iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 1h

Well, are you going to throw it, or?

Close up of dog face wondering if the ball will get thrown or if his humans will be a horrible disappointment.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 02/10/2026

thinking about putting out a new edition this fall, what do you think of these potential covers? Any preference?

A possible book cover with two people looking at a still life with a dead rabbit, fish, lobster, artichoke, etc.

possible book cover, showing a woman in a kind of trenchcoat looking up at a huge painting with a lot of figures and iconography.

A girl in a pretty floral dress with teal green and pink, looking at a big expressionist photo with a different green.

A woman looking at a circular painting on a red background, it has an elaborate gold frame.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 02/10/2026

What kind of day are you going to have today? (Courtesy The Pulp Tarot)

A photo of four tarot cards, all wands, in a rectangle. The top left is the four of wands with a bunch of pretty ladies, then it’s a big brawl with the five of wands with a bunch of 50s characters going at each other in a gang war, then a ticker tape parade with the six of wands, then a crazy scene of a blonde pinup girl with a bandaged head on the run from soldiers who’ve burned down her farm.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 02/10/2026

Bird friend (they should invent a phone camera that takes good pictures of birds)

Silhouette of a kestrel against a cloudy sky

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 02/10/2026

Biblically-accurate leaf monster courtesy my niece

Two tree leaves pasted on a painted sheet of white construction paper; the top is a maple leaf, the bottom just a simple narrow spadelike leaf; daubs of red paint and many googly eyes adorn this monster.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 20/09/2026

Two more. The purple is very strong.

Beautiful bell-shaped and deeply purple foxgloves with spotted white insides peeking out. They are growing up just among the thick grasses under some sumac trees.

A single flower with a hairy yellow center and a star shaped profusion of fleshy purple petals; overall though it has the aspect of a play-doh flower made by a child. It is surrounded by greenery.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 20/09/2026

The meadow continues to offer up a medley of late-summer flowers.

A glorious red poppy opening with delicate pistils like eyelashes and papery red petals. Also some kind of yellow orange cosmos, and blurry some pink daisy like things. All in a thick greenery, and waiting for the rain coming today.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 19/09/2026

All previous quotes from The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. And it is intense and crazy and…not wrong.

A photo of the paperback edition of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 19/09/2026

This. There are no adults anywhere.

But real adults - people who are masters of their own lives - are in fact nowhere to be found.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 19/09/2026

This book is just banger after banger, and it’s all strangely about right now and GenAI.

24. The spectacle is the ruling order's nonstop
discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true character as relations between people and between classes: a second Nature, with its own inescapable laws, seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the inevitable consequence of some supposedly natural technological development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the "mass media" that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle's internal dynamics. If the social needs of the age in which…

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 13/09/2026

There's not going to be a superintelligence.

A screengrab of Jessica Lange from AHS where she says there's not going to be a swimming pool, you stupid slut.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 13/09/2026

Last night was pretty nice (featuring otsegobarnswallows.com)

A stage built arbor-style with a band; its evening and tthe string lights overhead pierce the falling night platovely yellow. In the foreground a couple plastic cups with decent beer on a grainy wooden picnic table top.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 12/09/2026

Just thinking about this again—easy to get caught up in how different the past was, a foreign country, and yet, look at this continuity across time and space. 2500+ years and a more or less lost culture. And still a pretty good cup.

A photograph of my morning coffee cup and a 2500 year old Etruscan cup. Spoiler: they look very similar.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 09/09/2026

Intense!

$The ground and our cabin are dark silhouettes. Meanwhile a great big cloud with an almost fractal edge is sitting up top joined by some smaller ones. They cover the sun which is bursting forth with intense light like a wild owl in shape. The blue of the sky is glazed almost wintery.$

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 07/09/2026

From Hayek’s Bastards. I think it’s a combination of factors that makes them susceptible to this always happening: one, the stupidest to ever do it, and two, deep down they agree with it.

This was, of course, an idiotic misunderstanding. Brimelow was not engaged in Swiftian satire. He meant exactly what he wrote. "Let's have fun, playing Brimelow's game," the editor wrote. It was a game, but the editor was the one being played. Like hosts of editors before and after him, the newspaper's platform was coopted to broadcast radical views under the cover of provocation. Brimelow used his perch at the Financial Post, Forbes, and Fortune to mainstream the view that the immigration and reproduction of Brown and Black people was the new all-encompassing threat North America faced after the end of the Cold War. In column after column, Brimelow built up a theory of nativism built on market logic, a mutation of conservative and libertarian thought we have come to call the alt-right: the dream of a zone in white skin.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 05/09/2026

Not really sure about these neoliberals. They might be pretty bad actually.

Boston terrier sitting in the grass looking kind of chagrined or bemused.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 05/09/2026

A little light reading. The people in this book are horrible, one more hateful than the next. I recommend this if you’re having trouble staying angry, maybe experiencing brief moments of pleasure in life or hope. This will fix it good.

A photo of the book hayek’s bastards by Quinn Slobodian.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 01/09/2026

I bought this on an impulse online the other day, and the letters are remarkable, fascinating, funny, heartbreaking; but this edition is just the literal text file printed out with no page numbers or anything. What a world.

An edition of the complete letters of mark twain photographed on our sideboard with some other items scattered around it. It looks handsome because of a large gorgeous picture of Mark Twain.

Inside is literally just a text file printed out. It’s like some kind of artistic statement instead of a real book. There aren’t even page numbers. It’s like 10 pt font and the tabs are printed fucked up and every emdash is two dashes which looks like ass.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 30/08/2026

I’ve seen this going around and I think it’s pretty fucking problematic that folks are agreeing with it. At first blush it seems like a very agreeable sentiment and I get the urge, but it’s a thoroughly right wing attitude in service of reactionary politics—not something good.

A screed by Ottessa Moshfegh basically saying art shouldn’t be political but should be art. Except that her framing is misleading bullshit and all art is political art.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 28/08/2026

Having a bit of a stormy moment

The wall of clouds is shooting out some feelers that look like Long Island. The trees are all black and twisted. The sunset sky (all cloud with cloud on top) is deep red.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 16/08/2026

Because I have nothing more pressing to do (🤣😭💀) I’ve started a vintage photo collection, mainly old hollywood promo pics. Can you spot the celebrity in this photo?

A vintage sepia-toned photograph from
The 30s (I think); it’s a dining room still life with repros of paintings hanging on the wall, and the one on the right bears a striking resemblance to Duchess Goldblatt.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 16/08/2026

After a long day there’s nothing better Mr. Carrot liked than a soak in the tub with his friends.

A suspiciously human-like carrot “lying” back with one arm on the edge of a fruit bowl nestled in with a squash and a yellow cucumber.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 14/08/2026

You may not like it but this is the perfect book form. They have not designed a more legible or perfect presentation in all the years since.

A photo of a facsimile edition of a Princeton University Press
Book from 1926: big easy to read text (Caslon I think!), elegant subtitles, bracketed page numbers in the bottom center, oh my stars.

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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 11/08/2026

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Boston terrier standing quizzically on a freshly mown lawn next to some ancient patio stones.

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