iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 22/09/2026

like when people get nostalgic for old versions of fast food restaurants lol

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 22/09/2026

probably a poor term, all nostalgia has that false element to it by definition. what term are folks using for when the reality of modern fakeness peaks through staged 'authenticity'?

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👁️ @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 · 05/09/2026

the banana goes into the rice, matt

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 26/08/2026

the deep quantification of social platforms and the ubiquity of gambling and prediction markets, ironically, only makes us more paranoid of the numbers and what they claim to measure

👁️ @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 · 25/08/2026

in retrospect, web3 was grifters who correctly saw the world turning into a casino but galaxy-brained everything while boring gambling apps took over lol

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 25/08/2026

bleak times to be writing into the void lol

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 17/08/2026

my take thats too boring for anyone to want to read is Durkheimian functionalism is the through-line in every Zuck manifesto over the years

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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

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 02/08/2026

yes very Schmittian and, ironically, bot-like

👁️ @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...

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 21/07/2026

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

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yeah, there's a branch of tech critique that, once settled on the right political and moreal position, just reinterates that in increasingly hyperbolic ways. and then the hyperbole is spun as insight

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

tho big miss not calling this From Cowculture to Cyberculture

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 13/06/2026

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

👁️ @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 · 10/06/2026

not really disagreeing, just want to open space for that shelf of theory books from that era that articulated that heavily quantified and systematic process then. not as a "nothing is new" take but to think about how that work applies or doesnt

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 10/06/2026

im too u.s.-brained to imagine "mass culture" as ever anything other than thoroughly exploited by capitalism

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¹ Charles Horton Cooley (1902)

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for those posting videos, you know your self and experience through the lens of how others see, react, and share it. your "point of view" is as much how you look and are circulated as it is what happened through your eyes in the moment

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when taking a selfie (remember that term?), your point of view is your eyes and the front facing camera-mirror at once. 1st and 3rd person views collapse when documentation is taken for granted

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A Whole Generation Seems to Be Using ‘POV’ Wrong

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

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 08/06/2026

wonder how different “conflict entrepreneur” is from just "content creator" given what gamified platforms incentivize

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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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Reposted by 👁️

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

sometimes i see complaints that the news today is too "on the nose," or "if this was fiction the writer would be fired," etc etc because, if true, that critical thinkers job is no longer required. (they wouldnt have needed the They Live sunglasses if the aliens said what they mean)

👁️ @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

calling AI results you dont like a "hallucination" demonstrates an expectation of or desire for AI to have been human-like in the first place

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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

at least there is some tragic consistency is seeing virality and metrics and algorithms as bringing social good and now seeing the same in AI

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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

a long time ago i wrote about being annoyed by the "post-truth" framing reallifemag.com/faked-out/ have no idea if it still holds up lol

reallifemag.com

Faked Out — Real Life

Why are we so ready to believe that truth is over?