iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

“superintelligence” is realizing the neverending flow of new techy buzzwords is always more useful than making products

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 22/09/2026

“Potemkin nostalgia” When you enter the vintage looking photobooth and there’s an iPad When there’s glitch at the movie theater that reveals they’re streaming Amazon Video When you find out the “small, local” restaurant is re-heating Sysco food

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 09/09/2026

"AI's gonna kill us all" isn't an incoherent way to sell an AI product, it's a coherent way of selling the idea that AI is transformative. power is the product

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 26/08/2026

a through-line from social media metrics to prediction markets: the fantasy of simple numbers that make us feel we know an unknowable world

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 17/08/2026

"this will be a war of all against all that could end humanity. dont worry, the invisible hand of the market will lead to natural equilibrium. but fyi we're selling the weapons" -new Zuck essay

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/08/2026

a good definition of "slop" might be the degree to which any output can only be judged quantitatively "Friction/scale is coming to replace low/high or pop/rock hierarchies" www.its-her-factory.com/2026/08/slop...

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/08/2026

AI as having a parasocial relationship to your own self and life

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/08/2026

cultural consumption as to-do list. new albums, movies, tabs, even travel and going out as list-making and list-completing

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 07/08/2026

Durkheimian functionalism is alive and well in Silicon Valley

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 06/08/2026

took me too long to get to Colquhoun’s Narcissus in Bloom (2023). book tore itself apart, which was fitting given the thesis

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 02/08/2026

everyone calling out any hint of slop seems great! but reducing that to AI-or-not would terribly miss the point people want to use AI as a yes/no proposition to side step the harder task of instead judging if something was made with only efficient and viral intent

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 31/07/2026

AI is not advanced enough to create content more sloppified than human-made LinkedIn posts www.404media.co/linkedin-int...

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 21/07/2026

www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/is-ambient...

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 16/06/2026

nothing is less "real," authentic," or "in the moment" less than things marketed as such

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 16/06/2026

fred never misses thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

For Lonsdale, as for Dunn and, increasingly, Musk, the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.

That fusion is the essence of the Texan Ideology

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 13/06/2026

entirety of Disclosure Day's plot rests on the assumption that everyone believes TV news and not anything online lol

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 11/06/2026

while Pump dot Fun is extreme, i think its a good, if hyperbolic, example of what all gamified platforms are: metrics-saturated platforms like X and Insta but also here are about conforming to *and thus debasing yourself for* what the number counts encourage

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 09/06/2026

alternate take: using "POV" to caption third-person videos makes total sense when your own point of view and the imagined viewer of your self-as-content are collapsed together www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/m...

nytimes.com

A Whole Generation Seems to Be Using ‘POV’ Wrong

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 08/06/2026

"AI is a normal technology, meaning it can be adopted and analyzed using normal business principles; the abnormality is in how we talk about it" mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-logic-...

mattdpearce.substack.com

The logic of a termination

On Scott Pelley; on AI and the mathematical replaceability of workers.

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

dealing with "AI" is a bit like dealing with a pandemic — if there isn't social trust and a widely shared prosocial commitment to shared protocols of public health, then there is no protection for anyone, just paranoia and individualistic voodoo

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 29/05/2026

underrated question is what is the role of media/cultural criticism when meanings and power dynamics arent being hidden?

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 26/05/2026

"When AI hallucinates, it’s going through the same steps as when it’s working properly" on why saying "hallucinates" wrongly humanizes a process that is not at all like a brain malfunctioning: elftheory.substack.com/p/why-ai-doe...

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 19/05/2026

let's check in on the UpWorthy guy...oh, lol

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 18/05/2026

felt like this too neatly linked the feeling of fakeness to the recent pivot to short form video. all metricized and algorithmic media is deceptive. like, what's the "real" way to post content in a system that links attention to profit?

