook offers you a million dollar salary — especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, it’s hard to turn down. But it felt like there was this incredible compromise that had started to happen.
And David, expanding on this point:
David: This is a really important point of the 21st century, which is I graduated in 2001, and I don’t think anyone around me, even the money hungry people were like, I’m going to be a billionaire. No, it was just on zero people’s minds. And the best was like, dude, did you know you could go work for an investment bank and within five years you could be making $1 million?
Anyway, you should absolutely read David’s book. It deals with all of this and more. His ability to synthesize vast swaths of history and criticism into sane, compressed chapters is inspiring. It’s a fun read, and may radicalize you, too, in better directions. Or just reaffirm the path you’re already on. Or just get you to step offline for a few moments." "Pop Culture Got Stale. Counterculture Went Right-Wing. How the rise and fall of the nihilist hipster gave us the cruel reactionaries of today." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/books/review/culture-right-wing-david-marx.html https://archive.ph/idxdR "Make Culture Weird Again Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than the boring stuff." https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/blank-space-book-excerpt-culture/685037/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/blank-space-book-excerpt-culture/685037/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZzZAypQ-DyUUwPxyZrMsWaI https://archive.ph/KJmQM ]]]> wdavidmarx culture society 2025 stagnation art film tv television k-pop sociology economics politics snobbery liberalim liberals crypto cryptocurrencies nepobabies nepotism clarity tastemakers trends creativity community values neoliberalism capitalism profit profits twenty-firstcentury hispters nihilism reactionaries craigmod https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:f71c57b0c5e9/ Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog 2025-11-27T05:55:29+00:00 https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/alchemy robertogreco ai artificialintelligence economics technology history joshcollingsworth art creativity generativeai friction difficulty alchemists shortcuts gold salt rarity slop aislop music humanism human humans work labor effort connection content genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4456bbefe1b8/ What's the difference between an artist and a creator? 2025-11-26T04:14:59+00:00 https://www.ystrickler.com/whats-the-difference-between-an-artist-and-a-creator/ robertogreco art artmaking creativity commercialart hollisframton yanceystrickler creators artists davidchoe money expression markets institutions self-directed bendavis economics capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7f3383b094dc/ What '67' Reveals About Childhood Creativity - Atlas Obscura 2025-11-24T05:08:59+00:00 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/67-meme-childrens-lore-iona-peter-opie robertogreco ionaopie peteropie children childhood 2025 allegrarosenberg creativity folklore memes culture society play https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b908c39221d0/ Why AI Should Pay Us for Being Human | The Futurology Podcast - YouTube 2025-11-18T20:23:26+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdelPJTWRo robertogreco jaronlanier 2025 music technology ai artificialintelligence nealstephenson snowcrash clararockmore alanturing alexanderscriabin eglenweyl waltdisney disney fantasia philipglass power profit profits society grantslater dawnnakagawa siliconvalley spirituality cosmology humans silence human creativity patterns https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e2536f58b4f1/ Against Brainrot — how to read & write more online - YouTube 2025-11-17T19:36:45+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LnHruJPPsY robertogreco celinenguyen jasminesun art literacy literature technooptimism siliconvalley optimism contrarianism ai artificialintelligence progress culture media technology internet web online substack socalmedia literarycriticism humanities philosophy compsci walterbenjamin specialization howweread howwewrite karlmarx dialecticalmaterialism davidharvey reading education learning howwelearn criticaltheory stanford communication access accessibility sensemaking makingsense generalists lingo translation jargon ideology worldview disruption information knowledge abstraction decontextualization algorithms amateurs research amateurism zeyneptufekci extremism context discovery writing geography radicalization venkateshrao consciousness metrics analytics socialmedia discourse conversation attention creativity forums hierarchy llms slop aislop economics ecosystems commercialart culturalproduction publishing excess https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b841824b184c/ Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen | PNAS 2025-11-17T19:11:49+00:00 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1404212111 robertogreco anthropology light fire 2014 pollywiessner african firelight behavior humans sotrytelling imagination creativity evolution gossip culture trust anatomy social hunter-gatherers society https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:443e0b13dfea/ Who Are We Kidding - by Damon Krukowski 2025-11-17T19:09:38+00:00 https://dadadrummer.substack.com/p/who-are-we-kidding robertogreco“All participants were asked to listen to three tracks and determine whether or not they were fully AI-generated – 97% of the respondents failed.” This isn’t the future of music. This is the now. We’re already in the Napster moment, the iPod