Yeah.. hard to get on board with the levity for a kind of techno-mysticism when it's such an effective marketing tactic to get us to engage with LLMs. Happy holidays, Max!
I'm glad the nytimes piece was a bit of a performance, because me and my hubs both had a little laugh at its expense, and so I'm glad that's not the real-full-you, altho what ever is? :)
I do think a more accurate framing of "the internet is less fun for millennials" is just that marketing is always directed at the most vulnerable, and millennials aren't as vulnerable as they used to be. Marketing aims for the young and naive because they are easily flattered into thinking they're "important" and "in control" while being manipulated.
In other words, millennials are no longer the primary target of the extraction machine. All those little red laser dots have shifted to someone less experienced and therefore more vulnerable to the tactics of advertisers, "persuasive technologists," and algorithms offering to do all the thinking for you -- aw how sweet! lol
The idea that millennials were ever directing or in charge or in control of "the internet" is (to use a millennial reference) like Britney Spears thinking she was in charge of or in control of her career -- if she thinks she ever was, she is delusional. One day you wake up and realize you were being flattered, fluffed, and used so others could line their pockets and enrich themselves.
And when you get there, I think you should be a little mad, but more glad, that you're not being used anymore.
Thank you for the links to further reading on Silicon Valley Cargo Cults!
I think that, per Iliza Shlesinger's viral call to action, our generation has a very special role to play in calling BS on the manipulations of capital and hierarchy. It's our duty to recognize that we are uniquely enlightened about the limits of innovation, top-down progress, and hard work.
We have less to lose by being authentic and living in the moment - society for us is a melange of barely distinguishable mush and our intuitions approach the prophetic. We have more influence than we know, by shouting into the void - things have a way of mysteriously working themselves out.
There has long been a right-wing tendency to fetishize medieval Europe/Crusaders/dieu et mon droit political organization; arguably it never stopped from the moment that era ended, but the proponents of its more recent versions are easily mocked for their beliefs that were they actually in the time they romanticize, they would be shining knights and lords of their domains, rather than subsistence farmers.
This latest batch of reactionary modernists similarly seem to believe that were they in the milieu that they long for, they would be technocratic lords, the RAND Corporation personified, the Apollo program but somehow not government, Bill Shockley and John Wayne rolled into one. What would they actually be? Probably the same sort of letter-to-the-editor mooks they are now.
Just gonna relink this article on 'enchantment theory' that was a major source of insight/self-respect for me, not least because the most abstract pontificating seems to me to be a Spongebob Squarepants reference:
For my purposes, I’m especially interested in the way that philosopher Charles Taylor incorporates disenchantment theory into his account of modern selfhood. The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a *porous*, and thus vulnerable self. The disenchanted world yielded an experience of a *buffered* self, which was sealed off, as the term implies, from beneficent and malignant forces beyond its ken. The porous self depended upon the liturgical and ritual health of the social body for protection against such forces. Heresy was not merely an intellectual problem, but a ritual problem that compromised what we might think of, in these times, as herd immunity to magical and spiritual forces by introducing a dangerous contagion into the social body. The answer to this was not simply reasoned debate but expulsion or perhaps a fiery purgation.
Loved your NYT piece—I think much of the “decline of the internet” genre can be explained by the fact that…millennials are older now, the novelty of instant online friendships and interminable online feuds isn’t as enchanting anymore (we may still enjoy them, but less so…we’ve done this 1,000 times already in the last decade). Internet sociability is changing, obviously, for the worse and better, but I think the disenchantment is only partially about structural things happening.
Also very much agree with the over-mystification of AI! Systems can have interesting emergent effects that are unprecedented and unexpected for their creators; that doesn’t make them magic, that just poses a challenge for people to understand them and then coherently explain them…
For me, the AI is magic thing is incredibly dangerous because our culture in this country already tends to revere technology as somehow separate from, and purer and more reliable than, humans. Studies already show that people will assume AI-generated content is less biased, more credible, etc than human-generated content. I understand why someone might think this, but as governments, law enforcement, corporations, and news orgs begin to integrate AI into their operations, there will be important implications if the average person continues to believe in this mystical version of technology.
Basically, if a cop can say “we asked AI to decide if we should shoot this person” and people are set up to think “if AI said it, it’s probably true,” then we’re in big trouble.
Yeah.. hard to get on board with the levity for a kind of techno-mysticism when it's such an effective marketing tactic to get us to engage with LLMs. Happy holidays, Max!
I'm glad the nytimes piece was a bit of a performance, because me and my hubs both had a little laugh at its expense, and so I'm glad that's not the real-full-you, altho what ever is? :)
I do think a more accurate framing of "the internet is less fun for millennials" is just that marketing is always directed at the most vulnerable, and millennials aren't as vulnerable as they used to be. Marketing aims for the young and naive because they are easily flattered into thinking they're "important" and "in control" while being manipulated.
