In Love with ‘Her’ Hallucination in Our Era of Rising AI
Spike Jonze’s Her is a work of art that is far more influential than predictive; ahead of its time in exploring the murky obsessions and ambiguities that haunt our relationship with AI.
Technology
Gravity’s Rainbow Under Today’s Hypersonic Skies
In our era of awe-inspiring hypersonic weaponry, we turn to Thomas Pynchon, who warns in Gravity’s Rainbow that the Rocket is never mere hardware; it is a nihilistic creed whose liturgy is speed.
Today’s AI Sublime Was Forged in Cold War Cinema’s Atomic Monsters
Horror and sci-fi nuclear cinema of the Cold War era is our finest rehearsal for the AI future, and that’s why pop culture still reaches for monstrous metaphors when technology leaps beyond comprehension.
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The Art of Psychological Warfare
From marketing manipulation to all-out psychological warfare, Stories Are Weapons clarifies how our world – and worldview – is seldom our own.
The Idols of the Twilight: AI in Our Age of Inventive Divination
In their pseudo-creativity and occasionally malevolent capriciousness, generative AI programs resemble an order of magical spirits from another age.
‘Tokens’ Pays Attention to the Moneyish Side of Things
Tokens is about all those things that are moneyish—monetary-like exchanges that are tracked and programmable, shady and social, hard coded and beyond borders.
The Broken Hearts Gallery: Love, Tech, and the Death of the Romcom
Romcom The Broken Hearts Gallery is aware that we are chained to technology, yet it shrouds social media in the kind of movie magic that can revive the ailing genre.
In the Aeroplane Over the Meme with Neutral Milk Hotel
Neutral Milk Hotel’s ambiguous 1988 album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, suffered a memeified atrocity. But the tides of public opinion rise and fall, and memes come and go.
McKenzie Wark’s ‘Raving’ and the Need to Dissociate from the Body and Self
McKenzie Wark’s understanding of ravespace as a constructed situation in nonlinear ketamine-time comports with my experience raving on weekends as a freshman in college.
Only the Surveilling Technology Is New ‘The Listeners’ Contends
In The Listeners, scholar Brian Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States by means of technological cunning up to 2001.
Why Is There Still So Much Nostalgia for Nuclear Apocalypse?
The popularity of nuclear apocalypse is nostalgia for a time when our worries were wrapped in a single nuclear package, and all we needed was a bunker and a dream.
Punk Wouldn’t Have Spread So Far Without the Sh*t Media
Simultaneously inside and outside by either choice or circumstance, punk has always had paradoxical – sometimes hostile – relations with TV, radio, and the internet.