@outer@mas.toLiquid Bewitchment ( [Essay](https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/liquid-bewitchment/) by James Brown, Public Domain Review, 2023.)
...gin to England was delirious...as tipplers reported a range of effects: loss of reason, frenzy, madness, joy, and death.
...James B…
@jtk@infosec.exchangeWeekend Reads
* Data centers in Utah
https://ricci.pckt.blog/datacenters-in-utah-a-photo-essay-gehy55y
* Encrypted DNS at OARC 46
…
@fanf@mendeddrum.orgfrom my link log —
The meaning of doing mathematics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15998
saved 2026-05-23 https://dotat.at/:/JBTPR.html
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSierra acquires Takeoff, which develops "long-horizon" agents, for an undisclosed sum; founded in 2025, Takeoff neared $10M in annualized revenue in early July (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sierra-acquires…
@brichapman@mastodon.socialthe way of the Shambhala Warrior — #philosophy
@qurlyjoe@mstdn.socialEvery now and again I recall the best pun I’ve ever made in my life. I was in grade 12 about 60 years ago writing an essay on #Macbeth. I think. (Not 100% sure about that part.) The title of my essay was, Men’ll Pause, or The Chains of Life. I was sure I’d get at least a nod from Mr. Andrews, the teacher, but got crickets instead.
@juer@juergenklute@digitalcourage.socialUmgang mit der AfD: Verdampft noch mal! Essay von Daniel Bax.
https://taz.de/Umgang-mit-der-AfD/!6177939/
@bourgwick@heads.socialthoughtful & sweet essay by court carney on bob dylan's friendships with jerry garcia & johnny cash & "the vulnerability of brotherhood" https://thedylanreview.org/2025/03/02/questions-on-masculinit…
@cdarwin@c.imIn 2013, when I had been locked up in solitary confinement for 25 years,
I wrote an essay entitled “A Sentence Worse Than Death,” which I’m told has been read by upwards of a million people to date.
It describes what life was like in “the box” (the special housing unit, or SHU for short) in New York’s state prisons,
and posited that if given the choice, I would have opted for a sentence of death over more than two decades of incarceration in abject isolation.
At the ti…
@yetiinabox@todon.nlI hope Andy Burn 'em has some advisor who actually reads Environmental Research Letters. The review essay by Emily Grubert, summarizing a frustrating 25 years of research with no apparent effect on climate overheating, is blunt.
" For people and places that rely on fossil fuel production and face major transition challenges (Xenarios et al 2026), failing to be explicit about the degree to which transition must proceed, or the extent to which alternatives might actually be ava…
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialThe Atlantic republishes JD Vance’s anti-Trump essay from 10 years ago;
Magazine invites readers to judge Vance’s ‘assessment’ of Trump, whom he called ‘cultural heroin’ during first term
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/05/atlantic-r…
@villavelius@mastodon.onlineSo senseless, not to erase the past! 😉
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/05/atlantic-republishes-jd-vance-trump-essay
@n8foo@macaw.social
@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyzBefore Linotype revolutionised #typesetting in the 1880s, compositors set texts by hand ... and they set them fast: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/twilight-of-the-velocipede/ - the thrilling world of typesetting races, which drew crowds in the thousands, offered huge cash prizes, and helped women "Swifts" fight for workplace equity.
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ngRE: https://eupolicy.social/@bert_hubert/116939646868483647
Recommended read of the day... 👏
"This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent …
@cdarwin@c.imThe Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay
that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin”
exactly 10 years earlier,
bringing back to the fore his evolving
from a critic of the president
to his vice-president.
In an editor’s note,
the magazine said it was republishing the essay on the occasion of its 10th anniversary
– and the US’s semiquincentennial
– “so that our readers can judge for themselves
how well his assessment…
@NuclearDisorder@mastodon.socialHeute vor 64 Jahren: Am 20. Juni 1962 wurde ein Thor-Missile der US-Starfish-Testserie nach einer Minute Flug abgebrochen. Ohne nukleare Explosion fielen kontaminierte Teile auf Johnson Island, wo Personal lebte und arbeitete.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io“No one can write a 20-page essay without AI!”
