Monthly Link Dump: December 2024

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird.

From Terence Eden - The AI Exorcist:

After one too many crashes of the stock market and of aeroplanes, the love for all-things-AI withered and died. Companies wanted to remove every trace of the software from their ecosystems. Sounded easy enough, right? Large companies often found that AI was so tightly enmeshed in all their processes, that it was easier to shut down the entire company and start again from scratch. A greenfield, organic, human powered enterprise fit for the future! Not every company had that problem. Most small ones just needed an AI exorcism from a specific part of the business.

From Erin Kissane at wreckage/salvage - Against the dark forest:

The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions—initially in Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s freeform noticings that apply science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory of the universe to social media, then in humanist all-arounder Maggie Appleton’s illustrated tech notes.

From Anarchist Writers - The Dispossessed at 50:

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s SF novel The Dispossessed is still by far the best account of an anarchist society, warts and all. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards but, more importantly, it secured a place in the heart of many anarchists and even if its author denied she was anarchist, she expressed the ideal well. So well, in fact, its publication should be discussed and a few claims made about it refuted.

From Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden - What is the impact of online writing?:

Blog posts, microblog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, comments — these are self-published pieces of writing by regular people, most of whom are not getting paid to write. Most people would have had limited access to this type of writing fifty years ago, when self-published writing was zines and, like, church newsletters. Before the internet made self-publishing easy, most people’s exposure to writing by other regular people would have been letters from people they knew and letters to the editor.

From Adam Scovell at Celluloid Wicker Man - Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 15):

My second memory concerning a Polaroid photo appearing in pop culture was one taken by a maniac. This maniac had hitched a ride from some naïve teenagers in the sweltering outback of Texas and was freaking them out with his variety of macabre hobbies. He’d just visited the local slaughterhouse before they picked him up.

From Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony - Family matters:

When Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged appeared in 1977, some critics on the Right denounced it as Marxist, while other critics on the Left denounced it as reactionary. On both sides there was, I think, a failure to understand what Lasch was primarily trying to do, which was to demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of then-current social-scientific thinking about the family — and to indicate some of the dire consequences of that inadequacy.

From Ben Werdmuller - The open social web is the future of the internet. Here's why I'm excited.:

The open social web puts control back in your hands. Unlike big social media platforms, it’s not run by a single company — it’s made up of independent, connected communities where you decide how and with whom you interact. It respects your privacy, avoids intrusive ads, and gives you the freedom to truly own your online experience. It’s like the internet used to be: open, personal, and community-focused.

From Erin Kissane at wreckage/salvage - what people in the global majority need from networks:

For years, I’ve wanted a place to break down and promote research that can help us make/build/participate in more accessible, useful, and humane networks. I’m delighted to finally be doing it here. In each of these briefs, I’ll introduce a report or paper, provide some context about the people and/or organizations behind it, and summarize the points I found especially relevant for network work.

From Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain - Goth at the BBC:

Screened in 2018 as part of a night celebrating 'Gothic' in art, literature and, of course, music this is a compilation of archive BBC performances from many of the stalwarts of the goth scene - Siouxsie and The Banshees, Bauhaus, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Killing Joke, The Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - as well as a couple of later entrants - PJ Harvey, Marilyn Manson.

From Andrew Curry at The Next Wave - States have a shelf life of about 200 years:

One of the things that popped up in the chat while I was talking immediately caught my attention, given my interest in long waves and futures. It was an article by Luke Kemp and colleagues at the BBC Future website that discussed the timespans of states, and their patterns of decline. 200 years is about the average, which tallies with the 100-300 year window used by Peter Turchin and his colleagues working on ‘secular dynamics.’

From Gillian Rose at visual/method/culture - on criticising AI-generated images for not looking photographic:

I’ve just read Roland Meyer’s admirably clear critique in the journal Rrrreflect of the imagery generated by OpenAI’s Sora (Roland has developed an extensive critique of Midjourney’s images too). Sora generates video from text prompts. There’s lots to say about AI-generated imagery, and I’ve learnt lots from Roland’s work. Here I just want to make one point. Which is that I think it’s important not to criticise the visual appearance of AI-generated imagery on the grounds that it offers neither photographic realism nor coherent three-dimensional volume.