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

I hear critical positions towards so-called «artificial intelligence» nowadays framed more and more as «rejectionism», and this is especially formulated as a critique of the left. The argument often goes something like this: Rather than seeing the potentials of AI, the left merely rejects it 1/

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

the psychoanalytic distinction between "desire" and "drive" also seems useful to explaining that shift from "wanting to converse with friends and build relationships" to "compulsion to consume repetitively to sustain a machine-zone-like fugue state"

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

To call slop automated is not to say it is free of human labor — rather, this human labor is already embedded in automated operations, not only made machine-like and subsumed under the logic of algorithmic curation, but made machine-readable, dissolved into patterns and quantifiable reactions 5/

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 28/04/2026

new danah 🎯 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... it's weird we say "social media" to describe broadcast-like influencer-filled platforms and not use it to describe group chats, discords, and other far more "social" places

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 26/04/2026

i read a million takes about how cameras lost their relation to truth, and here's yet another news event filled with conspiracies about everything but the footage

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 21/04/2026

to me, the more interesting question isnt why highlights are more viewed, of course they are, but what accounts for the enduring popularity of the endlessly long streams the highlights are clipped from?

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/03/2026

always skeptical of AI apologism that rests on "people want," "humans are inherently" essentialism. as rob notes, the creation of those desires is the whole point here

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 23/02/2026

AI slop and nostalgia go so well together because nostalgia itself is the desire to misconstrue the past by smoothing its messy lived reality away into conceptual ideals. nostalgia and AI work in similar ways

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 17/02/2026

improved framing, takes into account the enduring truth-telling function of cameras and is not just the too-easy panic over some linear descent into fakery www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/u...

nytimes.com

More Than Ever, Videos Expose the Truth. And Cloud It, Too.

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Joanna Zylinska @joannazylinska.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

New piece: "ALGO-READ: The creative automation of the reading subject" Open access. Critical study of the production of ‘the reading subject’ as a media trend, unit of value and data point www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-de... in RELATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES (eds A. Lagerkvist, J. Smolicki

bloomsburycollections.com

Relational Technologies

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 10/02/2026

there’s a new edition of The Social Photo (Verso) and i wrote a little preface for it

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

We have another exciting CFP! "Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology & Computation examines noise across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research."

biblhertz.it

Call for PapersNoisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Computation

Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome, and online (Zoom), 4th and 5th June 2026

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

also seems like a good guide to what writing about AI not to take so seriously; shows who is either not thinking carefully enough about the topic or is deliberately writing obfuscatory hype

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

useful chart for "deanthropomorphizing" discussions of "AI" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Our suggestions for alternatives to anthropomorphizing language are presented in Table 3. For two categories, Emotion and Human role analogy, we found that there were no simple replacements. Rather, when faced with such anthropomorphizing language, the best bet was a larger reframing of the matter at hand. For the others, we could often find simple edits within a sentence, as exemplified in the Table 3.

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 03/02/2026

modernity is the doom loop of having to describe the same thing with ever new terms

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

The “human” we compare to AI, though, mistakes the dichotomy. It’s not that AI isn’t human — it is an automation of capitalism, a human imaginary. The opposite of Artificial Intelligence isn’t the human mind, the opposite of AI is a community.

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

What would be your key media studies texts on digital images / digital visual culture and gaming? Not necessarily brand new, rather foundational and still relevant ...

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kelly pendergrast @kellypendergrast.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

If you want a deepdive on robot restaurant issues, i have written about both animatronic robot servers and performances of automation, and Eatsa's digital automat and the hiding of human labor behind "frictionless" tech. 🤖🍕 www.e-flux.com/architecture... reallifemag.com/ill-at-ease/

e-flux.com

Workplace - Kelly Pendergrast - Performing Automation

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 20/12/2025

all i want to do is read old social theory and apply it to new stuff but i dont want to start a substack. help lol

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 20/12/2025

best place to start for defining "slop" is Weberian theory. one key aspect there, and for slop, is understanding the link between rationalization and irrationality ie "slop" is often used to describe both that which is "fully optimized" *and* chaotic purposeless hallucinations

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 17/12/2025

yes - better than trying to arbitrate what has "soul" or not is to critique that which is centrally conceived and controlled, made primarily to be efficient and profitable, AI or not

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

NOW ONLINE: The lastest special issue of Photography & Culture on «AI and Photography», guest-edited by Briankle Chang and Sarah M. Miller and featuring among others my essay «Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‹Photographic›» #OpenAccess

tandfonline.com

Photography and Culture

AI and Photography. Volume 18, Issue 3-4 of Photography and Culture

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