[staring forlorn at the hundreds of books on my shelves]
@tezoatlipoca@mas.toI am a Power User, of which this essay speaks.
I will give up only when they take the tools from my cold dead hands.
I _continue_ to remain considerably angrier about it than most people currently are.
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-th…
@annsev@troet.cafeEin #hörenswert|er Essay von Claudia #Emmert im #Deutschlandfunk: "FreiräumeZwischen Wandel und Widerstand"
Ein sehr kluger Essay.
@bthalpin@mastodon.social"If you want, I can also draft a full academic-style essay with references, formatted as a proper sociological analysis, including citations from studies on social media and mental health."
In the past, an offer like this would have been incitation to academic misconduct. Now it comes from software that the institution includes in the standard build for PCs.
@brichapman@mastodon.socialThe Case for Possibility — https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-case-for-possibility?utm_source=bri-mastodon&utm_medium=social&src=mstdn
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot@… @… @…
here's the essay I asked you for help with last night.
I hope that…
@gray17@mastodon.socialcleaning out old bookmarks. found a 2012 essay by a notable Reagan-era official, disillusioned by gwbush's unseriousness, and pointing at Obama's win as a sign that republicans need to regroup around Actual Reality, maybe by winning Blacks on anti-Hispanic anti-immigrant stances, etc.
... what a wild ride it's been
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialIsrael threatens to sue the NYT for defamation over the article on sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners but the legal viability of the lawsuit is in doubt (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/14/israel-sue-new-y…
@david@boles.xyzThe Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World
This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist's panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett's illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the…
@hex@kolektiva.socialOh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good:
https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/
@cark@social.tchncs.deAnthropic's new essay "When AI builds itself" says we need verifiable coordination to slow AI down if ever needed — but not who builds the mechanism, or how to fund it without the funders capturing it.
Thus, I wrote an open letter back: an IAEA (UN-associated organization) for AI, where a lab puts up the first ~$1B but contributing becomes the entry ticket to standing, not a lever of control.
@hnnng@chaos.socialLesenswerter Essay von Jan-Martin Wiarda über die AfD-Gefahr bei den anstehenden Landtagswahlen und mögliche Auswirkungen auf die #Wissenschaft sowie die Verantwortung, von Professor:innen, Haltung zu zeigen. https://www.
@aufsmaulsuppe@chaos.socialIch weiß, ich weiß, eben schon Repost, ABER das ist ein wirklich sehr sehr guter Text über Riefenstahl und wie sie mindestens aus Feigheit vom deutschen Staat finanziert wurde.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rzah5vj5p…
@publicvoit@graz.socialThe Boring Internet (text) | Terry Godier
#Internet because you've…
@georgiamuseum@glammr.usWe've got a brand-new book out.
"Much Love from Paris: Letters to My Family (1928 - 30)" (edited by Nelda Damiano with the assistance of Katherine Rabogliatti and with an essay by Robyn Asleson) lets Louise Heron Blair tell her own story: a young, rebellious American in Paris, learning how to make her own life.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialQ&A with labor researcher Molly Kinder on her recent, widely discussed "Messy Middle" essay on AI-driven disruption of knowledge jobs and how to address it (Casey Newton/Platformer)
https://www.platformer.news/how-to-help-knowledge-workers-w…
@ErikUden@mastodon.deAnother tale of the closed web: a common thing on Instagram is that it doesn't send out Co-Post requests when you do it too often or they don't like you. It's one of the aspects or levels of being “shadowbanned”.
I often work with various kinds of accounts to publish my essays on Instagram to get more exposure. For example, pages dedicated to criticizing the police (useless.cops) or accounts showcasing ICE activity in Minnesota (MNicewatch) for my essay on Renée Good…
@lindawoodrow@mastodon.socialThis is a very profound essay for permaculture people. It's economics beginning to use our vocabulary, our concept library. It's the first advance I've come across on Bill's thinking.
