iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If someone you love has or had ALS, you know the psychic horror that takes up residence in your mind, thinking what awaits my dear friend and his family. It happens all at once, like a smack in the face, and it lingers. If you know what I'm talking about, please consider giving gofund.me/bab5253f8

gofund.me

Donate to Support Joe Ammon's ALS Care, organized by Kirby Salvador

Joe grew up in Mt. Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. After graduating from high school … Kirby Salvador needs your support for Support Joe Ammon's ALS Care

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

NEW from me, @neilmhta.bsky.social and @sabrod123.bsky.social. Mentions of Trump on MAGA podcasts have fallen off a cliff since the 2024 election. With the midterms right around the corner, what are they talking about now? If you've been near TikTok lately, then you've probably got a guess.

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Mia Sato @miasato.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Between this and the stellar WSJ story about Polymarket's fake bettors, it really feels like we have completely given up on requiring influencers to disclose paid partnerships. It only hurts consumers.

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

TIL TJ Maxx is short for Token J Maxxer

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

it's a wonderful thing when a friend does something amazing. @johnwest.bsky.social looks deeply at link rot and what it means for our lives and times. there's beauty in these words! buy it! herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

herebelowbooks.com

Product – Here Below

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Reposted by Brian Whitton

John West @johnwest.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

Presenting THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out in September from @herebelow.bsky.social, a new imprint doing awesome things. Here's the cover, a lil' excerpt, and the tagline of the press: "Books for the subversive work of being human." herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...

The cover of a book (my book): THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU.

Just one more byte

It’s possible that to store is entirely the wrong verb. Maybe it ought
to be to attend, to give our digital lives the same attention we are
called to give our physical ones. Attention, as a noun, comes to
us through Latin and French, and, from those languages, carries
the sense of to stretch toward, as though my brain, pinned behind
my skull, might reach out, feel the tight restriction of muscle as
it grasps at the world. But, by and large, attention words point in-
ward, not out. We attract it and call it. We can gather it like wheat
in a field or draw it up like water from a well. Always, though,
attention moves from the world into us—except when it’s to be
minted and spent. “Pay attention,” we say, as though it is a com-
modity, bought, sold, and traded by brokers.

The digital world both beleaguers and demands our attention.
The quality of our focus and the metaphors we surround it with
have diminished even as we’re asked to spend more of it. I’ve felt
it, lately, in the very medium of the book, which rests ever more
uneasily in my hands, though I’ve published two, including this
one. I’ve read, I would guess, a couple thousand books in my life.
It’s harder now, harder than ever. And as it’s grown harder, it’s
grown more meaningful, those acts of attentional resistance, as
straightforward as reading a book for pleasure—a refutation of
market logic, a proletarian revolution in even the word attention,
not something I pay for and sell on an open market but, instead,
something I stretch toward.

“Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which
we live, our ability to perceive them is lost,” Garth Greenwell
writes in his novel Small Rain, “and maybe that’s the value of
poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the
frequency of certain poems.” Greenwell advances an argument
best advanced in literature, in fiction or poetry, buttressed as it is
by the logic of allusion. This logic stands in stark contrast to the
totalizing, seductive logic of instrumentalism, which would have
us see everything, every act and artifact, as for something else.
Reading under instrumentalism is pointless at worst and a form
of self- betterment at best—merely a way to refill the coffers of
attention before spending it again. Greenwell argues for poetry,
for reading, for all those many varied noninstrumental activities
that demand this “unmixed attention,” to use the philosopher
Simone Weil’s language, which are a species of prayer. I mean
this in the same way Weil does—in the best and truest sense of
the word: prayer not as an attempt to change the world, but as a
chance to attune ourselves to a greater will, one that asks of us,
Be more human.

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

The Trump administration says American “terrorists” and “rioters” are assaulting immigration agents. A WSJ investigation found none have been convicted at trial. www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...

wsj.com

Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

A WSJ investigation tracked the U.S. citizens caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive federal campaign to detain and demonize dissenters.

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

DOJ left the names of over 40 of Epstein's victims fully visible in Friday's massive file dump. For some names we found over 100 appearances as of Sunday evening. Nearly 30 were minors. Gift link. With @khadeejasafdar.bsky.social www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

wsj.com

Exclusive | Epstein Files Release Exposes Names of at Least 43 Victims, WSJ Review Finds

The Justice Department was required to redact all victims’ names prior to releasing the files.

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

@jackgillum.bsky.social @brennasmith.bsky.social Emma Scott and Belle Cushing If you're not following them you should. If you haven't subscribed this is one is worth it

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Joanna Stern @joannastern.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Shenaniganing, combobulating, julienning, hullaballooing, whatchamacalliting, flibbertigibbeting. According to Anthropic, there are 184 verbs that can show up when Claude Code is working. @bzcohen.bsky.social and I got the full list and VERB coded this for our @wsj.com vibe-coded column:

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

@joannastern.bsky.social and @bzcohen.bsky.social vibed up an interactive article and, like many vibe coders, called in a computer guy to bring it across the finish line. I had to do surprisingly little! But I did add a couple features by request Happy to report my job is secure. For now

wsj.com

We Have No Idea How to Code. So We Got Claude to Code This Article for Us.

Two WSJ columnists with no formal programming background vibe coded the article you’re reading—chat bubbles, Easter eggs and all.

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John West @johnwest.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

I couldn't stop thinking about this perfect Borges idea from @marcusjmerritt.com. So I made it: internaut.club. (N.B., if you want write access, you'll have to DM me.)

Over on Bluesky, Marcus Merritt, an artist and poet (who I don’t know), proposed a fake Borges story—one he might have written had he seen the Lovecraftian face of the AI-supercharged attention economy rise out of Silicon Valley. It goes like this:

A man asks AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

Like so many of the Argentine writers’ actual stories, I couldn’t get this one out of my head. A parable about compression, it plays on Borges’s map—his story about the useless horror of a map with perfect fidelity to reality. It touches on the Borges’s Library or Babel—his story about every book that could ever exist, which drives its librarians mad. It’s also just funny.

And like the best Borges conceits, it has the ring of prophecy. The man at the desk is all of us now: scrolling, summarizing, consuming endless “content” whose abundance is only a disguise for its emptiness. AI slop, despite its volume, turns out to be rather thin gruel.

I had a question—a bad question given that Merritt was making a pretty good joke. Why not actually make it?

Enter HOMER, my piece of digital performance art masquerading as a social media platform, a microblogging platform where every hour, every post is run through AI summarization, until it can’t really be summarized much more, until all we have left to do is repeat a single word again and again, certain we finally understand.

If you want access, reach out to me on Bluesky, I'm @johnwest.bsky.social.

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

@wnyc.org the live stream on google home is glitching out

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Brian Whitton @noslouch.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

the local paper reporting on right-wing backlash to a 30-minute lesson on gender (annual) used a group byline for coverage

Close up of a newspaper article showing a byline reading "By staff of the Rivertowns Dispatch"

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