The Noise Floor of Latent Dissent // Harry Halpin

Digital feeds, malnourished students — Phantom Power

Today we’re doing one of our occasional episodes where host Mack Hagood talks about a new essay he’s written for our newsletter “Feed Logic and the Failure to Thrive” Mack writes that students and professors are struggling, both academically and spiritually. He tries to diagnose the issue he felt in his classrooms this year and the role technology may play in it. For new listeners, Mack is a writer and researcher who studies sound, technology, and culture. He is the author of Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control, a book on noise-canceling headphones, white noise, tinnitus, and the ways people use sound to manage modern life. He is currently writing a new book for Penguin Press, and he also hosts this podcast Phantom Power, where he interviews artists, scholars, musicians, and sound designers about the invisible power of sound in everyday life. Besides all that, Mack is a university professor and that’s what his most recent essay is about. Click here to read the newsletter for free. Cited Media: Film:Mary…

The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.

ChatGPT's "Honest Reaction" to a "Song" Composed Entirely of Gas-Passing Noises Will Make You Question Whether It's Honestly Evaluating Your Other Brilliant Ideas

Writer Jonas Ceika "sent ChatGPT an audio file of a series of FART sound effects" for feedback. It was extremely flattering.

Sound Obsessed — collection

Ian Preston (@ianopolous.bsky.social)

Mathematician/particle physicist turned privacy researcher. Java Rockstar #Oxford Building a better web - private, self-sovereign identity, p2p, social - with @peergos.org. Public social media undermines democracy. #covidisairborne #maskswork #cleantheair

Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: ‘AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings’

His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he’s no longer the outsider he once was

Technorealists, the silent majority? - open self

you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center

Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich is doing to computers what he did to education (De-Schooling Society, 1971), to energy (Energy and Equity, 1974), to medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1975), and to sex roles (Vernacular Gender, 1983). Each time it has been radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on. Each time, and with growing clarity, it is an economic/historical analysis having to do with the idea of scarcity as a means of exploitation. This article is from Illich's remarks at the "Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society," Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982. The ideas here are part of a book Illich is working on, The History of Scarcity. - Stewart Brand The CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Words of Ed Zitron, a PR person and writer.

Switching Codes w/Eric Deggans | Substack

Knight Professor of Journalism and Media Ethics at Washington and Lee University; Critic at Large at NPR; dad, drummer, bassist, blerd. Author: Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation. (see links to purchase)

Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Tim…

Afrofuturist artist Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum…