#Actor-network theory

[antmanxai]

Declaration of Actor Network Theory

When theory drives you insane, a note from the past.

We, the scholars and practitioners of actor network theory, on this day of July 4, 2019, do solemnly publish and declare that we are by nature, and of right, ought to be by law, free and independent thinkers, possessing equal epistemological power with our fellow researchers. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all actors, human and non-human, are created equal; that they are endowed…

[omegaphilosophia]

Exploring the Philosophical Landscape of Technology: Theories and Perspectives

The philosophy of technology is a rich and evolving field that explores the nature, impact, and ethical dimensions of technology. Here are some key theories and approaches within this field:

Technological Determinism: This theory suggests that technology shapes society and human behavior more than individuals or society shape technology. It proposes that technological developments have a predetermined, often inevitable, impact on social, cultural, and economic structures.

Social Construction of Technology (SCOT): SCOT theory argues that technologies are not inherently good or bad but are socially constructed. It focuses on the process by which technologies are developed, adopted, and adapted based on the values and interests of different social groups.

Postphenomenology: Drawing from phenomenology, this approach explores how technology mediates our interactions with the world. It examines the ways in which technology influences our perception, embodiment, and experiences.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT): ANT considers both human and non-human actors (like technology) as equal participants in shaping social networks and processes. It emphasizes the role of technology in mediating human interactions and agency.

Ethics of Technology: This area of philosophy explores the ethical dimensions of technological development and use. It delves into topics such as privacy, surveillance, artificial intelligence ethics, and the moral responsibilities of technologists.

Philosophy of Information: This branch investigates the fundamental nature of information and its role in technology. It examines concepts like data, knowledge, and information ethics in the digital age.

Critical Theory of Technology: Rooted in critical theory, this approach critiques the social and political implications of technology. It seeks to uncover power structures and inequalities embedded in technological systems.

Feminist Philosophy of Technology: This perspective focuses on the intersection of gender and technology. It examines how technology can reinforce or challenge gender norms and inequalities.

Environmental Philosophy of Technology: This theory explores the environmental impact of technology, including topics like sustainability, resource depletion, and the ethics of technological solutions to environmental challenges.

Existentialist Philosophy of Technology: Drawing from existentialism, this approach considers the impact of technology on human existence and individuality. It explores questions of alienation, authenticity, and freedom in a technological world.

Human Enhancement Ethics: With the advancement of biotechnology, this theory addresses the ethical dilemmas surrounding human enhancement technologies, including genetic engineering and cognitive enhancement.

Pragmatism and Technology: Pragmatist philosophy examines how technology influences our practical, everyday experiences and shapes our interactions with the world.

These theories and approaches within the philosophy of technology provide valuable insights into how technology influences and is influenced by society, as well as the ethical considerations that arise in our increasingly technologically driven world.

[ratbits]

"[       ] noise" by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Victoria Adukwei Bulley reflects on the difficulty finding quiet and clarity in a loud, busy world in “[ ] noise” Translated Vase by Sookyung Yee//Credit: Google Arts & Culture In math, science, and acoustics, “noise” is often defined as an unwanted or unintentional signal. Noise distorts and obscures, prevents you from hearing what you’re trying to make out the message or getting a clear idea…

[kaiasky]

Possible successors to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT)

extractor network theory (the social only exists as a shifting graph of relationships. and we analyze it through flow-network graph cuts)

actress-matrix theory (FEMINISM.)

fudge-factor-network theory (ehhh, just make something up and claim that it's methodologically sound)

impactor-network theory (consider the large N limit of ANT and realize it looks a lot like the ideal gas law)

hacker network theory (💻🥷 im in)

actor net-worth theory (bet Matt Damon is raking it in)

actor-wetwork theory (youse thought youse could outrun ol' bruno, eh? break da network start fresh, eh? da boss sends 'is regards, materially-semiotically mediated through a series of actors including a telephone, laundered money, me, this gun here,)

actor network therians (a discord server of those afformentioned non-human actors)

malefactor hex-curse theory

second-order ANT (why does my corkboard mapping out all my relationships cause my friends to stop talking to me)

string theory

[shamemp3]

need to find a theory to close-read mrs. dalloway through the perspective of for my paper due tmrw... but suddenly i dont know a single theory in mind. In fact what is a theory

