This is both fascinating and politically badass: one of our favorite musicians is working in collaboration to confuse and destroy generative AI models used to push musicians out of their own industry:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYm2d9bmEA #Disrupt #AI #MusicIndustry

The History of Political Authority

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/595

Nietzsche Goes on Hot Ones

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/594

@LillyHerself Some websites use that language when they detect I am behind a VPN, but sometimes I get through without turning it off. Maybe Reuters' was testing something like that, as you say, or maybe they have a tool that's meant to block certain traffic, and it's just unreliable.

@existentialcomics "We must make the system more efficient at shoveling money in to my pockets as quickly as possible. Sustainability? No, I said efficiency."

Sartre and the Meaning of Life:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/591

A marriage proposal spoken in office jargon https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-marriage-proposal-spoken-entirely-in-office-jargon

@benlockwood In Postmodernism (or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), Fredric Jameson argued that cyberpunk was an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, which is a way of thinking that helps us 1) orient ourselves in the world, by every sense of the word, and 2) helps us imagine better futures and how to get there. Others have argued that cyberpunk failed and was co-opted, so solarpunk might be a good successor in that sense.

Exploring Solarpunk

https://write.as/benlockwood/exploring-solarpunk

Total chaos gremlin energy, and not in the fun-cool way: cyberintel.substack.com/p/doge-exposes-once-secret-government

On the plus side, we now have the term "broligarchy" to describe the current platform-capitalism moment of descent in to techno-feudalism. #DOGE, #CyberSecurity, #News

@weaver Yes, I agree! I just don't encounter those connections in fiction, at least in any obvious way. Perhaps dadaism has entered in to fiction more, and in a more critical way, but I haven't attempted to confirm that yet.

@weaver I don't post much, but we share that collection of interests. Mark Fisher was a big influence of mine and Becky Chambers sounds like someone I really ought to read.

@weaver Awesome! I have a hard time finding any intersection between weird/surreal fiction and critical theory, or philosophy in general, really, so I write it myself! But if you have any recommendations, I could always use more inspiration, not to mention a better grasp of my market.

Hello everyone! 👋👋👋

I've just joined the Fediverse, and I chose @zirk.us bc I'm most interested in #literature and the arts more broadly. I also created a #reading account via #Bookwyrm @d-integration, and a Fediverse-supported #blog (launching today) for my writings at @weaver@d-integration.org.

I'm most interested in #SpeculativeFiction, especially #SciFi and the #Weird, #ArabLit, #SocialCritique, #CriticalTheory, #Philosophy, and all things #Surreal and/or #reality breaking.

#Introduction

Yo, who loves wacky brutalism? Unfortunately, this place, the Wedding Palace in Tbilisi, Georgia, is not abandoned like many of these structures are, so we can't throw a sick rave party in there yet. #Brutalism #Modernism

Doot doot we wrote this song in 2005, when we were in to goth metal and hardcore techno. We STILL in to goth metal and hardcore techno, and THROUGH RED ANKH think it's reached its final form.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUo0mMeXo68 #IndustrialMetal #IndependentMusic #ProgressiveMetal #WeirdMetal

Breaking the habit of pop social media to try the Fediverse kinda broke the social media habit in general. It feels good, but there's still our new music to be shared. Here's a wacky and eclectic progressive gabber metal tune from an upcoming Red Ankh album:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnALAKo46TQ

#EclecticMusic #Music #ProgressiveMetal #WeirdMetal

@ArtBear 3rd places and experiencing the world with peers seem important, for tempering our biases, for broadening our scope, for encoding our bonds more deeply in memory, but the commodification of gathering places and even the concept of "having an experience" makes it really hard to feel like we're doing anything more than just consuming, being tourists everywhere we go (of course the severity of this depends on where we live).

Pressuring people to just go out anyway of course isn't the solution, but in addition to normalizing chilling at home (and not primarily to drink/smoke) it sure would be nice to reclaim community spaces to revive real compassionate, inclusive, supportive, safe community.

@siderea @STL_Inquiries Yeah, the biggest benefit of a lot of art is to just evoke a feeling--not even something easily described as an emotion, such as the motivation to dance from a lot of minimal dance music. It is tempting to frame art in terms of progress (eg: pushes boundaries, introduces new mediums, makes people think differently, NEW NEW NEW) but this carelessly discards the personal and communal aspects of art which, as creative and social beings, are at the end of the day probably a lot more meaningful.

The distinction between commodity media and art media seems useful, as the intent of the latter can be to get people thinking or feel special things while the intent of the former is always just to make money, buuut it's still possible for people to be inspired by commodity media that is objectively terrible, so the usefulness of this distinction only goes so far also. For example, if you hate pop music or Marvel movies so much that it forces you to become more critical of media, you've got a sort of subversive effect from a status quo cause.

@androcat @BethanyBlack This does make it really easy to know which buzzwords we should avoid using when trying to have conversations with people who don't get it, though. That is, which concepts need the most plain-terms explanations for the uninitiated.