Rob Horning
LightNews LightNews
robhorning.bsky.social
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social
4.6K followers 260 following 480 posts
robhorning.substack.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
robhorning.bsky.social
this names the phenomenon accurately but wonder what the "cultivation process" entails and what plays into how and when it works and on whom
the “male suckerfication crisis”: The process by which young men are continuously cultivated--by politicians, influencers, podcasters, sportscasters, and the very structure of social networks--as dupes and suckers, both for the enrichment and empowerment of Trumpist politicians and movements but also in service of the profits an ever-expanding roster of gambling and gambling-adjacent industries, among them app-enabled retail day-trading, crypto speculation, predictions markets, and of course, actual sports betting.
November 7, 2025 at 7:22 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
this seems right, and always makes me wonder what the "suckers" get out of being on "sucker lists," why they enjoy being on them. Is it just some combination of masochism and getting paid attention to? Confirmation bias as a service? maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...
One way of thinking about Twitter, especially in the Elon Musk era, is as the latest and most sophisticated version of the mailing lists that have powered the conservative movement, and the various scams and cons and schemes that constitute it, since the 1960s--in other words, as a huge and immediately accessible collection of suckers, waiting to have their avidity and paranoia exploited for cash. The predictions markets here are happy to play the same role with heavy X.com users as crypto scams and meme-stock hustlers did on the same site a few years ago, or as cash-for-gold ads did with Fox News viewers a decade before that, or as direct-mail get-rich-quick schemes did with Goldwater voters deep in prehistory.¹
November 7, 2025 at 7:10 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
AI tools also effective for undermining any communities whose existence may inexplicably threaten you
it was a super-chill community where anyone could ask literally any question and there were 15 people there to help you.
November 4, 2025 at 6:13 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
seems like one of the main use cases for genAI is to eliminate the joy that other people take in thinking and actually doing things www.thecut.com/article/woul...
he’s watched the group spiral into the depths of AI paranoia as images of phony crochet projects and impossible-to-execute patterns flooded the feed
November 4, 2025 at 6:02 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
analysis of political AI slop as "generated déjà vu" slavoj.substack.com/p/welcome-to...
This kind of AI-generated irony functions as an unconscious without a subject, carrying out a significant labor on which ruthless political powers can cash in. It is a work that pulls us all into the orbit of a generated déjà vu, where everything is possible, but nothing can happen anymore.
October 22, 2025 at 6:56 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
but the existence of text and video generators will also fortify those modes of social verification that don't amount to "it's acceptable for me to believe everything I see and read" www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/o...
The British theorist Stafford Beer once said that “the purpose of a system is what it does” — a helpful reminder to judge a process not by its stated mission but by its outcomes. Sora’s purpose, whether intentional or not, seems to be to make real the danger that activists have warned of: overwhelming users with so much fake content that they no longer have a choice but to assume that everything is false.
October 21, 2025 at 3:54 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
or you could say the entire station has been made into one big ad for this photographer news.artnet.com/art-world/hu...
For the first time possibly ever, there is not a single ad to be seen in Grand Central Terminal. “Humans of New York,” Brandon Stanton‘s popular social media art series of photographs of people he’s interviewed on the city’s streets, has taken over each and every one of the 150 video billboards in the grand concourse, as well as the subway ads below in Grand Central Station for “Dear New York.”
October 14, 2025 at 5:03 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
"new conspiracism" doesn't explain anything but is a means for isolated individuals to experience "social validation" on demand, in the absence of a verifiable public — a way to intensify the gratification of parasociality www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...
the new conspiracism has its technological basis in digital platforms and the rise of reactionary influencers and “conspiracy entrepreneurs.” Outlandish and pointless fantasies, like the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world. They may identify enemies and reinforce prejudices, but they don’t explain anything or provide a political plan. The only injunction of the new conspiracist is that their claims get liked, shared, and repeated. Engagement — and revenue — is all.