[elmandolinista]

New Poems in Canada and the USA

Nature is not good or bad, not ugly or beautiful, not weak or strong. Nature is, and nature is sometimes hard to understand. This is where poetry comes in. “What can be explained is not poetry”, wrote the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in a note to his son. However, poetry can explain the world. Usually it doesn’t use the tools of rationality, but empathy, intuitition, associativity,…

[quasi-normalcy]

This is one of the things that Donna Haraway talks about in her work on companion species.

you know how people say "cats domesticated themselves?" I find this statement irksome because as i've been studying plants and particularly weeds, a theory has slowly been forming in my head about domestication that makes a lot more sense than other theories.

Basically, I think everything domesticated itself. Or rather, domestication involves adaptation and active participation on both sides.

Evidence for this is found in studying weed and crop plants—truth be told, most weeds are or were also crops.

Amaranthus, the genus that gives us the most costly USA agricultural weeds? All edible and healthy, and several members of the genus are domesticated. They were staple crops for Mesoamerican empires.

Kudzu, the vine so aggressive in the USA it turns trees into looming kudzu monoliths? It's been bred and cultivated by humans since the Neolithic in its native range, in China it was one of the main sources of fiber for cloth for MILLENNIA to the point that the Zhou dynasty had a whole government office of kudzu affairs. Kudzu roots are edible and they can be as tall as a human and weighing over 200 pounds, you can make them into flour, make noodles out of the flour, you can process them down into a starch and use it just like potato or tapioca starch and make all sorts of sauces and confections and stuff out of it. In Japan it was used for clothes too, if you see pictures of clothes worn by a samurai that's probably kudzu! It has loads of unresearched phytochemicals that probably have medicinal use, it's good for making paper, a researcher even made a biodegradable alternative to plastic out of it

Yellow Nutsedge is a food crop, Purslane is a food crop, at least some species of morning-glories are food crops, crabgrass is a food crop, Nettles are food AND fiber, Milkweed is food and fiber too, Broadleaf Plantain is food and medicinal, Dandelion is food and medicinal AND great companion plant (they used to sell them in seed catalogues around the 1890's or so!) and have y'all ever seen queen-anne's-lace along the side of the road? THATS CARROTS. That's the wild ancestor of carrots! (ofc don't eat anything you aren't 1000% sure you can identify)

Simply put. A weed is a plant that has co-evolved with humans. And most of them are Like That because they co-evolved with us. And honestly I reckon that many plants were domesticated in the first place because they liked to grow in disturbed environments near human settlements and agricultural fields.

Now thinking about this in terms of animals...when our domestic species were first domesticated, there weren't fences, there wasn't "inside" or any controlled environment to bring animals into, and if you tried to overpower or coerce any of those species, they would 100% just kill you. It makes a lot more sense if the humans were just following herds around, and it gradually developed into protecting those herds from predators and tending to them more intentionally until we were kind of just part of the herds ourselves.

a lot of people are familiar with Biblical stories and metaphors about shepherds...it's clear those guys were basically living with sheep 24/7. They were assimilated to the sheep lifestyle.

this theory kinda suggests that we've lost the ability to domesticate new animal species to some extent because domestication has never really involved removing an animal from its natural environment. Feeding wild animals and trying to socialize them to humans isn't in line with the mutualistic nature of domestication because it's trying to change the animal to our whims, and usually decreases the fitness of the animal rather than increases it. And domestication probably takes a long long time to reach the level where an animal can be a "pet" instead of a more distant form of domestication where the association is not as close.