"Because life does not organize primarily through extraction. Life organizes through circulation. Through reciprocity. Through relationship. Through adaptive feedback. Through nested intelligence. Through co-evolution."
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itlmao!
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wmzynryvf7dhxeimg3l6lr2c/post/3mnnq2qopzc22
AltText: A NYTimes-style headline in the usual NY Times font. The headline reads : "You Were In For a Dipshit Take As Soon As You Saw This Font." Above i…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotI seem to have written a wee essay about #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #AGI
It's probably not in its final form yet, I'll probably revise a bit. Comments welcome.
@bourgwick@heads.socialyowza, @… uncovers joan didion's unexpurgated spring '67 hang with the #GratefulDead, rehearsing at the heliport in #sausalito (excerpted in &quo…
@BBC3MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#TheEssay
- The Insect Singers
The Insect Singers trill their last sonorous Essay. 5. Good Vibrations - Treehoppers. Through the discipline of biotremology, Rex Cocroft reveals an extraordinarily resonant world.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vl6n
@kazys@mastodon.socialIf Claude has a kind of Eames vibe, ChatGPT is a bit more SOM. Would be worth an essay to unpack, perhaps.
@digitalnaiv@mastodon.social"In Demokratien bekommt das Volk ohnehin früher oder später die Politiker, die es verdient – oder vorsichtiger formuliert: die zu ihm passen. Es hat sie ja gewählt." Andreas Püttmann - sein Blätter-Essay ist lesenswert, auch wenn er wehtut. #Rechtspopulismus #Demokratie
@isonno@mastodon.socialGreat essay on how gargantuan AI/Space X IPOs are likely to trash the stock market as a whole.
If you're expecting to sell hundreds of billions in new IPO shares, the $$$ has to come from -somewhere-.
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/ipo-mania
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialA look at the rise of micro-dramas, minute-long serialized soap operas, in China, and why they may be TV's next frontier as Hollywood studios enter the space (Chang Che/New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay…
@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyzWe Believed History Had Ended. They Didn’t: #SpacePolicy stuck in another century (breathless essay, worth a read).
@hex@kolektiva.socialExcerpt from an essay I may or may not write:
Ontologies evolve to fulfill functions. They serve a purpose, and will be adapted until they fulfill this purpose. There are, occasionally, things that exist within those ontologies which do not actually exist.
Programming bugs are an example. There is no such thing. Code is code. It can't be right or wrong, it just is or isn't. The mismatch between the intent and the execution creates a side effect. We may confidently assert such a thing exists. We may name such things. But they don't exist. This becomes apparent when you try to figure out how to suppress one specific instance of a bug in one specific place through multiple revisions.
At some level, a lot of things don't actually exist. We only need to follow through the logic of The Ship of Theseus to see how our ontologies break down.
One thing that doesn't exist, that is a side effect rather than an object, is the personal self. You do not exist. Your perception of your existence is an illusion, a necessary side effect.
Every day you wake up a different person. Every second you are not who you were. That person is as dead as you will be the next instant, as all versions of you will be every second until there are no more. These selves are bound together by imperfect memories. The person you remember as yourself, all those people, never existed. You created them based on your current experience, your current iteration.
You could, just as easily, wake up an unrecognizable person, in some Dark City, and never know the difference. Continuity is absurd. And yet, some people believe they'll still experience the same self after being frozen or "uploaded." It's a silly illusion.
Once you can get over that illusion, you can let go of the need to thrash against the void. You can let go of the various furious dreams of immortality.
At a high enough level, all ontologies are illusions. Useful illusions, but illusions none-the-less. There is only the undifferentiated universe, and you are experiencing it. You are the universe. You will always persist, long past the time this specific iteration or any iteration experiences it.
This implies a certain obligation then to all the others experiencing the same self, the future iterations that may remember being someone like you, and any other person you, the universe, could wake up as tomorrow.
@brichapman@mastodon.socialThe Case for Possibility — https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-case-for-possibility?utm_source=bri-mastodon&utm_medium=social&src=mstdn
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear."
This essay, like all the essays on my blog, is on #CreativeCommons Attribution/Share Alike licence.
