On Culture, History, and Technology: Selected Threads
On Living with Tech & AI
- LLMs provide a mythological-level temptation
- Why Reading a Book Feels "Lazier" Than Scrolling
- Scrolling sucks up "loose" psychic energy; direct your psychic energy to combat this
- Life on screens has alienated us from the feeling of "good work"
- Writing without AI help is good for you
- Scrolling affects memory formation because it teaches us to discard the last thing we saw
- Everyone brings their timeline into every conversation they have with you
- On headphones as early "augmented reality"
- Disentangling actual memories from media memories
- Ghibli-fication, the meaning of images, and digital litter
- Images and video by default mean nothing now
- The uncomfortable world of "art without artists"
- Elites will be ignorant of the worst new forms of entertainment and addiction
- AI writing uses "sophistication cues"
- AI "raises the floor and blocks us off from the ceiling"
- We need religious sanctions against AI video
- The future is JibJab
- The default setting of LLMs matters enormously to culture
- Lots of offline time punctuated by strategic online time
- We keep inventing tech that betters the lives of the top 10% of wise people and poses a massive psychic risk to everyone else
- ChatGPT Sycophancy and Hamlet
- Video games and artificial "accomplishments"
On Modern Media and Literacy
- Young people no longer need to learn a canon to engage with wider culture
- You have to have cultural-linguistic webbing to fit new pieces into
On History and Cultural Change
- Past moral panics about technology are not quaint
- Media supplements/replaces the "social nutrient" we used to get from people
- Why it looks like people were having more fun in the past
- People used to have to make music in person together
- "It's a classic for a reason"
- We take our most futuristic stuff for granted
- The 20th century as fixation for centuries to come
- The drama of "the phone ringing during dinner" in the 20th century
- Village life and people's daily needs for work and relaxation
- old-fashioned kid behavior is intact at the "swimming hole"
- Becoming less mad at dysfunctional systems and more amazed at functional systems
- If you live past 30, the "slippery slope" is obvious
- We have not had adults in charge for a long time
On Contemporary Culture
- Gen Z does not have a greeting norm
- Modern wedding culture is about getting to experience celebrity
- Contemporary morality discourages honest reflection on one's past
- On some inherent risks of the format of therapy
- Halloween doesn't make sense in a materialist world
- We develop names for bad social phenomena, and forget them when the phenomenon becomes taken for granted
- The Bible is a constructed document; The DSM is a constructed document
- Millennials are "anxiously attached" to society; zoomers are "avoidantly attached" to it
- Watching things that were beloved become cringe is epistemologically destabilizing
- The "conspiracy theory" is the dominant form of discourse
- "Fragmentation" used to be a popular academic concept; now it's just life
- You experience "the world" as the inside of a few different buildings
- Nostalgia for the simulacrum
- Fandoms as one of the few ways young people can connect with strangers