EXCEPT. Animals that adapt to our environment are prime candidates for domestication. This actually checks out because rats and mice are some of the most recently domesticated animals, iirc. Basically, pest animals are the most likely to be domesticated because they've already started evolving into a relationship with us. Just like weeds.

An interesting side note is how both animals and plants can de-domesticate and become "weeds/pests" again. Like "weedy rice" is becoming a problem in some crops where rice has evolved into a weed. And with animals, there's pigeons who were domesticated by us and now their habitat is cities because they co-evolved with us.

[bwv572]

The wikipedia article for dead internet theory is one of the best examples I've seen of just how retarded wikipedia has become. The entire article was created just to dismiss the concept as a conspiracy theory. This is the opening sentence:

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.[1][2][3][4][5] 

And you might think to yourself, wait, there's nothing about this phenomenon that requires a conspiracy. That bots would eventually outnumber humans is the inevitable product of 30+ years of bot and AI development, helped by the fact that just one person can run 100+ bots. We all know bot farms exist and that states have their hand in AI development, but just as many bots are run by normal people, and no amount of this is actually coordinated for some larger explicitly stated end: it's actually complete chaos with no end goal, with individual actors working for fun, for research, or for whatever other benefit, with no real concern for how their botting affects other networks or "civilians".

And the talk page thought of all these points. The editors responded to the above objection with "we have reliable sources that call it a conspiracy theory. Check those citations".

The more obvious position, the one actually used by the people who came up with the term to begin with, wouldn't have ever stated itself as "not a conspiracy", because no conspiracy was even being alleged, thus no "reliable sources" can be cited with the explicit claim "the following theory is not intended to be a conspiracy theory"

The kicker is that you click the reliable sources they quote, and the first one never alleges a conspiracy to begin with, it posits that it is a "speculation about the future of the internet". The second article calls it a "conspiracy theory", but in the colloquial sense of an "out there idea", which is a usage I have always hated. For instance, people call "bigfoot" a conspiracy theory - a conspiracy is a secret coordinated plan to commit a crime - that some big humanoid animal lives in the woods is not a plan to commit a crime. The "conspiracy theory" that "the moon isn't real" isn't a plan to commit a crime. These are just memes.

But, a "reliable source" written by a millennial woman used the term as a meme and now wikipedia cites it as an actual conspiracy and you're not allowed to change that framing unless you join a wikipedia council and vote to completely overhaul the editorial framing of this article.

There are much worse instances of this, but this is a good example of how retarded this all is because you don't really need a position on the article to understand that you don't need to frame it in that way for any of the information in the article to make sense.

[motziedapul]

@hinaypod has been shadowbanned for unknown reasons - either bad actors, or an auto flag, or because we post links as part of our podcast promotion. Or perhaps the Palestine posts, who knows.

Either way, while we wait for Tumblr to respond to our ticket, it's the perfect time to tell everyone to follow the @ above if you want to follow a Magnus Archives inspired, Rusty Quill Network official podcast about a Filipina immigrant dealing with supernatural threats in Toronto caused by cursed objects and immortal rich occultists from the 1920s who fuel their magic off violent death.

It's about how supernatural horror will never trump the horrors of real life fascism, and about how love, especially queer love, can change the very fabric of reality.

The protagonist is a 5 foot tall cheerful, warm and sunny Filipina woman with magic powers and personal trauma that's ten times worse than your average grumpy podcast man. The main villain is a faceless, nameless, powerful immortal threat in a fine suit, only known as The Benefactor.

It's got that delicious, TMA inspired analog sound (from phone calls and tape recordings) and spooky standalone stories mixed with an overarching plot that a lot of our listeners have made murder boards and spreadsheets for 👀 Theory crafting is popular in this fandom. Some episodes are so scary that people can't listen to them in the dark, but others have described it as their comfort podcast. We have more sound effects and music than base TMA; it adds to the horror, but we also like to include old jazz and classical music depending on the moment and character.

