Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost
@ghostofchristo1.bsky.social
In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment.
2022: “OMG! Elon is a genius! His bold leadership shows that we can make mass tech layoffs with no impact on the user experience at all! Let’s make this an industry standard.
Today’s user experience on Twitter:
Today’s user experience on Twitter:
May 24, 2025 at 2:32 PM
2022: “OMG! Elon is a genius! His bold leadership shows that we can make mass tech layoffs with no impact on the user experience at all! Let’s make this an industry standard.
Today’s user experience on Twitter:
Today’s user experience on Twitter:
“Verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli).”—Jean Baudrillard
April 13, 2025 at 1:31 PM
“Verification puts an end to the workings of truth (for truth, if it exists, is something to be fought over, whereas verification transforms it into a fait accompli).”—Jean Baudrillard
AI “bulldozes everything local, everything intimate, everything singular and idiosyncratic and irreducible to statistical regularities—and tells us the only thing that is to count as human reality is what gets reflected back to us by our machines.”—Justin Smith-Ruiu
March 23, 2025 at 1:20 PM
AI “bulldozes everything local, everything intimate, everything singular and idiosyncratic and irreducible to statistical regularities—and tells us the only thing that is to count as human reality is what gets reflected back to us by our machines.”—Justin Smith-Ruiu
The thing about Reform UK—across all its warring factions—is that it is fundamentally a right-libertarian party committed to the type of turbo-Thatcherism that caused the problems many of its supporters are ostensibly voting against.
March 20, 2025 at 8:38 AM
The thing about Reform UK—across all its warring factions—is that it is fundamentally a right-libertarian party committed to the type of turbo-Thatcherism that caused the problems many of its supporters are ostensibly voting against.
We really are doomed, aren’t we?
March 15, 2025 at 7:26 PM
We really are doomed, aren’t we?
“What happened to reality? Well, somebody took a picture of it, and ever since we haven’t needed it anymore.”—Fredric Jameson
March 9, 2025 at 1:19 PM
“What happened to reality? Well, somebody took a picture of it, and ever since we haven’t needed it anymore.”—Fredric Jameson
Harry Crane and his giant computer room. The desire to automate “creative” and replace it with pure predictive data. We are all Don Draper now.
March 9, 2025 at 8:08 AM
Harry Crane and his giant computer room. The desire to automate “creative” and replace it with pure predictive data. We are all Don Draper now.
Everyone ridiculed this film when it came out, but in retrospect it nails the early 2025 zeitgeist—if we interpret the movie such that Megalon is a delusional fraud and that the shining replacement world that the old order’s been levelled to make way for will never exist.
February 21, 2025 at 8:32 AM
Everyone ridiculed this film when it came out, but in retrospect it nails the early 2025 zeitgeist—if we interpret the movie such that Megalon is a delusional fraud and that the shining replacement world that the old order’s been levelled to make way for will never exist.
Found myself revisiting @ryanruby.bsky.social’s 2023 article about how Twitter came to be a confluence point for literary and cultural discussion online around 2020, and how we’d look back on it as something of a golden age after that version of Twitter was taken away. www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...
February 8, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Found myself revisiting @ryanruby.bsky.social’s 2023 article about how Twitter came to be a confluence point for literary and cultural discussion online around 2020, and how we’d look back on it as something of a golden age after that version of Twitter was taken away. www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...
Or, perhaps, a mass social panic associated with disruptive new technologies and the threat of impending war, akin to the “Phantom Airships” and “Phantom Aircraft” panics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
December 16, 2024 at 1:54 PM
Or, perhaps, a mass social panic associated with disruptive new technologies and the threat of impending war, akin to the “Phantom Airships” and “Phantom Aircraft” panics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
After each period of increasingly destabilising informalisation—a demand for reformalisation. Structures! Authority! Anything! Someone, please lead us out of this increasingly unfamiliar and now frankly sketchy place we thought we wanted the world to be.
December 7, 2024 at 8:14 PM
After each period of increasingly destabilising informalisation—a demand for reformalisation. Structures! Authority! Anything! Someone, please lead us out of this increasingly unfamiliar and now frankly sketchy place we thought we wanted the world to be.
Ex Machina (2014). You can never trust the tech bros, of course. But you should trust the machines even less.
