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Watching something that didn’t reek of the algorithm or AI generation, or covert Casamigos sponsorship, made me realize how passively I’d been absorbing my entertainment over the past few years and how fucked my brain may be because of it. I’d become so creatively lazy I’d entered into an existential free fall.
Why Have Clowns Taken Over LA? by Allison P. Davis in Vulture
I always felt it was always true. A lot of my feelings about being online have come from this deep discomfort with posting, but also not being able to explain why, despite that discomfort, I do it all the time, and I’ve done it for over a decade very regularly. I think this feeling, the emotion that I would feel going into a place like Forever 21, I felt the same when opening Tumblr or Instagram or YouTube, or whatever. Being surrounded by this potential of who I could become if I shopped the right way made me feel very powerful. Going into Forever 21, I’m thinking about everything I’ve consumed online. I’m thinking about images on the Internet and how I can become them via the clothes in front of me in the store. So, for me, there was no point at which I was able to conceptualize an idea of myself that wasn’t in relation to being online.
Cory Arcangel + Maya Man in Cura Magazine
The money is a big part of it. A.I. has merely accelerated a trend that was already underway at Stanford and has been reflected by many of the country’s most corporatized universities: Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently defined as a future windfall.
What A.I. Did to My College Class by Theo Baker in The New York Times
As a recording artist, she is conscious of her participation in sustaining the systemic conditions of the capitalist marketplace and the risks entailed, those of reinforcing gender norms or elevating profit over art.
Kim Gordon's Capitalist Realism by Christopher J. Lee in Jacobin
It is a performance of joy so excessive, so desperate, that it reveals the void it attempts to cover. It is the logic of the assembly line applied to human connection. What Fallon offers is a standardized production of “fun” that feels increasingly like a desperate plea to ignore the crumbling world outside the studio walls.
The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon by Jon Greenaway in Current Affairs