It's female led with a BIPOC majority main cast, and it's so overwhelmingly queer that we have a token cishet couple (an immortal Instagram influencer and her drippy bloody monster husband who crawls on the walls).

The protagonists are queer, the villains are queer, and we've got love stories both wholesome and toxic, happy and tragic. Old men in love, young men in love, young and old men and women in love, women in love in the 1920s, women in love in the 1940s, men who love women then men, women who love women than men, gay betrayals, lesbian tragedies, trans seductions of 150 year old former villains, NB romances in-between taking over the world.... Romantic surgeries and beheadings...

And milk tea 🧋

We're not the kind of podcast that'll ever get as huge as The Magnus Archives, but that's not really what we're aiming for. We're just aiming to reach people who would resonate with our message and love Hi Nay as much as we do!

So give us a follow and a listen! You can find us on Rusty Quill (they approached us, not the other way around 😉✨) and on almost all the major socials, and of course, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[creature-wizard]

Hell, it's accessible even if you live in a city. Urban ecology is a thing. Lot of people also need to learn about actor network theory and work that into their worldview.

Connection is not a feeling.

With some of the responses I've been getting on my post about connecting with nature, I realized I needed to write about this.

Folks have got to understand that connection is not a feeling. "I feel such a deep connection with-" nope, that's not connection you're feeling; that's fascination.

Whether it's nature, or a culture, or anything at all, connection isn't transcendent. It's something you build with actual physical effort. It's a relationship.

Let's say there's a stray cat outside, and I want to have a connection with it. So I go inside my house and meditate on the cat, visualizing myself sending out rays of love to the cat. I look at pictures of cats on the Internet. I collect cat memorabilia and pray to cat goddesses. But when I go outside and try to pet the stray cat, it runs away.

This is because I never built a genuine connection, or relationship, with this cat. I'm a parasocial admirer, at best. To the cat, I'm a weird stranger.

But let's say I put cat food outside, and I stay out there while the cat eats, and slowly get closer to the cat as it becomes more comfortable with my presence. Finally, I give the cat light touches, and it gradually learns that I am safe. And we become friends.

Now I have a connection with the cat, because we have a relationship. I feed the cat, the cat eats my food, and we're in each others' social networks.

"But what if I can't build relationships like this?"

It's okay if this is impossible for you right now. You're not going to be a Bad Pagan or a Bad Witch because you can't do something that is literally impossible at the moment.

But, if a connection is something you want to have, at some point? Get studying. You want a connection with nature at some point? Okay, then start studying ecology. Learn about the rain cycle. Learn about environmental damage. Find materials about the plants and animals in your area.

What about a culture? Okay, go learn about its history, go learn what kinds of problems its people are currently facing, and work on perceiving them as real, complex people instead of whatever stereotype you have in your mind right now.

And above all, remember: that's not a mystical connection you're feeling, that's fascination.

[antmanxai]

Organisations Improving STEM and Art Education in South Africa

There are many organisations that share a common vision to improve STEM and art education in South Africa for grades 8-12. These organizations work together with local stakeholders such as schools, universities, government agencies, non-governmental organisations, and private sector partners to provide learners and teachers with opportunities, support, and inspiration to engage in STEM and art…

[biancasaidstfu]

These people are BUSY. They are WORKING. Don’t know what everyone is going on about in terms of vacation. They just finished ten months of a Bridgerton. Ten MONTHS! And Luke shot a movie in there!

When they aren’t in front of a camera, there is auditioning, rehearsal time, memorizing your lines, traveling to locations, doing character research, filming promotion, doing print interviews, attending industry events, maintaining their socials, going to clothes fittings, meeting with your management, PR, agent, legal team, financial team, taking meetings for prospective jobs, photo shoots, networking, going to the gym, spending time with friends, family, SO, etc.

It’s a LOT.

And film shoots are 12-16-18-20 hour days (used to date a director, I know). Nic and Luke were always napping on set - Nic fell asleep in her boobs ffs - and they were picked up at 4am to head to set. Sure they have flexibility that others may not have but they’re hardly slacking. Maybe Luke buys his coffee and goes back to bed some days but he’s also shooting scenes at 2am. Nic is auditioning in between interviews and taking singing lessons.

Even the nonsense about Luke “always being on vacation”—how many trips was that? Five, ten? Even if each trip was a week, that’s 10 weeks. Big deal. That’s still 10 months of long days and late nights and attending events in the evening.

I think people who are employees who work 9-5 don’t get it. I work in a longs-hours, stressful, but flexible-hours industry (self-employed, 1099, like actors) and it is common for my peers to take a week off every 2mos (work 7wks, take the 8th off) because the work is intense. So in theory, 6 vacations a year.

But there are always trade offs: make good money, get a pedicure or drink margaritas at 11am on a Tuesday if you want, and book a vacation whenever if you can manage your clients and your workload. But there is no steady guaranteed paycheck, you don’t get off at 5pm, you don’t get weekends or evenings off, you don’t get holidays off necessarily, you take work calls into the evening, and it’s high stress.

The vacations might look glamorous but it’s to prevent burnout and the rest of the time is spent hustling.

In Nic and Luke’s case— and it’s not a small thing—they have the added pressure of being in a fishbowl constantly with cameras in their faces and being interrupted by strangers whenever they leave their house to do anything, go to dinner, see a show, etc. Time off affords them a tiny slice of privacy and sanity which must be a huge relief. Can’t imagine their mental health, actually, with the internet stalking them 24/7 and screaming their hate at them all day everyday, and the industry demanding they be beautiful and perfect and fit and morally upright and sex symbols and “nice” and non-controversial every time they’re seen in public lest their fortunes and follower counts fall.

Actors are hustlers. When they get to be Luke and Nic’s level of recognition and fame, they employ big teams of people to keep their momentum going and to make them look good while they’re doing it. That’s expensive and those people’s livelihoods are depending on them. That’s big pressure to produce.

People really shouldn’t begrudge them their time off.

I’d bet good money most people wouldn’t trade their privacy and decent work hours for the life Nic and Luke lead now. I’m sure the perks are nice but it comes with pressures they couldn’t have fathomed when they were first starting out.

Fame and fortune seems great but you’re only as good as your last gig (hence, this fandom’s constant harsh conversation around “being lazy, always on vacation, unemployed, slacking, following your boyfriend around, no momentum, missed opportunities,” etc). So that means you’re hustling all the time, and that means you’re tired, and that means you could use a vacation.

Maybe we could put the “always on vacation” thing to bed and get back to the part where we watched these two go from babies to global celebrities, continuing to book really cool new stuff. The Lovers Guide and GOAT? They’re doing GREAT! And as fans, we’re actually pretty lucky to have so much to look forward to.

Okay, sorry for the rant, Bianca, just wanted to throw out a different perspective. Our favorites are not lazy! It’s cool if they’re on summer vacation! 🏖️🍹🌺

*the image came from X

💯💯💯

Love this ❤️

[saveahorserideaneddie]

if i see one more “oh i thought tommy was nd coded” i swear to god i might actually rip my hair out

racism, misogyny, entitlement, and being an asshole are not nd traits… tommy kinard does not have nd mannerisms or speech patterns…. nothing about that man has even HINTED at being anywhere REMOTELY nd, y’all just want to come up with a way to say that hating on your favorite racist white man is bad

same with people calling him good queer rep is actually insane

not even in the context of shipping- tommy kinard is such god-awful rep

a racist misogynist asshole, who uses his queerness as a shield against valid criticism for his behavior, and acts like he has some sort of moral superiority over other queer people who are just starting to figure things out for themselves is not the paragon of queer rep you think it is, and i’m tired of seeing actual queer people pushing that narrative

especially when the straight actor leaned into physical stereotypes, put on a “gay voice,” and claimed he was doing some sort of groundbreaking work by playing a “masculine gay man” on a network tv show… the levels of audacity that his whole character post 703 has had is absolutely atrocious, and is not something i ever want to see defended again.

tommy kinard is not nd. tommy kinard is not good queer rep. you just got obsessed w a white man who kissed another white man, and paid him to lie to you on social media for a whole year, and you are scrambling to find ways to prevent yourself from looking stupid, when in reality all you’re doing is digging yourself deeper into a hole with every “headcanon” and “theory” you post about him.

sincerely, a queer nd person

[mariacallous]

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.

