iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

the ephemerality and emptiness of figures like MrBeast (who seems to have no personality but is an algorithm tat has assumed human form) perhaps marked this transition in process

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posting for algorithms requires more of the "flexibility" of neoliberalist subjectivity at the expense of the "social and cultural capital" of having a personal brand

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indicative of the shift away from people posting things meant to project an identity to other people and towards posting directly for algorithms that monetize other people's attention at a remove

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makes me wonder whether this shift away from neoliberalist-style self-exploitation makes having a "personal brand" seem more aspirational and out of reach, or if personal brands are now becoming irrelevant to a zero-sum hustle culture focused on exploiting others

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"Rather than cultivating personal brands, they prioritise speed, scale and adaptability, pointing toward a post-creator mode of cultural labour in contemporary platform economies"

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it dictates what can be seen and how we can see it, how we can reexplain to ourselves what we are seeing and so on

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"All media consumption is reinforcement learning with human feedback" as a general description of the current cultural condition; no way of seeing now is exempt from it newleftreview.org/issues/ii160...

Advertising works as a social agent in this sense, as Paglen acknowledges, pointing to Edwards Bernays’s pioneering of public relations, and the early accounts of such activity in the work of Daniel Boorstin and Jacques Ellul. However, Paglen claims, ‘the efforts of the propagandists of yore are prehistoric by today’s standards, where the circulation of images is a largely automated circuit that reinforces itself through feedback mechanisms built into its systems’ so that ‘All media consumption is reinforcement learning with human feedback.’ The result is increasingly effective addiction, and precise tailoring to individual weaknesses as the boundaries between perception, reality and manipulation erode. Precedents for the extractive and controlling logics of machine imagery may be found at a small scale (psyops) and large (advertising) but its technology, reach, automation, processing of trillions of images and saturation of everyday life are entirely novel.

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I don't find it useful to redescribe mechanical processes as sense perception or to talk about "nonhuman photography"—makes more sense to me to see machines as extensions of human sensing, which is sometimes deliberately obscured by those who don't want to held accountable for it

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I guess the only reason you would call a data file an "image" is to make the claim that machines "see" rather than compute or process—but this essentially implies that "images no longer exist, everything is just data and all 'imagining' is just data processing" newleftreview.org/issues/ii160...

While the book is called How to See Like a Machine, it rapidly becomes evident that humans can do no such thing. Paglen tracks what he rightly sees as an epoch-making development, which is superficially marked by the recent inability of people to reliably distinguish machine images from those made by cameras or humans, and more profoundly the condition that has been reached in which ‘the overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.’ The computer file used to display a screen image may be thought of as a latent image, rather like an undeveloped photographic negative, unreadable to the human eye. Yet machines can read these files directly. Regardless of whether anyone attends to the two billion photographs uploaded each day to social media sites, machines scrutinize them for purposes of data mining, classification and manipulation.

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Reposted by Rob Horning

👁️ @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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I think that prediction markets encourage a blinkered, binary view of the world in which "reality" is resolved into yes/no propositions capable of being framed in unambiguous, uncontested language—an impoverishing way to think of both events and language as cognitively corrosive as AI use

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prediction markets argue they are democratizing the risk-managing tools of insurance companies; this piece argues that is just a smokescreen for opening more tax-efficient sportsbooks thebaffler.com/salvos/infin...

While prediction market bets on the deaths of world leaders, the bombings of countries, or the burning of forests feel scandalous and obscene to many Americans, they are the direct descendants of those British underwriters betting on the sinking of ships or the starvation of helpless migrants—as well as the death bets of the viatical and life settlement industries. The plumbing of the American economy is corroded with all sorts of heinous shit like this, and all of it is at worst celebrated and promoted as prudent financial investments and at best completely ignored by the vast majority of Americans.