November 29, 2024 at 8:28 AM
Ex Machina (2014). You can never trust the tech bros, of course. But you should trust the machines even less.
I really wish the future weren’t the hyperstition of whatever random IP is floating around in our tech aristocracy’s understuffed heads, but here we are.
November 27, 2024 at 11:34 AM
I really wish the future weren’t the hyperstition of whatever random IP is floating around in our tech aristocracy’s understuffed heads, but here we are.
[Adam Curtis voice] “But of course DOGE wasn’t real. It was the same simulacrum of government restraint we’d seen many times before. Paradoxically, it led to the growth of government. New rules, new regulations, and new forms of oversight to comply with the new edicts issuing from above.”
November 25, 2024 at 10:02 AM
[Adam Curtis voice] “But of course DOGE wasn’t real. It was the same simulacrum of government restraint we’d seen many times before. Paradoxically, it led to the growth of government. New rules, new regulations, and new forms of oversight to comply with the new edicts issuing from above.”
Not Late Soviet Britain so much anymore as Post Soviet Britain, when the entire country gets put up for sale.
November 22, 2024 at 8:31 AM
Not Late Soviet Britain so much anymore as Post Soviet Britain, when the entire country gets put up for sale.
Impossible to accurately describe the vibe emanating from the top in the U.K. at the moment. Threadbare yet absolutist. Utterly supine and craven to external interests (in this case, BlackRock), but keen to still pose as a Poundshop Leviathan to its domestic constituencies.
November 22, 2024 at 8:29 AM
Impossible to accurately describe the vibe emanating from the top in the U.K. at the moment. Threadbare yet absolutist. Utterly supine and craven to external interests (in this case, BlackRock), but keen to still pose as a Poundshop Leviathan to its domestic constituencies.
OK, we all know academic book pricing follows its own logic (whatever that is). But what, exactly, is the point of this (from Palgrave Macmillan?)
November 21, 2024 at 12:06 PM
OK, we all know academic book pricing follows its own logic (whatever that is). But what, exactly, is the point of this (from Palgrave Macmillan?)
“It would be more than an engineering issue if a part of the reason that we want to join and use Twitter is that it has [the] potential to mobilise a crowd psychology, and that we enjoy participating in flash mobs to trash the reputation of other users or other institutions.”—Adam Hodgkin (2017)
November 20, 2024 at 12:59 PM
“It would be more than an engineering issue if a part of the reason that we want to join and use Twitter is that it has [the] potential to mobilise a crowd psychology, and that we enjoy participating in flash mobs to trash the reputation of other users or other institutions.”—Adam Hodgkin (2017)
John Pistelli on how social media has “obtruded the image of the group” into everything. No one individual is now intelligible without reference to the tribe they belong to. And how one talks about groups is now a way of signalling which group you yourself affiliate with.
November 19, 2024 at 8:15 AM
John Pistelli on how social media has “obtruded the image of the group” into everything. No one individual is now intelligible without reference to the tribe they belong to. And how one talks about groups is now a way of signalling which group you yourself affiliate with.
Even if the new procedures initially “recognise” or seem to codify preexisting organic traditions or understandings, that is only temporary. Once formalised in this way, everything is open to replacement, obsolescence, and the product and fashion cycles of policy.
November 13, 2024 at 7:08 PM
Even if the new procedures initially “recognise” or seem to codify preexisting organic traditions or understandings, that is only temporary. Once formalised in this way, everything is open to replacement, obsolescence, and the product and fashion cycles of policy.
Just some preliminary and unfinished thoughts prompted by a first read of @annakornbluh.bsky.social’s Immediacy.
February 27, 2024 at 1:31 PM
Just some preliminary and unfinished thoughts prompted by a first read of @annakornbluh.bsky.social’s Immediacy.
There are certain books that have a particular clarity and coherence to them, such that virtually every paragraph is a banger on its own, packed with acute insights. Here are two.
February 11, 2024 at 8:35 PM
There are certain books that have a particular clarity and coherence to them, such that virtually every paragraph is a banger on its own, packed with acute insights. Here are two.
It seems to be exploding there now. Several semi-viral posts.
February 11, 2024 at 8:25 PM
It seems to be exploding there now. Several semi-viral posts.