iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 5h

Fascinated by topsy turvy economics of TV and the way these bleed through into narrative structure that sets stories at odds with themselves so they can't tell stories they intend to tell because it all costs far too much to get going so they're constrained by their own cost of entry to production

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 5h

I suppose you only get narrative unity where you tell a story that is intended to end. Its substitute is narrative detail without narrative closure. A couple of people in a room talking about some different people in a different room has minimal costs as long as not massive stars, if not: milk it

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 9h

Aside from any other concerns, the right seems far more fertile as a bed for fabulation of the past through LLM/media generation than the left because the past is just a malleable slushy medium for critique of the present in ways that the left doesn't need or desire.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 9h

The interaction of LLM/media generation and nostalgia is an amazing example of one particular answer to the question 'what is the past actually for?' and the answer is 'to be reinvented to tell us we are right and they are wrong in the present' It's an amazingly disconcerting eruption of mulch

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 9h

It reminds me of one of the things I realised about LLMs and their output: we judge them by the extent to which they provide us what we expected, not the extent to which they make anything new. They literally aim to not surprise us or challenge us by design.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 9h

I remain fascinated by the ways easy access to AI image and media creation has kind of created a soft confused underbelly of yearning for incorrect things as a marketing tactic. A technology to automate the misremembering of things and a symbolic glaze of hazy signfiers speaking to angry desire

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 9h

This is the ad that led me to the AI slop / poppy orgy clothes. It's incredible to think that some people think that this AI to outside world generation of shit product, shit website, shit video is the pinnacle of human ingenuity. Which I suppose it is if your primary endeavour is jingoistic scams

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I think you might be onto something. Somewhere a lake is emptying, somewhere another forest is cut down, on screen somewhere a jumper with a horse made of poppies riding on tank made of guns on top of a Union Jack is displayed for the first time

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I found this because I keep getting adverts on YouTube. I'll share one of I catch one.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Did you get to the whimsical one where all of the flowers come out of a little cute grenade?

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Pssst. Battle of the Somme. Pass it on

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I honestly feel like someone fed the Vote Leave brexit micro messaging matrix into and LLM/image generation and created these hundred of baffling 'Remembrance' items of clothing. The image card does not do justice to the incredible hallucination of poppies, guns, soldiers, crosses and dogs

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Lads. I've found the absolute zenith of AI slop meets poppy fetish. Which is your favourite way of remembering the events of the war to end all wars? sewmuchclothes.com/collections/...

Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I've been really enjoying your posts recently about places, sentiment and time. Being unwilling participants, as we are, in a time war, they've really spoken to me.

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Reposted by Mark Brown

Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 03/10/2026

#OtD 3 Oct 1937 almost a year after their defeat at Cable St, Mosley's Blackshirts attempted to march through Bermondsey, South London. Met with strong local opposition and barricades in the streets, the march never arrived at its intended destination workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e35-...

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That sounds like a sound intervention! Wobble neutral is such a vibe

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Also reminds me of Deptford's Eliot Gould is a Jerk, Ars Vita Ryvita. Which is a deepcut for all you Deptford folks.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This feels like something we might have done growing up

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's been a hell of a decade, like. And I think the practical arguments in favour of joining the EU will be possible to phrase as benefits you currently don't possess, rather than a status quo of actual benefits that were difficult to itemise and bring to life.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I think the largest argument for getting joining the EU back on the agenda is a list of all of the ways that 2026 isn't 2016.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I mean, 'whoda thunk it, we notice change' but the organisational inability to not get bored when someone's suffering persists is one of the major barriers to making people's lives better.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

An associated political thing is that overall we tend to see it as more noteworthy when someone changes category and regard it as important to return them to the category we initially placed them in, but find it much more difficult to focus on people's problems if they have problems that persist

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I see this cognitive quirk a lot. It's like if there isn't an immediate fix to a problem, we sort of minimise the problem's importance to match the level to which we feel we can't take action.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

One thing I have never quite worked out in my head is the way we view chronic pain as somehow less of an issue than acute pain. Same as the way we seem to regard someone experiencing something for the first time as somehow more noteworthy than someone who lives with it every day.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Bring back British Quota Quickies.