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historicalmaterialism.org

maybe this is what "speculation as a mode of production" means, but its implication is that gambling becomes a way of organizing our relation to reality, so we understand it as a series of disconnected throws of the dice and not something built socially www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-series/...

Speculation as a Mode of Production. Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital - Historical Materialism

Marina Vishmidt Author: Marina Vishmidt In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories o...

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schemes like this, where viewers place bets on what streamers will do next, exhibits this logic, under which no activity makes sense or has social meaning without being subject to bets: i.e. Bets or It Didn't Happen www.msn.com/en-us/news/t...

msn.com

MSN

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prediction markets aspire to be the arbiter of what is real, replacing other social ways of making sharing reality with a system that makes winners and losers—no reality can be shared; all "reality" places atomized individuals on one side or another of a bet

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Botting, memecoins, puts, private credit, emerging markets and bowling.

Matt Levine aptly called prediction markets "untruth machines" allowing for reality arbitrage—strategic falsifications, angles on how to corrupt means of measuring reality understood to be neutral or fair—they incentivize the elimination of shared yardsticks www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

bloomberg.com

Untruth Machines

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

prediction markets incentivize the production of insider information, which undermines the bureaucratic functioning of institutions harpers.org/archive/2026...

The prediction markets that exist today are not the fulfillment of Hanson’s vision; they are the fulfillment of May’s. Rather than coordinating expert opinions, they deliver uncertainty and distrust. Who’s cashing in on what they know? Who can be trusted? Is this story fake? Indeed, is any of this for real? Because of perverse incentives, a system intended to make information about the present and knowledge about the future more transparent has made the world more opaque and volatile. The dream of creating an honest consensus now works as a kind of acid, a solvent dismantling the capacity for coordination. What we’re left with is a system for producing conflict, a machine for generating chaos.

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as it scales up, LLM text becomes collectively worse wherever and whenever it had appeared, regardless of how it might have looked to a prompting user from their isolated standpoint

I understand why people do this: Writing is hard work, and people are insecure about their prose. To the first point I would say: If you are prompting the LLM with a real argument, narrative, or observation, you have already done most of the the hard work! To the second I would point out that the flood of LLM slop online has made its irrepressible voice all but unreadable: At this point in time, even the most inelegant human-authored prose is preferable to the glib, airy stylings of a consumer LLM, which tend to obscure, complicate, and circle ideas rather than communicate them clearly.

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

when I saw the title "Just send me the prompt" it reminded me of those conceptual art pieces that are just instructions; made me think the idea was going to be we can all have our own personal LLM "finish" any given communication in our preferred style

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

the gist of this post is that LLMs are terrible at drafting or editing text that anyone wants to read, but they are good at getting users to write text of their own — i.e. LLMs are serve an emotional rather than practical role in writing process www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

In general my feeling has been that the writing demanded by LLM chatbots is a benefit, not a burden.

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👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/08/2026

what Alasdair MacIntyre proposes as an outlandish thought experiment on page 1 of After Virtue describes what AI is doing to scientific practice right now

all that they possess are fragments: a
knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical
context which gave them significance; pans of theories unrelated either to
the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment;
instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single
pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred.

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Reposted by Rob Horning

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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Reposted by Rob Horning

👁️ @nathanjurgenson.com · 12/08/2026

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

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LLMs present us with infinite "blocks of wood" masquerading as works mediated by thoughtful agency; these text-blocks impede our ability to "recognize ourselves" or others in language psyche.co/guides/how-t...

Imagine a sculptor faced with a block of wood. She works on the block with a set of awls and chisels, transforming it into an object of art, a statue. Through work, the original wood has been transformed. Its initial, heavy ‘woodness’ has been overcome. It has become an object of art invested with the sculptor’s thought, a reflection of herself, of her creativity. In Hegel-speak, the immediate block of wood has been mediated. It has been raised up and liberated from its initial form into something more mindful, more spiritual, more thoughtful. As such, it is something in which the artist may recognise or know herself as an artistic agent. More generally, our thinking agency transforms the world of objects, overcomes their immediate presentation and makes them into ‘objects of art’ in which we may recognise ourselves.

