The Hungarians getting a prime minister called Peter Magyar is like the UK electing Alfred Saxon, or Arthur Albion, or Boudica Iceni

I'm something of a strava artist myself.

I had a little rant - with bonus Latin coinage! - about designers making objects friendly that have no business being made friendly exitmusic.world/dark-discourse

Dark Discourse

At SXSW recently, IDEO presented a robot pet: a furry blob designed to trigger mammalian caregiving instincts. Soft fur, leopard spots, c...

exitmusic.world

In before the hurried rebrand of “tactical nukes“ to “clean nukes“

My work colleague's AI protest children's song so deserves to go viral OMG www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdD-...

You Don't Have To

YouTube video by Ross Kirsling

youtube.com

I wrote a thing about, I dunno, the subservience of all modern ideologies to industrialism, liberalism's blindness to the baked-in nature of the oppression that enabled our story of progress, and the need for us to need each other as a way out of the torment nexus departurein.place/learning-to-...

Learning to Need Each Other

The family argument There is something that, once you see it, is hard to unsee: every major political argument of the last two centuries has been a disagreement about who should run the machine. Almo...

departurein.place

People working in tech deserve both awakening to their part in the state of the world, and also compassion for not already knowing it or knowing how to extricate themselves yet

Before the LLM craze, the “we should maybe reconsider Luddism” thing was kind of a niche topic. Now its urgency level has switched to “everything’s on fire”

Tyson Yunkaporta likes to say that the oral tradition is the ultimate data resilience strategy, which should give a decent hint as to whether physical durability or social relations are the real underpinning of resilience

All right so I spammed this out after listening to one too many A*G*I apocalypse interviews exitmusic.world/ai-researche...

AI researchers' wrong theory of cognition is making us worry about the wrong kind of AI apocalypse

I originally wrote this (in 18 minutes!) as a stream-of-consciousness Mastodon thread. Thought it might be worth putting it all together ...

exitmusic.world

I find my LLM writing radar getting stronger over time. There’s a certain brassy, self-confident style, coupled with the sense of incoherence that comes from a slightly ill-placed metaphor, or even the casual elision of meaning from a plausible but wrong choice of noun. Texts gives this off […]

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James Fairbairn@james.exitmusic.world · 9mo ago

Thanks to modern industrial technology, the midlife crisis is now available to any worker, at any age!

Capital is busy completing the construction of a no-escape two-tier economy society. And LinkedIn thought leaders think they can get in on that upper tier if they are loud enough in their support of “disruptive change”

Reading Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” and Kemp’s “Goliath’s Curse” back to back is quite a trip Recommended, so far :)

“The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” https://exitmusic.world/design-can-help-tilt-what-we-do-towards-who-we-want-to-be

Design can help tilt what we do towards who we want to be

We should design for moral coherence. If we design for anything, our designs should aim to bring our habits and actions into line with the values we truly hold, or perhaps more accurately, the values we wish we were able to hold. “The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” – Taylor Guthrie, https://overcast.fm/+AA2tlVFUsQs/45:28

exitmusic.world

I’ve started using this place to sketch out my random thoughts - to think in public, but with as small an audience as possible to minimize my self-consciousness. Don’t subscribe unless my public messy thinking is what you want! exitmusic.world/life-is-supp...

Life is supposed to be pleasurable

Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law is something I keep thinking about. It states: For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to liv...

exitmusic.world

What does your salary depend on your not understanding?

Executives: if I'm working for you I want you to delegate management & retain leadership. Definitely not the other way around.

Today's NY Times comparison of Elon Musk and Cecil Rhodes really clarifies what Musk's whole deal has always been about: rehabilitating the colonialist tradition around new frontiers on the internet and in outer space, and rebranding this deracinated neo-neo-colonialism as "adventure" and "purpose."

e.w. niedermeyer@niedermeyer.online · last yr.

I want to especially draw attention to the use of "exploration" as the preferred euphemism here for "choosing to participate in explicitly racist late-stage colonialism." Musk's rhetoric about "exploring" space is widely seen as his most inspiring, but it is rarely located in the colonial tradition.

Life is (living systems are) vertically coherent. Things built on top of computers, not so much.

“If this is the game, I wouldn’t try to win it”

the reasons gadgets are neato is because they are self-contained and limited gadgetry is a frame, it requires a border physical camera: gadget, neato eink weather display: gadget, neato ipod: gadget, neato modern iphone: not gadget, not neato slop generator device: not gadget, not neato

Petition for a hand-wringing emoji

If you evaluate a technology’s ability to do a job “better than a human”, you have to include all the benefits that the human version of the practice created, in terms of social bonds, regenerative capacity and cultural meaning.

- Life is emergent self-sustaining, self-complexifying complexity and self-diversifying diversity, and thus can only evolve in interaction - Life and entropy are in a dance with each other. No evidence that entropy has to win in the long run, given quantum fluctutations

Okay... deep breath. I’m, erm, I'm writing a book. I think. Or at least I'm writing something that sits in my heart as a book now. Who knows where it'll lead. If you'd like to follow along and cheerlead/act as a passive accountability partner, join up here :) departurein.place/departure-in...

Departure In Place: An outline for a wildly ambitious book

I’ve been circling this book for a long time without quite realising it. It’s about collapse—yes—but not as apocalypse, not as spectacle, not even as a single event. Collapse here is understood as a l...

departurein.place

A society is civilized to the extent to which it makes room for the unimportant

Video Dispatch #20: Kill Magic Thinking Bulls**t isn't created or destroyed, it just takes on different forms Podcast episode: pnc.st/s/faster-and... Video dispatch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHm... If you enjoy it please consider subscribing, leaving a rating, or writing a review 1/4

Don’t act because you have hope. Have hope because you act.