In other words, millennials are no longer the primary target of the extraction machine. All those little red laser dots have shifted to someone less experienced and therefore more vulnerable to the tactics of advertisers, "persuasive technologists," and algorithms offering to do all the thinking for you -- aw how sweet! lol
The idea that millennials were ever directing or in charge or in control of "the internet" is (to use a millennial reference) like Britney Spears thinking she was in charge of or in control of her career -- if she thinks she ever was, she is delusional. One day you wake up and realize you were being flattered, fluffed, and used so others could line their pockets and enrich themselves.
And when you get there, I think you should be a little mad, but more glad, that you're not being used anymore.
Thank you for the links to further reading on Silicon Valley Cargo Cults!
💯💯💯
Fantastic description of what's going on.
I think that, per Iliza Shlesinger's viral call to action, our generation has a very special role to play in calling BS on the manipulations of capital and hierarchy. It's our duty to recognize that we are uniquely enlightened about the limits of innovation, top-down progress, and hard work.
We have less to lose by being authentic and living in the moment - society for us is a melange of barely distinguishable mush and our intuitions approach the prophetic. We have more influence than we know, by shouting into the void - things have a way of mysteriously working themselves out.
Performance or not, that middle-aged millennial jab was completely uncalled for 😭
There has long been a right-wing tendency to fetishize medieval Europe/Crusaders/dieu et mon droit political organization; arguably it never stopped from the moment that era ended, but the proponents of its more recent versions are easily mocked for their beliefs that were they actually in the time they romanticize, they would be shining knights and lords of their domains, rather than subsistence farmers.
This latest batch of reactionary modernists similarly seem to believe that were they in the milieu that they long for, they would be technocratic lords, the RAND Corporation personified, the Apollo program but somehow not government, Bill Shockley and John Wayne rolled into one. What would they actually be? Probably the same sort of letter-to-the-editor mooks they are now.
Just gonna relink this article on 'enchantment theory' that was a major source of insight/self-respect for me, not least because the most abstract pontificating seems to me to be a Spongebob Squarepants reference:
For my purposes, I’m especially interested in the way that philosopher Charles Taylor incorporates disenchantment theory into his account of modern selfhood. The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a *porous*, and thus vulnerable self. The disenchanted world yielded an experience of a *buffered* self, which was sealed off, as the term implies, from beneficent and malignant forces beyond its ken. The porous self depended upon the liturgical and ritual health of the social body for protection against such forces. Heresy was not merely an intellectual problem, but a ritual problem that compromised what we might think of, in these times, as herd immunity to magical and spiritual forces by introducing a dangerous contagion into the social body. The answer to this was not simply reasoned debate but expulsion or perhaps a fiery purgation.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-meta-positioning-habit-of-mind
Max Read is the foremost millennial internet public intellectual of our time!!!!!
meh. journalism is a harsh mistress.
Loved your NYT piece—I think much of the “decline of the internet” genre can be explained by the fact that…millennials are older now, the novelty of instant online friendships and interminable online feuds isn’t as enchanting anymore (we may still enjoy them, but less so…we’ve done this 1,000 times already in the last decade). Internet sociability is changing, obviously, for the worse and better, but I think the disenchantment is only partially about structural things happening.
Also very much agree with the over-mystification of AI! Systems can have interesting emergent effects that are unprecedented and unexpected for their creators; that doesn’t make them magic, that just poses a challenge for people to understand them and then coherently explain them…
For me, the AI is magic thing is incredibly dangerous because our culture in this country already tends to revere technology as somehow separate from, and purer and more reliable than, humans. Studies already show that people will assume AI-generated content is less biased, more credible, etc than human-generated content. I understand why someone might think this, but as governments, law enforcement, corporations, and news orgs begin to integrate AI into their operations, there will be important implications if the average person continues to believe in this mystical version of technology.
Basically, if a cop can say “we asked AI to decide if we should shoot this person” and people are set up to think “if AI said it, it’s probably true,” then we’re in big trouble.
I watched the whole video and made a post about it. Hail and well met, fellow muskrats!
https://draftingthenarrative.substack.com/p/dungeons-dragons-zoom
Internet is still fun for me? Skill issue tbh
Writes Hot Takes
Max Read and Ganz is my own personal “Neesons and Willy”. Excited to dig into that conversation.
I dunno, it's still kinda fun: https://ifrqfm.substack.com/p/cursed-mash-ups-and-music-poops
I pre-changed it in the copy I filed because I knew it wouldn't make it past standards
Cory's fully credited!