Related Recs

🤖

CONVOLUTED CYBER PUNK

Been watching a lot of stuff lately that touches on the intersection of geo-politics and the cyberization of the body (see Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, X-Files, The Shrouds, etc.) So often people are really down on how complex and amorphous the plots can be but isn’t that the whole point? What better reflects our reality than a messy shadow world brimming with malicious government and tech sector actors seeking to weaponize our bodies and minds? These stories aim for a certain realism and achieve it in their refusal to provide clean answers. So often, there is no truth for us anymore. Everything is a false flag, everything is a psy-op, who does the smoking man really work for? We’re the victims and we can only grasp at half-truths and accept that we’ll never know. Yet in accepting that, we reach a deeper truth of another kind.

@YungChicken

Apr 26, 2025

🖥

The Reenchanted World, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

i'm always getting too bleak about technology and AI, about the brain rot and disassociation and spiraling out and general cognitive decline we're all experiencing, that will only continue to worsen with time. but this essay gave me some hope “Do you see a way out?” “Yeah, I mean . . . I’m not in the business of saving the world, but it would definitely be a better and more interesting place if more people were involved in making these things. That’s the fundamental thing: that if more software, more buildings, more social spaces, and more everything were designed by more people, of course it would produce a more interesting and better world! ...One of Stafford Beer’s more famous and brilliant phrases was ‘POSIWID,’ which stands for ‘the purpose of the system is what it does.’ It’s a kind of maxim of cybernetics. And it’s very good for diagnosing systems. Instead of saying, Oh, we have a democratic system, we have an education system, you say, The purpose of the system is what it does. And what our society produces is people who are undereducated, or just educated enough to perform specific tasks—the way to get a good education is to study something that has this high economic value. Apart from that, you are pretty fucked. The purpose of the system is to reproduce the existing power dynamics of that system again and again. That is what it does. Society has no interest in educating you in how technology works. Because then you make your own technology, and you make different technology, and you upset the economic power balance and so forth. But it is doable, and people are doing it all the time. You can do it yourself.”

@pratibha

May 30, 2025

🗿

AI IS FOR LOSERS

i wrote a substack "ultimately, we have to create our own ways of living that limit outsourcing, at the very least, our fundamentally human capacity for self-regulation, connection, and creativity. we have to really understand the way things work in whatever ways we can so we regain some sort of autonomy over our lives. when we give ourselves over to other people to think, act, and do for us, that’s bad enough in and of itself, but when we give ourselves to machines, well… i imagine it’s even worse. but just like the Metaverse’s ultimate flop and redirection to AI, there is a world in which we will have refused to accept this as well. but there needs to be a persistent resistance."

@pratibha

3d ago

Top Recs from @ganeev484

⭐

stop counting yourself out of life

We’re never too old, too late, too inexperienced or incapable. Nothing is embarrassing or weird. I didnt realize how much of everything I counted myself out of because of some anxiety or preconceived notion. It’s all made up, do everything and try it all. Nothing is beneath us and we are not beneath or above anything.

@ganeev484

Sep 5, 2024

📷

Camera

Really has romanticized life or at least added more value to small moments. I’m tryna “perfect days” in this bitch. Also recommend the movie perfect days it has not left my mind since I watched it a month ago.

@ganeev484

Dec 3, 2024

📖

Parable of the sower by Octavia E. Butler

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. the only lasting truth, is change. God is change. the book has such an interesting philosophy that it explores through a sci-fi world thats also feels so close to a possible reality. it’s an interesting read makes you think and sit on a lot of excerpts.

@ganeev484

Aug 14, 2024