Please feel free to republish it anywhere.
@bourgwick@heads.socialdetailed forensic account of the early beatnik peyote scene(s), though i think maybe missing some bohemian forerunners that connected to the nyc crews. https://beatdom.substack.com/p/peotl-eaters-of-the-hip-generation
@adamhotep@infosec.exchangeRE: https://mastodon.social/@jasonkoebler/116556317019164009
This is a great essay about how chatbots are shaping our minds, even if we are trying to avoid them.
@nic@geno.social"KI ist keine neutrale Technologie, die durch Einhegung davor bewahrt werden kann im Sinne der päpstlichen Metapher zur Atombombe zu werden. Sie ist die Atombombe. (...) Sie ist inhärent konservativ und homogenisierend und damit nicht etwa ein Maßstab für fortschrittliche Gesellschaften, sondern eine Zementierung des Status quo."
Essay von @…
@cdarwin@c.imAnthropic on Wednesday joined growing calls for the artificial intelligence industry to find ways to cushion people from the technology’s disruptions,
announcing an initial $200 million investment to research AI’s impact on jobs and the economy.
Alongside new policy proposals from the maker of the Claude chatbot,
Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei published an essay on his personal website that expanded on his position that
the government should promise econo…
@hex@kolektiva.socialIt makes a solid case for the latent fascism of cars, but I would argue that cars actually play an even more active role in creating fascism. Which, I am actually arguing in the essay that I need to get back to writing.
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotWell, that's probably been the worst day for #Depression of the whole bloody year, but I did not get nothing done.
I finished an essay, and I think it's an important one.
https://www.
@BBC3MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#TheEssay
- The Insect Singers
The Essay revels in the musicality and din of Earth’s loudest insect singers. Cicada Summer Song. Celebrated in verse, sculpture and myth - from Japan and China to Ancient Greece.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vmxj
@yetiinabox@todon.nl@… says, almost as an aside in an essay on AI,
"my best guess is that people today are inoculated against moral critiques of social and technological systems—i.e., anything that points out that something is bad because it hurts people. There’s nothing wrong with moral arguments, but we exist in a world where it’s impossible to live a regular life (within the …
@juer@juergenklute@digitalcourage.socialDat klopt wel. — Essay
Koen Schoors: Bedankt Poetin en Trump, voor het graven van jullie eigen fossiele graf.
https://www.demorgen.be/meningen/bedankt-poetin-en-trump-voor-het-graven-van-jullie-eigen-fossiele-graf~b9f04341…
@kazys@mastodon.socialFrom my latest essay, on Nikkō
@hex@kolektiva.socialI have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.
@adjb@social.lol📝 S06E10: How Colonial Law Shaped Modern Data Extraction, an essay by @JLoewenColon https://podcast.doctrineofdiscovery.org/season6/episode-10/
@BBC3MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#TheEssay
- The Insect Singers
The Essay celebrates the musicality of Earth’s insect singers. 2. Katydids - All Night Long. As told by naturalist Wil Hershberger and evolutionary biologist Charlie Woodrow.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vlf2
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotThis is an astonishingly good essay by @… on #Trump and the #EnergyTransition. I'm not going to bother to select pull-quotes from it -- it's all potential pu…
@tomkalei@machteburch.socialMusste auch wieder an diesen Essay denken. Bald 20 Jahre alt und gehört für mich einfach zu den besten Texten die je geschrieben wurden.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html
@brichapman@mastodon.socialI Don’t Want Less. I Want More. - #leadership
@yetiinabox@todon.nl @hex@kolektiva.socialI did say that in that essay that I wouldn't go off on the Zizian tangent, but like... I gotta for just a moment...
edit: wrong link, but that other one is funny too.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-zizians-how-harry-269931896/
@servelan@newsie.social**The Atlantic republishes brutal anti-Trump essay for July 4 — its author is JD Vance** - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/jd-vance-2677158738/
@smurthys@hachyderm.io @brichapman@mastodon.social
@ose_rouge@don.linxx.netSeit der Lektüre von Simon Nagys hauntologischem Essay »Zeit abschaffen« begegnen mir gefühlt in jedem Buch Gespenster. 👻
@hex@kolektiva.socialI tried to write something up to talk about an idea, but it didn't quite work. I have a lot more I need to put into it. But I want to get an idea out, and, after talking with a person who pointed out some of the flaws in what I wrote, I think I can maybe write down the kernel of the idea here.
