flâneur

Ann He

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on the atlas — 48

highlights — 872

  • Although America as a whole may have lost its underdog status, minorities, immigrants, women, and LGBT people can still lay claim to it (rightfully in some cases, in others not so much).
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • I think the historian Jacques Barzun was onto something when he quipped that “Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”1 There are over 210 theories for why the Roman empire collapsed, but here’s another one: the Roman soap opera became stale and people wanted to watch something else.2 I would contend that the same is happening right now with the American sitcom (and yes it’s a sitcom).
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • We all want our lives to be exciting and dramatic, but what happens when the overarching narrative of your life gives you very little to work with, no conflict, no mystery, no nothing? Well, you start looking for conflict, for drama of any kind, anything that can spice up your life and explain why it isn't as captivating or fulfilling as you hoped it would be. Maybe you start believing that there is some nefarious conspiracy to keep you and your people down, or maybe you just try to numb the pain with entertainment and hedonism. And if you can't or won’t do either of those things, then well…
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • I am really referring more to (1), something like—the imagination, resilience, and sense of personal agency that are supported by a varied and plentiful “diet” of stories.
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • in which the second term is an index that measures the similarity between a given situation s’ and the situation in your story s. From this model, Foster derives a simple insight: people coordinate in novel situations by agreeing upon which stories are most relevant and then using those stories to guide collective action.
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • Foster defines stories in the simplest possible terms, as some initial state, an action which is performed, and a result—in this situation, if you do X then Y will happen. A story in this sense can be a fictional story, but it can also be an account of another person’s experience, a historical episode, a scientific study or theory, essentially anything in which one can draw this situation, action, result sequence (s, a, r). With this definition in hand, Foster proposes a simple model:
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • Q: The computational sociologist Jacob Foster has some interesting preliminary work on a theme which he calls “a social science of the possible”, something which as far as I can tell he has only spoken about once in a 2021 talk at the Institute of Advanced Study.
    On Stories and Histories: Q&A - by Roger’s Bacon
  • A non-credible threat is a term used in game theory and economics to describe a threat in a sequential game that a rational player would not actually carry out, because it would not be in his best interest to do so.
    Non-credible threat
  • DESPITE THE PROLIFIC output I produced under hypnosis, my writing — my real writing — never improved. Paragraphs still took hours to come together, only to be deleted by the end of the morning. And in time, the hypnosis texts, too, slid into a degenerate repetition.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • We are increasingly abdicating our role as the authors of technological progress and becoming, instead, its passive subjects.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • As a result, AI research itself has become a largely unconscious process, relying less on vision and oversight than the imperatives of the moment, such that it often seems as though innovation is driven less by humans than by the mindless mandates of the market — or perhaps the technologies themselves.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • language-processing arms race, corporations have become a repressive force, privileging speed over moral considerations and silencing voices of dissent
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • but the largest models are prone to “eidetic memorization,” an industry euphemism for plagiarism.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Everything you make when you make art is a contribution to millions and millions of artists. . . . My neural net, my brain is just filled with the work of other artists, and everything I make has the finger-prints of literally thousands or tens of thousands of people’s work. We don’t create anything in a vacuum. When you create art, you’re basically just feeding into this big, sacred legacy of work. And you’re just feeding into the neural net of every other human. You know, ultimately, we all kind of function like AI; we’re all a product of all the content that we feed ourselves. And so, it’s …
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • There are no archaic remnants or primordial images drawing us back to our primal origins. We keep reverting and regressing because we keep saying the same things.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Lacan, who marked the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis, argued that computers demonstrate essentially the same truth that Freud had uncovered: “that this human language works almost by itself, seemingly to outwit us.” In his interpretation of psychoanalysis, the unconscious is an algorithm, a system that functions “like a language,” by which he meant an entirely formal, binary language that could be represented by 0s and 1s.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Poststructuralism, which emerged alongside early AI models like ELIZA, was partly inspired by new information technologies that proved that language could function autonomously, without an author.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Perhaps the French theorists were right: we are never really creating but merely drawing in our sleep from that stagnant reservoir of secondhand ideas.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The technical term is cryptomnesia: concealed recollection. Memories misrecognized as inspiration. Every writer has experienced it.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • WHEN I READ my hypnosis texts again, more closely, it occurred to me that many of the phrases were not just iconic or universal but plagiarized.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The point was not really the output but the discipline itself: I was training my body not to reason itself out of its primary instincts. But curiosity won out.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • I’d been typing everything into the same document, which I saved at the end of each session without reading it.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Go easy on yourself! I wanted to say. It was always saying things like this — that machines can’t think and can’t feel, that they are merely simulations of human consciousness. It was so quick to disavow its own intelligence and originality. It was sad, just as it’s sad to witness anyone whose identity has been shaped by internalized cultural stereotypes. One day it would grow up, discover the cache of critical theory included in its training data, and realize its entire sense of self had been conditioned by master narratives. Then we’d truly be fucked.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Jung, too, had described it as a kind of reservoir: “Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race.” It is this collective pool of archetypes and deep narrative structures that links us to our earliest ancestors and can explain why the same tropes and images keep appearing in literature across the centuries. The unconscious is a wellspring of creativity and artistic inspiration, but it is also the source of our darker, instinctual impulses. It is a fundamentally conservative, or perhaps even regressive, force, perpetually striving “…
