dear miss. madhatter,

hi! I'm sonja.

[vanessagillings]

Happy Summer (and Father's Day!)

[funeral]

The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You.

Laurence Scott, "Hell is Ourselves"

[ralphiebelair]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[wovi]

*

simone weil

[wovi]

*

ursula k. leguin

[funeral]

The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You.

Laurence Scott, "Hell is Ourselves"

[butmyloveyouhavewings]

[keytomind]

🖤👆🏼

[nevver]

You only find nowhere when you come by it on the way to someplace else, Dan Attoe

[thoughtkick]

“Do you know how much thinking and feeling I’ve done? It’s terrible. And nothing’s come of it.”

— Andrei Platonov, Happy Moscow.

[thevisualvamp]

How to write

[mournfulroses]

Savannah Brown, from a poem titled "Unmute me unmute me unmute me!," featured in Closer Baby Closer: Poems

[nevver]

Bust a move, Ronit Porat (because)

[nevver]

Sun City, Agoraphobic Traveller

[missmadhatter]

I feel scared that you won’t

Protect me from

The bad things in life

And I will have to fight

All the monsters

by myself

It’s not all beautiful and fun

And sometimes I feel like I’m fighting

And you’re looking at me

And if something happens

I’m by myself making the decisions

Being the general and I don’t want to

I want to be the soft girl the dreamer

Protected instead of dancing around

Instead of being expected to command

Aim shoot fire dodge

I want to look at the sky and say

Isn’t this beautiful

And for you to take my hand

And lead me home

[strokeofserenity]

Charlotte Eriksson, “Everything Changed When I Forgave Myself”

[luxe-pauvre]

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something. […] More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

Oliver Burkeman, Navigating by aliveness

[wabi-wabi]