An acquaintance of mine did a deep dive on Operational Art and wrote his thesis (which prompted an earlier set of posts and an article I wrote for my professional-ish blog) on the intersection of the OODA loop and critical philosophy. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Kilcullen's Three Pillars model (after watching Andrewism's wonderful video) and Beer's VSM. The TL;DR of it is that there's a much better insurgency model. Of course, the insurgency model also works for a bunch of other things, because cybernetics lets you do all kinds of cool abstraction like that.
So as I was reading the essay of a comrade the other day, that model popped back into my head and I'm going to try to share what I can of it.
When colonizers came to the Salish region, they saw what they believed to be an untouched wilderness. They failed to see the ways in which Salish people tended the land. Indigenous fire practices were common on the northwest coast, and the suppression of those practices remains a problem. There is an interrelationship between an environment and the systems within it. Systems, like people, animals, and cultures, adapt to the environment. In doing so, those systems will also change the environment.
Social technology was invisible, so colonizers defaulted to either some kind of Rousseauvian or Malthusian model of these people. They were not, for the colonizers, people who had developed advanced social technologies to live in harmony with their world. They were, rather, people in "a state of nature."
The European influenced left continues to draw this Rousseauvian model, which continues through a lot of Anarchist revolutionary thought. European anarchists were heavily influenced by observations and theories around the behavior of indigenous people. The remnants of this thought still exist in the idea that the system must only be destroyed for us to be free.
This is the same obliviousness to social technology, that social technology actually exists, often informs both early colonizers and modern radicals.
It is through this obliviousness that we fail to recognize how capitalism is a social technology that is managed into existence and maintained, and how changes in the environment can threaten institutions that have become over-adapted to a specific version of that environment.
We can extend Kilcullen's metaphor of a "conflict ecosystem" through cybernetics into a much more rich model, populated by viable systems. The ecosystem itself has a fitness function, which drives adaptation within the environment. But all actors in the environment also affect it. Some try to manage the environment. Revolutions are often over who manages a social ecosystem, over who controls the social technology and what it does.
Once we see this dynamic at play, calls of "riot" and "revolution" make a whole lot less sense. Rather, the question becomes, "how do we change the ecosystem in such a way that it cannot be 'managed' at all?"
Graeber/Wengrow talked about Turtle Island indigenous social technologies in Dawn of Everything, such as the system of moieties and clans described in the book. So I have a good reading list as I think through this model, but I hope the "ecosystem" model is helpful (if not completely fleshed out).
I'd be interested in any critiques or thoughts to help develop this idea more.
@brichapman@mastodon.socialThe Case for Possibility — https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-case-for-possibility?utm_source=bri-mastodon&utm_medium=social&src=mstdn
@brichapman@mastodon.social @brichapman@mastodon.socialWhat if conflict isn't about winning or losing?
We learn "fight or flight" but that's way too simple. There's freeze. Fawn. Tend. And when we're calm? We can discuss. Get curious. Set boundaries. Create something new together.
Most conflicts never get solved anyway. 69% stay forever.
The goal isn't to win. It's to be in conflict well.
New essay explores why our old conflict models suck and what actually works:
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io“American art is suffering a polycrisis that combines a lack of belief in and support for its artists born after 1975, the structural de-centering of artists in the art industry, and the subsequent stagnation and possible breakdown of formal innovation in art. In other words, meaningful art, relevant for society and our time, may not be sustainable under the current conditions here.”
Fantastic essay on the economic problems making our cultural landscape more shallow because of the economic constraints placed on fine arts.
#art #contemporaryArt #AmericanArt #AmericanCulture #NYC #artMarket #ArtIndustry