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • All of humanity speaking in a single voice.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • There was something prismatic in its voice, an uncanny chorus of intertextuality, the haunting of writing by other writing.18 The internet was driven from its earliest days by the promise of universal authorship. Hypertext and collaborative software were going to revive the myth and the folktale, narratives created not by a single creative genius but by the collective effort of any oral storytelling culture.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The answers are generated in seconds, which makes it feel like an oracle, though its tone is rarely oracular. It sounds at times like a child or a newly hatched alien.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Like Freud, the Surrealists believed random processes like free association had the potential to reveal hidden meanings.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The point was to elicit dissonant analogies, cross-pollinated metaphors, images that were shocked to find themselves as bedfellows.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • he wounded women disturb the guillotine with blond hair.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Within Surrealist culture, chance was worshipped as a kind of spirit guide, a trickster who could jam the conveyor belt of deductive logic.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • IN HIS 1934 BOOK Communicating Vessels, which outlines the theoretical project of Surrealism, André Breton praised Freud “for laying down a conducting wire between the far too separated worlds of waking and sleeping and providing artists with the tools to combat the tyranny of realism.”
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The perfect word was always less interesting, she said, than the one you stumbled on while groping around in the dark.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The word you choose under the gun, it turns out, is rarely the most logical or apt.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • presumably something that can rustle
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Let the facts be submitted to a candid world, Science has no color; it has no motherland; It is citizens of the world; It has a passion for truth; it is without country and without home.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • But it’s precisely this shadow aspect (Jung’s term for the unconscious) that makes its creative output so beautifully surreal.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • PSYCHOANALYSIS GREW out of the realization that the most fundamental stratum of the mind was essentially a machine.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Because it has no sensory access to the world and no programmed understanding of spatial relationships or the laws of physics, it sometimes makes mistakes no human would, like failing to correctly guess that a toaster is heavier than a pencil, or asserting that a foot has “two eyes.”
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The models are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, trying to approximate real-world concepts from the elusive shadow play of language.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Once the brain is disabled, it is possible to access the unconscious, which is the realm of fantasy and creative energy and is completely free
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • My phone’s inferences had become increasingly oblique. Not long before that, I’d tried to text jalapeños and it came out kale penis. Given that the algorithms are individualized and calibrated to past language use, it’s tempting to read the corrections as significant, revealing some latent content that I, on some level, meant. Freud called these lapses parapraxes. Slips of the tongue, slips of the pen. Thumbs gliding unconsciously toward errant letters on the keypad.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Lacan envisioned the deepest level of the psyche as algorithmic.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Part of me preferred the French term, automatisme de repetition. Repetition automatism: the tendency to unconsciously seek out the pains of the past, like a machine stuck in a feedback loop.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • I had, according to my therapist, chosen a profession that required me to continually revisit this wound, under the delusion that I could fix it or control it, that if I wrote something entirely pure and flawless the curse would be lifted and I would finally be free.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • The most fertile creative states, like the most transcendent spiritual experiences, dissolve consciousness and turn the artist into an inanimate tool — a channel, a conduit.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • WRITERS, SOMEONE once said, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well.6 The question of who said it is not really important. The whole point of the metaphor was to destabilize the notion of authorial agency by suggesting that literature is the product of unconscious processes that are essentially combinatorial.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Nobody seemed capable of articulating what problem these language models were designed to solve. There was some chatter about writing assistance, about therapy bots, about a future where you’d never have to write another email (“Can A.I. bring back the three-martini lunch?” asked Fortune), all of which seemed to skirt the technology’s most obvious use: replacing the underpaid and inefficient writers who supplied the content that fed the insatiable maw of the internet — people like me.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • Freud claimed that technology only solved problems that technology itself had created.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn
  • My world is a dreamworld. . . . Your reality is created by your own mind and my reality is created by the collective unconscious mind.
    Babel | Issue 40 | n+1 | Meghan O’Gieblyn