David Lynch was a visionary in an era bereft of them
I’ve read a few things about Lynch over recent years that expanded my appreciation his impact. I thought others might be interested in them following his recent death.
Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch: Philosophical Perspectives is an interesting companion to eight of his films and Twin Peaks: The Return.
Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times - Phil Hoad in The Guardian.
Another Article about David Lynch - Patryk Chlastawa in The Point
Our doubles, ourselves: Twin Peaks and my summer at the black lodge - Linnie Greene’s reflections on her time in Lynchian darkness
This book is esoteric and academic but discusses his impact on transmedia aesthetics in a novel way - Networked David Lynch: Critical Perspectives on Cinematic Transmediality.
This podcast (in French) had an interesting discussion about Lynch.
The new are hotdogs sandwiches is are lozenges soup?
To paraphrase Frederic Jameson it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of human knowledge than the breakdown of academic publishing models. This paper by Williamson, Macgilchrist and Potter tries to conceive what that could look like.
Legacy AI systems have been removed from publishing infrastructures, and Big Tech partnerships have expired without renewal. Peer reviewers are remunerated and review times have been extended to 4 weeks or more, to protect time for rigorous reading and thoughtful response.
An important example of how public knowledge is being controlled through intimidation, doxing and brigading.
Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
I really enjoyed this post/newsletter on skibidi toilet and dialectic analysis
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/663/2025/3d121a21e6.jpg" width=“590” height=“600” alt=“Diagram from the article that shows a flow sequence. Text is:&10;&10;Discomfort with algorithmically recommended content &10;Leading to &10;Discomfort with new internet content&10;Leading to&10;Desire to annoy Absurd or self- referential&10;language like “skibidi,” “gyat,” “rizz,” “sigma” &10;Leading to&10;Reactive language like “brainrot,” “touch grass,” and “iPad kid”&10;Leading to&10;Even more “brainrot” language; emergence of an aesthetic&10;&10;Superimposed on this is the “How do you do fellow kids?” Steve Buscemi meme from 30 Rock. “>
Cam Wilson has taken over venerable Australian tech(ish) newsletter The Sizzle - Cam’s first issue is out today.
All the best to Anthony Agius for his non-retirement.
The two genders: Githyanki and Githzerai.
(The New York Times seems unable to stop beclowning itself)
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/663/2024/d67926df78.jpg" width=“398” height=“600” alt=“Screenshot of a New York Times article. The image is a top-down view of dice and a dungeon master screen, typical of a Dungeons and Dragons game. The text is:&10;&10;Heading: Dungeons & Dragons&10;Rolls the Dice With New Rules About Identity&10;&10;Image caption text (oddly not very descriptive of the image itself): Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, endorsed a trend throughout role-playing games in which players are empowered to halt the proceedings if they ever feel uncomfortable. Simon Simard for The New York Times&10;&10;Body text: The role-playing game replaced “race” with&10;“species” and divorced several character traits from biological identity. Some longtime players are upset (as is Elon Musk).">
Michael Leunig, Australian cartoonist, dies aged 79
I hope those memorialising him remember his recent comments and attitudes as well as his earlier work.
I read more for pleasure this year than usual. Reading more widely led to some genuine surprises - and a few punishing tomes. Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake was the definite standout.
I’m dealing with generative A.I. use in assessment a lot at the moment. This is a good summary of the issues, but also describes the pressures and anxieties that students face as well as the structural drivers.
Climate change may have driven Homo sapiens to extinction in Europe before we were helped by Neanderthals. The Nature article provides more details.
I often wonder if the right species survived.
Storing information for 2124
A wonderful article on how you might go about digitally storing something for 100 years:
What is consistent about these examples is that they all involve groups who care. The most enduring decentralized efforts don’t owe their success to technological or organizational innovation, but rather by having enlisted generations of people with an emotional and intellectual investment in their worth. For both cloud storage services and distributed storage schemes, the question is whether they can provoke the necessary level of passion and watchfulness. Are they and their technologies empowering those who care, or setting them up to fail?
Century Scale Storage by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, via Molly White
Getting free from the slop machine
He’s half right. Manipulation by recommendation engines and algorithmic oppression is an extant threat that’s changing our relationships and our politics.
But social media - interactive technologies that facilitate the networked sharing of information - can be emancipatory. It can expand our worlds in real ways. That sounds Pollyanna-ish until you recall that we’ve experienced that potential ourselves. Made new friends. Seen things in new ways.
It wasn’t always this way
One of my kids was recently quizzing me about Mastodon, and he pulled me up when I said I like the chronological feed.
“What does that mean? If there’s no algorithm, how do they know what you want to see?”
I realised he’s never known a chronological social media feed. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook abandoned theirs before he was born. The idea that all I see are the accounts I follow, and that I see everything they post, in the order they post, broke his brain a bit. He didn’t like it.
“You might also like” this slop
But the recommendation algorithms aren’t working like they used to either (if they ever really worked at all). Instagram is allowing you to “reset” your recommendation algorithm. Even though they have hundreds of thousands of data points about you, they’re recommending things that you’ve already long-forgotten. Or worse, that you wish you could forget.
Beyond blocking or unfollowing accounts, there aren’t many ways for us as users on algorithm-driven platforms to control the slop we’re fed. In fact most platforms are doubling down on the slop, serving up content from accounts you never followed in an effort to drive up fake engagement metrics. I don’t know if you’ve checked Facebook lately, but the dead internet is real and your relatives are trapped in it.
That highlights a tension we all experience. We all know our privacy is being invaded and our data linked by these recommendation algorithms. We don’t like the idea that we’re living in filter bubbles where something else decides what we see, but we can’t imagine anything else possible.
What instead?
This also made me consider a major upside of the fediverse that we don’t promote enough: the best recommendation algorithm is another human, and on the fediverse that’s all we have.¹ There are still human-driven ways to encounter novelty, and to escape the flattened world served up to us by algorithms.
These are some of the ones I use:²˒³
- For academic reading: The Syllabus is expensive, but it offers genuine insights into different fields. It’s expanded my reading and thinking.
- For links: Metafilter is still the most venerable and reliable source of web-based surprises.
- For films: Letterboxd has a “films like this” algorithm, but that’s about the extent of the recommendations you’ll find. It’s still what your friends watch, listed in the order they watched them.
- For photos: Pixelfed or even classico Flickr will make you happier than Instagram.
- For fiction: BookWyrm eclipses the bizarro, astroturfed morass of snark and spin that is Goodreads. Real humans talking about the books they’ve read, and they’re on the fediverse too.
- Feeds: Good old RSS feeds. These can be hard to get started with, but people like Molly White have shared the feeds they subscribe to, which you can treat like starter packs (and remember that podcasting is basically audio RSS).
These options often have a cost in money or time, essentially because they involve work instead of harvesting your data and mining your attention. If you look at Facebook, TikTok or YouTube you can see that what appears to be free has a cost.
A slop-free existence is possible, but it takes a bit of work.
- Yes, I know there are bot accounts, but you have to follow them.
- You’ll notice that Bluesky is nowhere on the list. That’s because even though it’s not be the latter-day 4chan that X-the-everything-app has become, it still relies on graph neural network recommender engines. It’s still slop. The ingredients just aren’t as bad - yet.
- Social video is tough and not something I know enough about. I’m not a big viewer of YouTube-like platforms. Peertube would be worth trying, but I don’t use it much. YMMV.