moment, the Spotify moment with regard to AI music. It’s all around, whether you realize it or not. (97% may not be able to tell the difference, after all.) Last week Deezer also announced that 50,000 fully generative AI tracks are being uploaded to the platform each day, which accounts for more than a third of its new music. As Stuart Dredge of MusicAlly pointed out, that number is up from 10,000 tracks a day in January 2025; 20,000 in April; and 30,000 just in September. The trend hardly needs analysis. We’re already drowning in slop. Which means it’s too late for most of the conversations I hear around me about music and AI. The question isn’t what are we going to do about it. I believe the more productive conversation at this point is what are we going to do afterwards. Perhaps that’s my native optimism showing, or just diehard dialectics: AI will collapse from its own contradictions, whatever we do or don’t do about it. That doesn’t mean AI will disappear – on the contrary, it is here to stay like all technologies. The story of Pandora’s box isn’t about closing it. AI music is already a part of the technological landscape we live in; however, it won’t dominate that landscape forever. In fact, I would suggest its dominance may be very brief indeed. Why? Cause it sucks. I’m not going to link to the fully generative AI “country” song that supposedly topped a Billboard chart recently, cause I don’t want to give it any more clicks. Let’s just assume it’s as bad as you imagine, cause in fact it’s worse. As is most everything that AI churns out. It’s beyond imagination because it doesn’t come from one. And yes, I suppose it is hypothetically possible that the corporations developing AI decide to steer the tool instead toward truth and beauty. Just as it’s hypothetically possible that Spotify decides to fulfill its stated mission, “To unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creators the opportunity to live off their art.” (Still a part of their staff recruiting, believe it or not!) But come on. It’s not happening. More importantly, it already didn’t happen. When I look past AI, I feel rather cheerful. Because what AI is bad at, necessarily, is what humans are good at. Could there be a more positive development, at this absurd moment of capital spinning out of control, than a rededication to the need for human labor? Music may well again – I hope it will again – go first in this regard. Because what puts music in the forefront of so many technological trends is the same thing that rescues it each time: music is simple to make, easy to share, and universally enjoyed. Fully generative AI music will quickly fill up all the space there is for audio slop. And we can take back the rest. All we have to do is survive this moment. Stop waiting for it to happen, cause it already did. Start rebuilding. Now."]]> damonkrukowski streaming music ai artificialintelligence algorithms 2025 generativeai aislop slop spotify napster human humanism humans labor work creativity genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:193e2c22e6a9/ The Creative Connection: Jazz, Culture, and Cybersecurity – Seeline CYBER 2025-11-17T17:35:53+00:00 https://seelinecyber.wordpress.com/2025/02/03/the-creative-connection-jazz-culture-and-cybersecurity/ robertogreco seelinecyber 2025 creativity jazz music culture cybersecurity yussefdayes https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:75122127f54e/ AI Grief Observed 2025-11-13T04:53:10+00:00 https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-grief-observed/ robertogreco There is no good way to say this — when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough. The first time I heard the line, I knew already what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to the right distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence — there is no good way to say this — struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation; its precision has stayed with me. > The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair where my husband should sit and took the other chair in the living room. My heart already began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen all stood.” "There is no good way to say this." There is no easy way to talk about this. There are acceptable words, I suppose, but they are never "good," never remotely satisfying or comforting -- not to say, not to hear. By "this," I mean death obviously. By "this," I also mean other traumas, other endings. By "this," I mean what might feel like or look like the end of education – an end not spoken about with the solemnity of the policemen but rather with a real jubilation from technologists and venture capitalists, who gloat about disruption. I want to start here – by “here,” I mean the recognition that there is no good way to talk about death, no good way to talk about grief, even though I am going to try very hard to do so: to talk about grief – mine, yours, students’, teachers' – and tie it to “artificial intelligence.” I want to talk about grief and “the end." I want to talk about the end of the world – I don't, really; I want to talk about what feels like the end of the world and what might be, should we continue to build data centers, invest in this rapacious technology, and ignore climate change, literally the end of the world; I want to talk about the destruction of the future (our own, our children's), about the end of democracy, the end of education. I want to talk about loss. A loss that is, perhaps, an abandonment. Perhaps an abdication. An absence. An erasure. A trauma. Death, mass death -- literal and metaphorical. “There is no good way to say this.” I have read a lot of memoirs about dying and about grieving. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, of course. Geraldine Brooks’ Memorial Days. C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (a phrase I’ve borrowed for the title of this talk). Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. I could go on and list so many wonderful, painful books. And yet, despite some of the greatest writers having tried, “there is no good way to say this” -- I know this. I know this intimately. Yet I still search for some good words to have been said, to have been written. Words to comfort. Words to find meaning. Words to make sense. Words to not feel so utterly alone, at the abyss abyssmal, because those we love most have left us, and the future we thought we would share is gone too. “There is no good way to say this," the police told Yiyun Li. I don’t think that the coroner said those exact words to me, although he might have, when, in May 2020, I received the phone call that my own son had died. I do not remember the words, but I remember the feeling. Everything tilting and spinning and spiraling down. The blood drains, your stomach sinks. All words and feelings of such profound, indescribable, unspeakable loss. May 2020 was, if you’ll recall, the early days, the early weeks of the COVID lockdown. I was in Oakland, California; Isaiah was in Seattle, Washington. He died alone in his apartment of an opioid overdose. A few weeks later, OpenAI released GPT-3. Our tools are cultural not merely technological, so while many people want to frame the emergence of generative AI as simply the latest development in the long history of computers, of artificial intelligence -- transformers, neural networks, tokens, and so on -- we have to remember that what emerges is not just a matter of engineering. It's a matter of markets and politics and ideology and culture. I think it matters that GPT was released during the COVID pandemic (and ChatGPT shortly "after"), when many of us were stuck at home, isolated and interacting with one another almost entirely through screens. I think it matters that all this talk about the potential for "AI" to do our jobs comes after labor made some important (albeit tentative) gains during this period: the whole notion of "essential worker"; the successful push for unionization in some sectors; the astonishment from many parents after trying to facilitate their own children's schooling -- all those “teachers should be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year” posts on social media; demands during and after the pandemic to continue to work from home, to have more control over space and place and time. AI is a backlash. AI is anti-worker. I always feel the need to remind people that neither robots nor AI are coming for our jobs. But management probably is. I think it matters that this latest AI push, with generative AI's penchant for “bullshit,” follows on the heels of growing mis- and disinformation campaigns online. This was precisely the realization many people had come to after Donald Trump's first election as President and during his first term in office. And this was precisely what LLMs have been trained upon. I think it matters that the technology industry relies on deception and obfuscation and markets its new bullshit machines right as the leaders of this country have openly embraced being liars, cheats, and frauds, have openly rejected knowledge and expertise. I think it matters that as we have lost faith in institutions over the course of the past few decades -- in the church, in the media, in schools, in science, in medicine (particularly in public health and in vaccines) -- that we are now promised an oracle that can deliver instant and easy answers. I think it matters that AI -- so utterly opaque in its algorithmic predictions and decision-making -- is the ultimate unaccountability machine. We expect more from technology than we do from each other, the psychologist Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Alone Together in 2011. I think it matters that trust and solidarity have been eroded for a while now (if they ever really existed or were encouraged in this country). I think it matters that economic inequality has in the last few decades exploded, that the promises to students in particular – get good grades and you'll get into a good school, graduate from a good school and you'll get a good job – feel pretty empty. AI is a "normal technology," the artificial intelligence professors Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (authors of AI Snake Oil) have argued. But what we have come to see as "normal" is, in fact, utterly abhorrent, abysmal. Yiyun Li writes a lot in her book on learning to inhabit the abyss of grief. What does it mean to normalize the abyss? AI is the symptom of a broken world. AI is the symptom; and AI is the disease. Generative AI emerged during a global pandemic -- a global trauma of mass death (1.2 million people in the US died of COVID, and about 7 million globally -- these are, no doubt, figures that undercount how many actually died of the disease, let alone those like my son who died during that time period of other causes -- overdoses, suicide, murder, and deaths related and unrelated to the pandemic). Mass trauma, mass death and, as such, mass grieving. But it was, at the time and still to this day, a grief interrupted, a grief buried, a grief denied, a grief (contrary to C. S. Lewis's phrasing) unobserved. We were often not able to bury our dead, not able to hold funerals, not able to have wakes, not able to observe the rituals of death, not able to gather, to bring food, to hold and comfort one another. And when we were told the pandemic was over -- it hasn't really ended; the World Health Organization says there were around 150,000 cases of COVID reported