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Reposted by Mark Brown

Frances Ryan @francesryan.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

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Press Access | Frances Ryan | Substack

The things nobody tells disabled journalists about an industry that wasn’t built for us. Click to read Press Access, by Frances Ryan, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Timelines matter. What happened before something matter. You would have thought the infinite space of the internet would have made it easier to find the room to show the order and sequence of events but it doesn't, at least not anymore. And there's little to fill that gap.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

If you're looking to assemble enough public opinion behind you to get votes in a general election you can say any old shit you fancy about when stuff started or what caused it because it's very hard to keep track of how policy shapes events over time.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I noticed this a lot with government policies. Aside from when the Commons Library puts out guides to the history of policies or around certain issues, it's often really hard to 'see' as just an interesting person where current events came from and what decisions were involved

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Regarding that last repost, I really, really wish there was more reporting that involved timelines of things. Things that happen have pasts, presents and futures. It is surprisingly difficult for lay people to piece together coherent histories of polices and events and it's getting more difficult

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Reposted by Mark Brown

Otto English @ottoenglish.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Liar. Small boat crossings peaked under Johnson in 2022 reaching 46,000 in 2022. In current year they are 18,565 and falling. Also prior to Boris Johnson's Brexit there were none.

It's a disaster, and it can all be traced to
Labour ideology. Burnham has no mandate
from the people. He has no real ideas, and
no plan,

Johnson on X

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Reposted by Mark Brown

Kim Justice @kimjustice.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

There's something amusing about models that are yet to be painted. This will likely end up looking fine but I thought for a second that someone had made the armadillo from the cover of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Tarkus out of a chicken. I can't be the only one, surely.

A 3D printed model of the mecha-armadillo Tarkus, from the Emerson Lake & Palmer album of the same name. Not yet painted, so it has a uniform colour that's somewhat like a raw chicken.

The cover of the Emerson, Lake and Palmer 1971 album Tarkus, featuring the same mecha-armadillo, included for reference.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I was thinking 'I'm old enough to be your grandparent and I'm wearing a very wooly jumper'. Though, to be fair, I was looking like I could do with a pick me up.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The other night, when out walking, a polite lad on a bicycle asked me if I wanted packet. I said 'sorry?' he said it again. I said 'sorry?'. He said it again. I said 'I have no idea what you mean' the he say OK, wished me a good evening and cycled off into the darkness.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

At work I think we're starting to see a small up tick in requests for information where, once we provide the information, the person gets back to us asking for that information again which suggests AI somewhere in the mix.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I suppose anything involving communication where the limiting factor was time it took to communinicate is now likely to find itself with far more demands as computing power collapses time. AI as a problem of demand, not a problem of output

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Reposted by Mark Brown

Podcasting is Praxis @praxiscast.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If you've a few pounds to spare, consider donating some to a lovely queer and trans bookshop in Glasgow who've been having their windows smashed and sadly need to install roll shutters to be safe. They're close to the target, so help push it over? www.gofundme.com/f/categoryis...

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Category Is Books Get Shutters!, organized by Category Is Books

For the past eight years, Category Is Books has been able to comfortably oper… Category Is Books needs your support for Help Category Is Books Get Shutters!

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The people I like live In kitchens and halls I am Robertson Speedo And this is my Gramme Friday #fallfriday youtu.be/g73X1anS6sI?...

youtu.be

Gramme Friday

YouTube video by The Fall - Topic

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

For me, the winning Nirvana album was Incesticide, which feel like the most 'British' Nirvana album. I think 'noise in popper structures' had a large constituency in the UK from the inky music press, indie charts, John Peel nexus.

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Pixies, early PJ Harvey, endless lists of noisy indie acts. I think the main effect in the UK was very vaguely tuneful indie bands getting a bit more crunchy and a bit less buzzcocksy. I don't feel the effect on metal in the UK was as pronounced as we had lots of very melodic but hard mental bands

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

In the UK, there was already stuff that had that huge guitar sound and sonic messiness. A mix of stuff like Seamonsters by The Wedding Present, My Bloody Valentine and shoegaze along with Husker Du/Replacements indie punk stuff like Mega City Four and Senseless Things etc. There was not twee Indie

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I'm just the right age to think about this from a UK perspective. There's a version of Nirvana's influence on US bands that took all of the classic rock hints scuzzed up and made a kind of dead centre American rock radio sound that wasn't really a go-er in the UK as things were different...

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

What both can do, only limited by processing power, is do lots and lots of things at once, which humans can't. So I think you're bang on about the capacity for LLM and Agentic AIs capacity to fill spaces of meaning with stuff much more quickly than humans can, generating demand as well as supply

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I was thinking about that the other day. I'm a lay person, so take this with a pinch of salt: the things LLMs can do much more quickly than humans is compose stuff, only limited by computing power to do so. Agentic AI can also do this but autonomously, composing actions as well, limited by compute

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I'd be trying to get set in my head why AI was a problem for people who are on the receiving end of it, not just for producers. And that nailed it for me. The adulteration of quality and function and value

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Mark Brown @markoneinfour.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

We already see non AI versions of this a lot in healthcare, with letters sent (the measured output) but with things incorrect in them (wrong phone number for clinic, wrong directions etc) or sent at wrong time making them useless (the appointment letter sent after the appointment). AI multiples this

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