[bittersweetty]

Bless The October ᥫ᭡。

We are very blessed with Luke's sudden treat on October 3rd when he posted two stories in less than 24 hours. And while he was active, the significant other was rather quiet as if they're playing a game 🤫 (because whenever one upload about bton related thing, the other one is always silent and vice versa). Okay but then, the next day she surprised us with a lovely cutesy picture on a flight that I believe, had us all screaming, crying, throwing up, and kicking our feet ><

Let's break it down!!!

Nic posted a story of her picture on a flight drinking champagne and thanking Aer Lingus for bringing her on a long-awaited holiday. From the interior and seat, she was flying with Aer Lingus Business Class.

Aer Lingus Business Class Routes in the picture below. (They depart only from Dublin Airport, Shannon Airport, and also Manchester Airport). My take: She didn't fly home to Ireland using Aer Lingus Business Class. And according to her upcoming schedule, the narrative that she flew to New York seems more plausible. But it's not from Heathrow Airport!!

Connecting Luke's story and Nic's story metadata. They flew on the same day. From the information above, we know that Nic went on a long-haul flight, but we don't know about Luke.

Let's look back at his story on the October 4th. Luke's luggage picture was taken in British Airways Galleries First Lounge, Heathrow T5 South. This lounge is accessible to: a) First-class passengers b) Gold members of the British Airways executive club c) Oneworld emerald members. So, he doesn't necessarily have to fly first class and he could take any cabin class and enjoy the lounge as long as he's part of point b or c.

People speculated that he could fly to Larnaca, Cyprus because A uploaded a picture from Marina Breeze, Limassol. So, I checked the flight to Larnaca on Oct 4th morning but the time wasn't timing, and here's the reason why :

Some people also speculated that Luke and Nic flew to JFK from LHR together using Aer Lingus. I found out that it was not a possibility, because Nic was using Aer Lingus Business Class which only departs from Dublin/Sharron/Manchester. Aer Lingus 8817 indeed flew from Heathrow -> JFK BUT that flight was operated as British Airways 117.

YES, I'm a firm believer that they flew together hence the teasing within a day difference and flying at the same time. And also the hand gate picture uploaded by her stylist. It was definitely Lukey Newts' hands! The only possible scenario that aligns with my theory is Nic and Luke flew together and they were connecting through Dublin to one of Aer Lingus' long-haul destinations in North America. Since Luke was at Galleries First Lounge BA, T5, LHR around 06.26 am, they could take this flight : BA | LHR -> DUB | BA828 | departed at 08.44 - 09.37 then switched to Aer | DUB -> JFK | EIN105 | departed 11.33, arrived at 18.49 (dublin time) and 13.49 (NY time) THIS WOULD EXPLAIN why was her story picture taken at 16.27 pm (London time) but appeared very bright outside. Because it's around noon time in the United States!!!

As I'm typing this post, we got another sighting of Nic with her bestie Jake Dunn and also at A24’s screening of Nicole Kidman’s “Babygirl” and apparently they also watched SNL together. Good for them and glad they were having fun (as they should!!). p.s. Jake is not only Nic's best friend, but he is a professional actor first and foremost (and also a producer) like Nic who attended a filming screening and could have used this opportunity to network. It's not a pure holiday if you're still attending events here and there. I beg people to respect Jake and not assume that he's just tagging Nic along when he works in the same industry as her.

