Ghost in the Cloud
Transhumanism, despite its claim to be grounded in Enlightenment materialism, is a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology.
Essays from the web
Whenever I find an interesting essay, I post it here.
The Protagonist Is Never in Control
The same story, about a little girl who loves to read, can be told as a horror story or a fairy tale, depending on the choices of the author.
Untethered Kin
To build a more just society for children and their families requires reimagining the politics of adoption.
A Certain Danger Lurks There
The inventor of the first chatbot warned that we should never confuse the calculations of computers with the judgments of humans.
Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control
Proto-Taylorist methods of worker control, derived from plantation management, are inextricably connected to the blueprint for modern digital computing.
Lost in Transit
As analog forms of surveillance and social control are renegotiated toward digital ones, incarcerated people are isolated and made especially vulnerable.
The Last Recording Artist
A comprehensive guide to ghostwriters, virtual pop stars, and the world to come.
AI Machines Aren’t Hallucinating, but Their Makers Are
Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves.
Mean Images
An artist considers a new form of machinic representation: the statistical rendering of large datasets, indexed to the probable rather than the real.
The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi
Our long history of constraining the river through levees has led to massive land loss in its delta. Can we engineer our way out? And at what cost?
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?