in the last month -- we didn't deal with our trauma. We didn't deal with our grief. We were supposed to bury our feelings; we were supposed to forget. It was back-to-school, back to work, back to "normal." Or some “new normal,” now with AI – a technology that we didn't want, that we didn't ask for, and that we're told we cannot refuse. Of course, that's not quite right. We can refuse. One more correction: there was, in fact, a massive demonstration of grief – an outpouring of grieving in public – during COVID; and that was the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests that occurred in cities throughout the country particularly after the murder of George Floyd. This grief was not private or hidden; it was collective. This grief was not just personal, expressed by those impacted directly by racism and police violence; it demanded from protestors and onlookers, empathy, solidarity. This grief was expressive – even as we are always told with protest, as with grief, that that is not the “good way” to say it. The grief of Floyd’s death – and all the deaths – was not sufficient. It was not simply a marker or memorial of death; but it was an act of life, an act of repair. It was a demonstration of love and loss and fury; it was a commitment to the future. And again, technology is cultural, ideological not simply technological. It matters that generative AI emerged with or alongside -- you can decide the preposition you prefer -- a politics that is openly hostile to Black Lives Matter, that opposes diversity, equity, and inclusion. It matters that Silicon Valley companies were among the first to backtrack on their DEI initiatives, were happy to stand with Donald Trump when he proclaimed that AI needed to be purged of "ideological biases," purged of "woke." Generative AI is, with or without Trump's executive orders, a backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion, a reinscription of the words and images of white supremacist, heteronormative, Western, English-speaking capitalist patriarchy. That is the corpus that large language models have been trained on -- "the canon" (with all the copyright violations that that has entailed) as well as "the Internet" (thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of YouTube videos and YouTube comments and Reddit posts and -- with apologies to anyone this might include here this evening -- lots of very mediocre freshmen essays on the theme of family in Romeo & Juliet or the role of "states' rights" in the US Civil War). In response to a radical outpouring of love, loss, life, grief -- expressed together, embodied, on the streets -- we were presented with, forced to use in so many cases, a technology that severs us from creative expression, dignity, and truth. There is no choice, we're told. "Get over it." "Move on." One of the problems with grief, as Yiyun Li argues in her memoir, is that it's been described as a set of stages one moves through, as something that has a beginning and, significantly, an end. You will eventually, people try to tell you, "get over it." This is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's famous formulation: grief as a series of emotions that move from denial to anger, then bargaining, then depression, and finally acceptance. And even if we might've revised this progression somewhat since she published her book On Death and Dying in 1969, society still gives mourners (and not just as workers) a very limited amount of time "to deal with it" before they're expected to "move on." “There is no rush,” Yi writes, “as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.” > And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual. > I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word? Of course, we like thinking of things in stages. We like the order, we like to frame our world, our understanding of time this way -- in hours and days and seasons. We ritualize these -- indeed, that is one of the reasons why our inability to conduct the traditional practices associated with death and dying made our grief during COVID even more unbearable. Without rites and rituals, you cannot “move on.” You cannot grow or shift or change. You are stuck in the past. You are stuck. The anthropologist Victor Turner used the term “liminality” to describe the one of the key phases of rites of passage, those rituals that mark transition – not just transition into the “afterlife,” for example, but transition into adulthood or into marriage or into society. This liminal phase, as he called it, was “betwixt and between” – a period where you are in the process of becoming something new, but you’re not that new person yet, nor are you the person you were any longer. Liminality, Turner argued, was a sort of limbo – but in that limbo, something really transformational happens – something radical even in the most conservative and traditional ritual practices. Liminality is a time – and to be fair, this can be a very very very brief moment, depending on the rite of passage – of solidarity and equality and unity. Protests, for example, are liminal spaces. Education, I’d argue, also has elements of this liminality. It is a rite of passage, a ritual of becoming – you enter a child, a “fresh man” and you leave an adult. We have retained some older parts of these rituals – the cap and gown obviously, moving the tassel from one side of your head to the other. But there's more to it than just these practices. You have to believe, I’d argue, in that transformation to be able to commit yourself to the time, to the work. (Socially, culturally, politically, we have to believe it is worthwhile to send children to school, to send them to college.) But much to the detriment of learning, let alone to the survival of educational