Substrate

Source: Are.na

Earlier today, I received a message from Ivan Minutillo, one of the core team behind Bonfire. He knows that I've got at least one client interested in Bonfire, but also we used to work together on MoodleNet, so he keeps me up-to-date with anything I might have missed.

The hand-wringing about disinformation in modern times paints an ahistorical view of the past. There has always been disinformation.

Take, for example, this passage from p.589 of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance (which I finished today) giving examples of what the printing press was being used for, even in the early days.

”Civilisation is a thin film across an ocean of chaos”.

— Werner Herzog

Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.

I'm not sure that pejorative terms such as AI 'slop' and AI 'psychosis' are helpful. Similarly, neither is 'cognitive surrender'. What's interesting is how similar or different over-reliance on a particular tool or workflow is for a particular individual. In that way, I think AI use can and should be considered in the same realm as 'addictions' to things like betting and algorithmic timelines.

Back in 2024, Rabbit Inc. sold the R1 as an AI companion: a charming little orange square, designed with Teenage Engineering, that was meant to replace your phone apps with a big red button and a cloud service. Underneath the marketing, it was always a locked-down Android device running a Flutter app. This thing has GPS and even a SIM card slot!

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More at my Are.na channel

Definitely concurring with this Warren Ellis post from a few days ago:

My problem, apparently, is that I’m interested in too many things. In fact, someone made a point of writing to my office a few weeks ago specifically to tell me that my interests aren’t interesting.

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