October 3, 2025 at 5:04 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
this from Yves Citton's Mythocracy is maybe useful for thinking about Sora 2 and other slop feeds: Generated video constitutes an "imaginary of power" that gives consumers pictures of how they've been trained to believe things are "supposed to be"
The imaginary of power is not, therefore, a 'theory' that comes along after the fact to provide the analytical explanation of the images circulating around us. Rather, it is a set of schemas that we experience insofar as we use them. It is a set of imagos, of 'expansive forms' (patterns, Gestalt) that shape our expectations inasmuch as we are able to reconfigure them. They are spectacles that help us see 'reality' only by filtering what we see of it.
October 2, 2025 at 7:24 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
wonder if the ease and rapidity with which "AI" can generate right-wing fantasy images and propaganda makes them more convincing for their consumers — as though one shouldn't have to use their own imagination to manifest the bigotry they insist on www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...
everyone knows the videos aren’t real, but I was missing the point: ‘It’s about us showing everyone what’s really happening.’
September 24, 2025 at 4:52 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
not bad advice, but presumes that most people read and write to experience "charm, surprise, and strangeness" when the opposite may be the case www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...
For publishers, editors, critics, professors, teachers, anyone with any say over what people read, the first step will be to develop an ear. Learn to tell — to read closely enough to tell — the work of people from the work of bots. Notice the poverty of the latter’s style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing. So far this has been about as easily done as said. Until AI systems stop gaining in sophistication, it will become measurably harder. Required will be a new kind of literacy, an adaptive practice of bullshit detection.
September 23, 2025 at 6:06 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
What does it mean to "optimize" for this condition — to train users to enjoy it? Why is it most profitable for companies to train us in wanting to pay attention as a way of avoiding rather than seeking meaning? www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...
The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.
September 11, 2025 at 1:50 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
But perhaps the function of disappearing is a vital one. Perhaps this is how we react as living beings, as mortals, to the threat of an immortal universe, the threat of a definitive reality. So this whole array of technology could be taken to mean that man has ceased to believe in his own existence, and has opted for a virtual existence, a destiny by proxy. Then all our artefacts become the site of the subject’s non-existence, of his desire for non-existence. For a subject without an existence of his own is at least as vital a hypothesis as that of a subject decked out with such metaphysical responsibility. Seen from this angle, technology becomes a marvellous adventure, just as marvellous in this case as it seems monstrous in the other. It becomes an art of disappearance. It might be seen as aiming not so much to transform the world as to create an autonomous world, a fully achieved world, from which we could at last withdraw. Now, there can be no perfecting of the natural world, and the human being in particular is a dangerous imperfection. If the world is to be perfect, it will first have to be made. And if the human being wishes to attain this kind of immortality, he must produce himself as artefact also, expel himself from himself into an artificial orbit in which he will circle forever. So we dream of a world carried along miraculously, without our intervention, and of autonomous beings which, far from escaping our will, as in the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, might fulfil the desire we ourselves have of escaping our will.
September 10, 2025 at 2:36 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
This is what is at stake in Virtuality. And there can be no doubting its absolute ambition. If it were brought to completion, that radical effectuation would be the equivalent of a perfect crime. Whereas the ‘original’ crime is never perfect and always leaves traces (we ourselves as living, mortal beings are the trace of that criminal imperfection), future extermination – that extermination which would be produced by an absolute determination of the world and its elements – would leave no trace. We would not even have the time to disappear. We would be disintegrated in Real Time and Virtual Reality long before the stars went out. Fortunately, all this is literally impossible. Very High Definition, with its ambition of producing images, sounds, information, bodies in microvision, in stereoscopy, as you have never seen them before, as you will never see them, is unrealizable. As is the phantasy of Artificial Intelligence: the brain’s becoming a world, the world’s becoming a brain, so as to function without bodies, unfailing, autonomized, inhuman. Too intelligent, too super-efficient to be true.
September 10, 2025 at 2:36 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...
Originally, the service had generated recommendations based on a five-star system of user ratings, but in 2017 Netflix abandoned this in favour of the altgenre-based system. “Moving from explicit to implicit recommendations was the big shift,” said Yellin. “Recommendations based on behaviour – what you actually watched and consumed, versus what you said you liked.”