institutions, we have seen education redefined as something else -- as a product, not a process. As certification, not transformation. The liminality has been shattered; instead of ritual, society has demanded “outcomes” and “optimization.” I don’t say any of this out of nostalgia for a once-upon-a-time when college was good. Educational institutions -- whether at the K-12 or the university level -- have always always been deeply flawed, highly exclusionary, full of all sorts of machineries of bullshit. These are, as Michel Foucault reminded us, sites of discipline -- disciplining bodies and minds. But by dismantling educational institutions -- and AI is really just the latest act in a long long history of dismantling -- we are also dismantling that space for shared practice and purpose, for shared understanding -- “communitas,” Turner called it. The technology industry -- indeed, capitalism -- prefers “individualization” and “immediacy.” Certainly, it pays lip service to "community" -- Mark Zuckerberg's blah blah blah about Facebook connecting the world. When Google says it wants to organize the world's information and make it "useful," this is a very different mission than the university's. The tech industry's allegiance is to surveillance capitalism, to profit and power, not to knowledge and certainly not to people. What we are experiencing now -- with AI, with the defunding of public education and public research, with deportations and surveillance -- is more trauma, more loss, more grief. There is no silver lining here, as Yiyun Li reminds us, as much as that's offered as some tepid consolation. Grief, to reiterate, involves a loss of identity, a loss of the future -- how we imagined things would be, who we imagined we'd become. And there is no good way to say this: it will get worse. And grief doesn't get any easier -- not with the passage of time, not with the number of times one experiences it. There is no good way to say this. And yet we must always try. I can only say this, and it's not good, it's not sufficient. It's not really a satisfying way to wrap up this talk. But here we go... Grief is an expression of love. We grieve because we love, and that love does not end with death. I grieve for my son. I will grieve forever. I grieve for the future we will not share. When I talk to teachers and students alike, I hear such grief as well: grief about what AI threatens to do education, what it's already done to the work of teaching and the work of learning, the work of research and reading and writing. We grieve because we love. We grieve because we care. We grieve because we know that the machines do not, and that the community we try to foster -- on campus, in the classroom, in our scholarly works -- is threatened with erasure. We grieve because we fear forgetting; we worry that people will forget what is beautiful and what is difficult and what is joyous and what is horrible about education. We worry that, if we do not grieve, we give up the struggle to go on, to persevere, to live. But we do not, we should not grieve alone. We should not be made to feel alone, feel crazed by our grief, feel crazed for grieving. We can, we should grieve together, grieve in public, grieve in protest. Such is comfort – "com" + "fort," a word that means "with" + "strength." Technologies are often wielded in ways meant to imply that humans are weak, messy, slow, stupid, replaceable. We are strong, messy, awkward, flawed, irreplaceable. All of us. Our strength comes, in part, from this vulnerability, from our humanity. Together in the flesh. Not isolated, individualized thru some algorithm. We cannot allow systems and practices and machinery to foreclose this humanity, to automate the decisions, the expressions, the explorations that we turn to and that we struggle with in education, in this imperfect but liminal space of learning. "There is no good way to say this" but to say this: AI is the antithesis of education. It is the antithesis of the future. As such, it is a kind of epistemological death, and I recognize -- thanks to capitalism and neoliberalism and imperialism and racism -- we have long been surrounded by such efforts; we are grieving already. And yet, we go on. One final note that I think I'd be remiss not to state, even though there is no good way, or rather no polite way to say this: Some men (and I do mean mostly men) would rather spend trillions of dollars on an idea that is financially, technologically, morally, and environmentally unsustainable, they’d rather destroy democracy and destroy education and destroy the planet than just get therapy. Thank you."]]> audreywatters 2025 ai artificialintelligence grief education institutions schools schooling highered highereducation colleges universities academia edtech llms death geraldinebrooks joandidion cslewis michellezaunder helemacdonald covid-19 coronavirus pandemic screens online chatgpt opeanai donaldtrump maga trumpism robots chatbots church churches media science medicine faith trust knowledge expertise liars cheats cheating frauds fraud corruption algorithms decisionmaking snakoil arvindnatayanan sayashkapoor technology generativeai us who worldhealthorganization blacklivesmatter geogrgefloyd empathy solidarity idology siliconvalley dei diversity equity inclusion inclusivity capitalism patriarchy hereronormativity whitesupremacy creativity expression dignity truth life living loss yiyunli elizabethkubler-ross emotions 1969 2020 victorturner liminality adterlife between betweenness betwixt protest protests society social learning howwelearn teaching howweteach outcomes optimization efficiency discipline bodies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:25ac1b950024/ The Future is Mundane - Farsight 