✱ Bulletins
Gregory Sholette, the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, describes how workers in a Pennsylvania factory spent their break covering a wall of the plant with “newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces.” They called it “Swampwall.” It reminds me of the sculpture on a high shelf in the back of a diner where I worked, composed of unusually shaped potatoes. Its form changed with each new tuber contributed by the cook on prep shift.
Such spontaneous projects are signs of life: physical evidence of the liberating fact that not all time at work can be measured or processed into productivity. Swampwall was inutile: a means to itself. It was allowed to flourish until the company was bought out by a global corporation, at which point the massive collaborative mural was “expunged.”
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age - Thea Lim
We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?
Some photos from Squamish, BC.
The 2024 Gruber/Mann ‘Holiday Party’ episode cannot arrive soon enough.
He said, “How did we get here? We started as skaters
Then you got your license and then graduation
Then I changed medications and everything after went sideways including tonight”You had a Screamer with trackers and OJs
And I had a Steadham with Bones and a dome tail
And if failure’s a trick then we learned pretty quick
It just took a few times to get rightMan, we used to glide
We used to hang like the smoke
We’d show off for my sister
We didn’t mind being brokeNow every conversation I have’s about money
And I leave home in the morning but then I just keep driving
Kill off the day until you guys stop working
Then pitchers at Skippers now Carlos is crying
If you work on generative models that create hyperrealistic photos or videos of people, and you are not scared shitless of what you’re working on, I do not understand you. My humanity can’t connect to your humanity. In fact, the nihilism of your eagerness shakes me to my core.
Salman Rushdie never wanted any of this, but here he is and here we are.
A book note on Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder.
It’s been One of Those Days®. Sometimes if you’re lucky, you catch the One of Those Days not too far from a record store therapy provider/Level 1 trauma center “capable of providing total care for every aspect of injury”.
The fate to which you are condemned as the one who brings a nice camera and takes nice photos of gatherings is to be the one person missing from all the photos of all the gatherings.
A good Bandcamp Friday.
Experiments in the letter شين (sheen) from a few years ago.
The fine folks over at deeplearning.ai openly saying they prefer AI companies just ignore robots.txt files and hope the courts back them in this.
What’s new: Researchers at MIT analyzed websites whose contents appear in widely used training datasets. Between 2023 and 2024, many of these websites changed their terms of service to ban web crawlers, restricted the pages they permit web crawlers to access, or both.
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Yes, but: The instructions in robots.txt files are not considered mandatory, and web crawlers can disregard them. Moreover, most websites have little ability to enforce their terms of use, which opens loopholes. For instance, if a site disallows one company’s crawler, the company may hire an intermediary to scrape the site.
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We’re thinking: We would prefer that AI developers be allowed to train on data that’s available on the open web. We hope that future court decisions and legislation will affirm this.
(Highlight mine).
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