I studied the Chinese Internet for a decade, including several occasions of protest and civil unrest. It is time that I lay down how this is going to go. Buckle up: 🧵1/47
I don't fucking know. Nobody does. That's the whole point. Approaching the question from a predictive standpoint is epistemologically sus and in itself a precise political position that happens to be oriented in very peculiar ways
I feel the fact that China has been largely COVID-free for months isn't discussed enough? Like life and economy are back to normal there and suddenly the country disappeared from the media? Am I crazy
2003: Dark culture
2014: Dark Enlightenment
2018: The Intellectual Dark Web
2021: The League of Extremely Dark Yet Wise Gentlemen
2028: The Darkest Ideologues of the Dark Fellowship of Darkness
the AstraZeneca fail is shaping up to be a metrology horror story in which Oxford doesn't trust the measurements of it's Italian manufacturer and messes up their own test, invalidating the whole vaccine trial
fascinated by AI nationalism aesthetics - as tech and national sovereignty reshape one another, the only way to make sense of it seems overlaying flags and circuit boards
The more I do fieldwork in a Magic: The Gathering store, the more I think it's groundwork for understanding crypto circulation. MtG is the precursor of BitCoin. It's not chance that Mt. Gox was originally a MtG exchange market. It's desperately semiotized gambling
come work with me? I am hiring 2 postdocs to join my 4-year research project “Algorithmic folklore: The mutual shaping of vernacular creativity and automation” (ALGOFOLK) at the University of Bergen - looking for socsci&hum+tech people with global outlook
shoutout to a generation of grad students & early-career researchers who have kept academia functioning for an impossible year when they could have just walked out and let the sytem collapse, solely because they love their work, and will get absoluely nothing in return
increasingly convinced that in 200-300 years our times will be named something like the Deluded Era in which we clearly knew which stuff was fucked up and how to fix it but we just carried on pretending it wasn't
really want to read reporting on the U.S. written as if it was China
American People Are "Yeeting" Each Other As Passive Resistance
Does the Soyboy Phenomenon Hint at American Youth's Discontent With Meat Overconsumption?
Cheugy: The Identity Challenging the U.S. Government
scifi story idea: generative text detectors start identifying several key theoretical texts from the 1800s as being AI-generated, and computer scientists can't explain why. Marx's Capital turns out to be entirely synthetic and possible retrotimed via unknown means
a more upbeat take could be that generative models are precisely what's needed in order to navigate increasingly unwieldy repositories of data that transcend human sensory and attentional capacities
there's only two kinds of academics
- hyperspecialized, clearly only person in the world dedicating so much energy to this singular topic, yet constantly prey of impostor syndrome
- superstar academic who applies one concept from their PhD thesis to literally every world event
my latest kink: "It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far."
"Oh that's great, you study China... you know what, you should do research about:
2006: Subcultural resistance
2008: Civil society
2010: Weibo
2012: Censorship
2013: Millennials
2014: WeChat
2015: e-payments
2016: AI
2017: Bitcoin
2018: The social credit system
wrote a history of machine-readable encoding standards, with a focus on the QR code and how it became an infrastructural gateway - with an attempt at theorizing the broader usefulness of this concept for infrastructure studies - out for
@GCHjournal
my current take: these models can't do much beyond ungovernable surrealism and weird style mashups, so AI companies are scrambling to sell them through the vocabulary of art
just spent half an hour to connect to the Tsinghua University BBS over telnet with the right GB-2312 character set, still active in 2018 and here's a native resolution screenshot
thought experiment how long would have Clubhouse lasted in China without getting blocked if Western journalists hadn't hyped it up? Is it maybe time to reconsider the journo-to-authorities pipeline
TIL about the "star gauge" poem, a legendary non-linear love poem (or perhaps more appropriately, poem-matrix) which Su Hui used to win her husband back.