2025-11-10T10:53:55+00:00 https://farsight.cifs.dk/the-future-is-mundane/ robertogreco sarahpink anthropology everyday slow 2025 tamirasnell senses sensory multisensory futurism climatechange climate globalwarming ethnography ai artificialintelligence robotics humanism slowcity slowcities design uncertainty possibility speculation speculative socialscience cities mobility energy foresight creativity trust care caring anxiety futures future embodiment bodies sustainability reality technology society diversity human humans https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:bad7abaef898/ The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art - Big Think 2025-11-06T05:18:52+00:00 https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-ai-art/ robertogreco kenliu cinematograph cinema experimentation ai artificialintelligence poems poetry translation 2025 creativity expression georgesméliès noematograph augustelumière louislumière lumièrebrothers movement history narrative film filmmaking timeberners-lee tiktok chatgpt youtube llms language chenzi'ang wuzetian interpretation howwewrite writing languages machinelearning emilywilson subjectivity aiart art arts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4789f48f5fb2/ How AI Will Translate Human Creativity as Sci-Fi and Reality Converge | The Futurology Podcast - YouTube 2025-11-04T18:43:57+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ZR9-y4ik8 robertogreco kenliu nilsgilman ai artificialintelligence creativity human humans humanism sciencefiction scifi art audience humanity emotion language communication biography emotions storytelling vladimirnabokov conversation orality rephrasings writing howwewrite dictionaries linguistics llms context consciousness meaning meaningmaking creativewriting translation ursulakleguin ursulaleguin coding feeling legal law legalwriting process voice style ernesthemingway hemingway fiction speculativefiction technology futurism stories dreams interiority unconscious reality collectiveunconscious science frankenstein maryshelley myth fantasy mythology photography film filmmaking cinema thoughts cinematograph georgesméliès noematograph augustelumière louislumière movement lumièrebrothers history narrative though subjectivity machinelearning participation participatory mediation affordances sociability personalization proteinfolding metaphysics metaphor simulation embodiment self existence text languange adaptation inte https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1f8320e98f9e/ Extralibrary Loan: Making the Civic Infrastructure We Need 2025-11-02T20:52:41+00:00 https://placesjournal.org/article/extralibrary-loan-making-civic-infrastructure/ robertogreco shannonmattern 2025 libraries journalism place infrastructure civics creativity knowledge publicknowledge kellyjensen bookriot lukesutherland susanorlean heatherchaplin us jousrnalism whatsapp information social terryparrisjr maga ala librarians hannawiemer donaldtrump socialarchitecture everylibrary wisdom resources politics media newdeal forums johnstudebaker wpa makewith kateharlow mediaecosystems hanifabdurraqib engagement privacy integrity sustainability surveillance extraction distraction monetization collections ai artificialintelligence inevitability solidarity bannedbooks newsrooms mediacommons commons katherinevictoriacoffield seattle sandiego nyc brooklyn ballard missoula montana museums nypl undercommons collectives mutualaid resistance refusal trusts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:dba7ad9f651c/ Are Immigrants More Creative? | The MIT Press Reader 2025-10-31T06:24:10+00:00 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/are-immigrants-more-creative/ robertogreco borders creativity connection kaithsawyer immigration 2025 ericweiner art design adamgalinsky difference diversity relationships https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0b8aa68439cb/ The Decline of Deviance - by Adam Mastroianni 2025-10-29T04:21:23+00:00 https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance robertogreco adammastroianni sameness blandness difference differences conformity imagination creativity sociology trends innovation psychology culture art 2025 deviance subcultures safety crime mobility stagnation tedgioia internet web online interestingness homogenization myspace tiktok thumbnails architecture alexmurrell construction kylechayka airbnb design interiors consolidation brands branding science progress ruzandrateslo weirness academia derekthompson change technology susansontag 1965 coleporter names naming babynames henryoliver chrisdallariva katherinedee music pinterest substack danger boringness risk risktaking dangers climatechange nuclearwar authoritarianism inequality caution worry anxiety life living howwelive limitations arturodimodica capitalism choice robertputnam bowlingalone soulcycle fandom swifties taylorswift lububus cults adamaleksic brianklaas modeiocrity tseliot crackerbarrel idiosyncrasy courage wealth https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:721b5f49b6b8/ An imaginative activity | A Working Library 2025-10-26T04:58:15+00:00 https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginative-activity robertogreco mandybrown jameshillman ursulakleguin ursulaleguin 2025 work howwework knowledge imagination thedispossessed art creativity psychology dreams joy fantasy pscyhe https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:49a0b5503cfa/ A Tool That Crushes Creativity - The Atlantic 2025-10-24T19:38:29+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/ai-slop-winning/684630/ robertogreco ai artificialintelligence aislop slop 2025 charliewarzel generativeai creativity genai https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0162a91d06e2/