Did my belief change that she went with Luke? NO 😊😊😊 I believe Luke was busy auditioning or doing something for an upcoming project. Until it's proven wrong that Luke was somewhere else, this is where I stand (⸝⸝> ᴗ•⸝⸝)

And I'm still standing firm and tall believing that Jake is nothing but a very dear gay friend of hers. Yes, I'm assuming his sexuality based on his social interactions and all of the proof shown by @fiamat12 in her amazing blog, as well as some people assuming he's straight just because he was papped hanging out with Nic and the gang for few times. We are all assuming and speculating anyway. Showing support is okay but coming at them and harassing them is never okay. Never okay to JD as well as to A.

P.S. Big thanks to @ladytumbledown who's very kind and patient responding to my messages and discussing this flight saga with me. It was much easier and fun when you've got someone working with you :)

[trans-axolotl]

"Just as 'most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk,' we can say that most of the psychiatrically committed walk into hospitals because they know they will be restrained or dragged in if they don't walk. Often, this power has not required the psychiatrist to know the exact source of the ailment they treat nor exactly how their methods act upon the mind; what matters is that the machine is running. A whole system, a tightly interwoven mesh of relays and discourses is in place to transform the psychiatrist's judgment into effective action: a working theory and classificatory system to organize the clientele and separate them from other objects of care or punishment (taxonomy or nosology); institutional spaces (the asylum is historically the most pervasive, but also clinics, group homes, psychiatric wards, etc.); judicial codes defining the status of the mad (generally analogized to animals or children); prescribed roles for legal actors (police, judges, forensic experts); a chain of bureaucrats to sort out matters of insurance, finance, and property in cases of institutionalization or guardianship; and approved mechanisms or surveillance and reporting to translate individual complaints into the state's administrative codes. There are as many points of contact as there are spaces of encounter and discourses of legitimation in the social world. One or more of these elements can be revolutionized without fundamentally changing the connection between the parts. For example, at various points throughout its existence, as we've already seen, a theory of 'social causation' prevailed over a biological one without changing the matrix that defines modern psychiatry, and the same can be said for some of the legal alterations to the patient's status throughout the twentieth century.

There is no psychiatrist-patient encounter set apart from a broader circuit of relations: patient-apartment-work-family-cop-partner-school-neighbor-psychologist-state-guardian-probate-judge-psychiatrist-hospital. And to be clear: our biology itself is shared and leaks throughout this chain at every step. Our bodies are permeable, open, they leak, bleed, consume, excrete; our bodies flow out into a common world, and are open to outside influence, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made so excruciatingly clear. A patient of the Utica Asylum put it beautifully in The Opal in 1852: 'Like fermentation in the chemical world, [humanity's] atomic adhesions are in constant enlargement and in silent operation, seeking out relations, and forming relations of unsurpassed beauty and comfort, because in conformity with nature and adapted to its condition, means and end.' Attempts to neutralize this network by relegating every actor and space in the chain external to the domain of the psychiatrist onto the order of natural history ('we're just responding to the demands of the family...' or 'that's a matter for the police...I just deal with the patient once they arrive here') expose this posture as a naively religious one. In denial of the profane world and its complications extrinsic to the holy circuitry of neural or endocrine highways of the One in isolation, they declare a monastic fealty to an object of study over and above the matrix that makes its study possible or their conclusions efficacious in any real encounter...

...If psychiatry still takes refuge in the desert of scientism--speaking in tongues of prolix jargon--it's because a paradise of healing did materialize, but not as a Promethean forge of liberated humans, nor even as solemn resting place of broken souls, but sank so low as to appear as nothing more than a mundane prison. Burdened by the unbearable weight of their failure, the next generation abandoned their project and ran away to the labs, relinquishing responsibility for the armies of the living dead. At least they hung a sign at the door of the asylum on their way out. It read: 'abandon every hope, who enter here.'"

-Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren, pg 32-34