September 9, 2025 at 7:21 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
treating "authenticity" as something to consume (rather than as a practice, a way of relating to people, etc) means that the signifiers of authenticity always get used up, exhausted —
It’s sort of pathetic to reflect that we have so few—maybe no—authentic and unmediated experiences that the thing that now really upsets people is an alteration of a simulation of authenticity. It’s felt as a loss of national identity on par with the defacement George Washington, because our national identity is now just corporate brands and consumerism. It’s no different than the “trad wife” fantasy, which is also a simulation and simulacrum of pre-modern living. You see this across the reactionary right, and it would be amusing if it didn’t muster real political energy: people genuinely angry over the loss of comforting consumer experiences. The attack on simulations is experienced as a trauma: remember the fury of gamers who felt their imaginary worlds were being tampered with. Not for nothing does Baudrillard refer to the “panic-stricken production” of simulacra and simulations.
August 25, 2025 at 3:04 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
another piece on the same theme www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-cracke...
Cracker Barrel wasn’t some old institution that got updated; it was always already a corporate simulation of country life. It’s a gimmick to sell gas, thought up by a Shell executive: It was meant to be plugged into the commercial matrix of the interstate highway system. People at Cracker Barrel are consuming the idea of communal wholesomeness and a pre-suburbanized society
August 25, 2025 at 2:51 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
users should in fact smell the glove over and over again, just not continuously
August 11, 2025 at 1:28 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
seems like a distinction without a difference www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
Andrea Vallone, safety research lead at OpenAI, said that the company optimizes ChatGPT for retention not engagement. She said the company wants users to return to the tool regularly but not to use it for hours on end.
August 11, 2025 at 1:26 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
AI companies want us to think their products are like "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest, capable of chatting us into terminal inertia
nymag.com/intelligence...
Everything from chatbots’ personification to their recurring issues with engagement-boosting sycophancy suggests that entertainment, not just utility, is what keeps a lot of users around. As a communications strategy, nudges project ambivalence about excessive platform use and raise the possibility that users may be misusing products. As a bit of marketing, they’re likewise helpful: Our product is so compelling we have to tell our users to take a break. Nudges are perhaps best understood, though, as attempts to demarcate liability. They imply concern for users’ well-being and offer tools to help them manage it. But they also make it clear that, should these new products drive you sort of insane, that’s ultimately your problem, not theirs. You were warned! Or at least you were nudged.
August 6, 2025 at 2:47 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
slop then reminds people that content can flow forever, without "meaning" — which may be the appeal, as Baudrillard argues here, about fashion: it is "irresistible" because it circulates specifically as the absence of "meaning," just trends as "trends"
One has but to consider the phenomenon of fashion, which has never been satisfactorily explained. Fashion is the despair of sociology and aesthetics: a prodigious contagion of forms in which chain reactions struggle for supremacy over the logic of distinctions. The pleasure of fashion is undeniably cultural in origin, but does it not stem even more clearly from a flaring, unmediated consensus generated by the interplay of signs? Moreover, fashions fade away like epidemics once they have ravaged the imagination, once the virus has run its course. The price to be paid in terms of waste is always exorbitant, yet everyone consents. The marvellous in our societies resides in this ultra-rapid circulation of signs at a surface level (as opposed to the ultra-slow circulation of meanings). We love being contaminated by this process, and not having to think about it. This is a viral onslaught as noxious as the plague, yet no moral sociology, no philosophical reason, will ever extirpate it. Fashion is an irreducible phenomenon because it partakes of a crazy, viral, mediationless form of communication which operates so fast for the sole reason that it never passes via the mediation of meaning.
August 1, 2025 at 3:01 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-... the sense that "slop" is a kind of place-holder that holds open space in feeds, or supplies continual confirmation that the spiggot is open even if nothing "meaningful" is flowing through it
The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment its only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.
August 1, 2025 at 2:54 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
9% seems really low actually www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-...
Among teens who do use AI, 30% list entertainment and curiosity as the driving factor and 9% say it’s easier to talk to AI chat bots than other people.
July 25, 2025 at 6:36 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
"What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself." (from Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil)
If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power. If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them peopl
July 17, 2025 at 7:22 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
July 14, 2025 at 12:54 PM