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slo ~|• @slo-slo-slo.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

and of course current cultural logic points to ultimately having an "AI agent" do all the consumption for you while you get to check the boxes (as with the Axios worker who had AI process The Last of the Mohicans for him)

0122

Reposted by Rob Horning

“Those lines are drawn in terms of friction: devalued things like labor and politics require and generate friction, whereas scalable value must minimize it.” “In 2026, slop scales. Actual musical labor and the critical labor involved in interpreting music does not scale.”

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now popularity metrics say nothing about social behavior, they measure the success of algorithms to atomize people with the same slop

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"scale" as something individuals are (paradoxically) supposed to consume and enjoy is inculcated by all metricized platforms—the numbers reveal what is valuable. Numbers once were a proxy for social significance. Now scale means a stack of atomized consumption acts

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this gets at the same idea with "sameness" as the lens: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want" — i.e. people consume "easiness" as the content, as the substance

070

feeds teach us to value ourselves for the velocity of our consumption— that is, to enjoy "speed of scrolling" as a kind of content, the substance of our acts of consuming that gives the ambivalent "pleasure" of being numbed out by the overwhelm: the slop sublime

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"friction vs. scale" is one way of putting it; algorithmic force-feeding is another, or "fast" vs. "slow" consumption, as when people rhapsodize about reading long books or watching 10-hour movies or whatever

Friction/scale is coming to replace low/high or pop/rock hierarchies

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

commercial entertainment has been optimized for convenient consumption rather than "discourse," yielding "hits" that offer no substance for critical discussion etc. www.its-her-factory.com/2026/08/slop...

In 2026, slop scales. Actual musical labor and the critical labor involved in interpreting music does not scale. Critics dig their teeth into the products of musical labor, where the friction of work creates the open, messy, plurivalent art object ripe for the labor of interpretation (and the social proces of debate).

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algorithmic-feed-driven platforms work to create content consumers who regard feeds as pipelines of care and creators as parasocial caregivers (rather than writers or critics or whatever). "writing" for platforms means placating addicted audiences assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c...

Reading and writing platforms tend to code their operations in a language
of care, presenting the activities they facilitate as so many paths to inclusive community that can assuage various forms of anguish, including social isolation and exclusion, stress, anxiety, and depression.

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

pairs well with this post that points out the structural forces aligned against "deep reading" www.theamericanvandal.com/p/neuroplast...

Deep reading, careful listening, and constructive conversing are harder to do than they used to be. And that is not because of some individual, professional, or generational failure. These things have been made harder to do by structural adjustments to our systems of media, politics, and economy on behalf of consolidated power. These adjustments are being defended and reinforced, but are not inevitable or permanent.

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

good account of how books and "book culture" offer no refuge from imperatives of streaming, parasociality, and "content creation" assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c...

assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com

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Rob Horning @robhorning.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

"authenticity" is built from feelings not facts, and facts don't "feel real" in and of themselves. (also, "authenticity" is always a construct and not empirically given) ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

misinformation and disinformation do not proliferate merely because of the absence of literacy, trust, or discussions needed to discern facts from fiction. They succeed because a complex composition of actors ranging from social media platforms to armies of propaganda bots has
economized and politicized the affective texture of authenticity, hijacking the feeling of “real.”

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"The more models are designed to seem like living beings, or like persons, the less agency users have to decide how they relate to them": i.e. the pseudosubjectivity of a product allows the consumer to be further dominated and controlled by it — it is a fundamentally coercive interface

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every engagement with an anthropomorphized machine depreciates our ethical obligations to other living things

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this need to be wary was already fomented by "context collapse" situations on social media platforms, but automated language makes the onslaught of opaque speech from entities whose intentions cannot be inferred far more relentless

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