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piece that explores our collective relationship with algorithmically driven platforms and theorizing why non-algorithmically driven platforms haven't caught on yet (PI.FYI mentioned ā€¼ļø). some of the references and moments in the writing style makes this article feel hollow and generic, but the overall conceit is engaging. also this article (and the general public alike) keep saying tumblr is dead but tumblr is very alive for me personally.
"Just kidding. There is no pure place: we crave the end because it seems cleaner on the other side. We all live,and have always lived, in the muck—even and especially after death. Download the niche app, participate in the empty-ish forum. Labor to make the experience you want. Labor to animate a human internet."
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Mar 6, 2024

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anyone on pi.fyi will likely feel seen and heard when reading this. it basically accentuates all the redundancies and senseless aspects of social media and how it’s disrupted every industry and how we are all dominated by the algorithm and have to be our own hype person. i always feel like an idiot after i finish a record or a book that i'm really excited to share with the world, but then have to think about ā€œcontentā€œ to promote the art itself. obviously pi.fyi feels likes a refreshing beacon of hope because artists can share their work here in a far more simple and wholesome manner. the article also addresses non-creative jobs like accountants and other professions that are all being forced to become an ā€œinfluencerā€ of some sort or build a brand. it’s spooky, yet we’re all feeling the fatigue so hopefully we can see a less algorithmic future soon…
Feb 8, 2024
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this article really captivated me about 8 years ago when it came out. i was still in college on my sociology bullshit and was extremely interested in the tactile changes the internet was bringing, especially to cities (i was also in the midst of a rust belt obsession so really couldn't have been more tailored to me).
a lot of what is in this article has been discussed to death in the time since, but i re-read it recently after a visit to troy new york (the main subject) and found it a really interesting relic of the 2016 internet landscape AND a worthwhile reflection of what the author was predicting and how much of it came true. and all of it is still very relevant, just swap instagram with tiktok
Nov 12, 2024
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I have some subscriptions expiring soon that I can’t financially justify anymore so I’m on that article grind and for I suppose sadomasochistic reason many of these articles have been about ai and I simply can’t get behind these overeducated assholes proposing it has any humane, beneficial qualities at all. (It is quite literally inhuman.) the main argument always seems to be efficiency or offloading the emotional labor of navigating your own life and an argument that essentially boils down to ā€˜fuck the elderly and disabled leave them alone isolated in their homes or institutions with their screens and an algorithm fed on bigoted rhetoric that hates them’. You have to keep the whimsy to remember the time ai saves you is worth nothing if it keeps you from your friends and family and passions and general Ć©lan vital. (Also that nothing is worth the environmental racism, air pollution, and quickening towards the water wars necessitated by data processing centers.) in the scope of universal relativity, the laws of physics, space and time, string theory probably, it is a miracle that any of our consciousnesses have been realized as a tangible collection of cells cloaked in flesh moving around on the single life sustaining planet we know of among one another, each individual their own fantastical miracle at the crosshairs of time and space. That you are ever anywhere with another person has cosmic implications. Whimsy and recognizing the secular miracle of existing is what makes it all mean anything. They want us to forget our miracle of being and sign our time and eyesight over to the ai that further resigns you to the hustle culture normalizing three jobs to afford food and shelter. Mortality makes your life mean something but death in itself is meaningless. It is cruel and random. It’s the life that matters, not the moment it ceases.Take that hammer for your brothers and sisters, remember however gooey you feel inside is the same solubility everyone always feels shifting inside, and it is that persistent threat of dissolution and navigating the slick tumbleweed in each of us that makes us human, that keeps the poets employed. The confusion of being alive is paramount to the human condition, and the clinical precision of ai obfuscates the beauty of being alive with other people. If you prick us we bleed! Heaven is each other, etc. Reject binary codes and techno-fascist yes-men. I’ll show you my ooz and you might see yourself in the leaking I can’t contain. Maybe we can ooze together in a Francis Bacon, Queer (2024) sort of way.

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read from 2021 abt modern counterculture, rejecting tech overlords, and the dark forests of the internet
"To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.ā€
Feb 20, 2024
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well-written article analyzing cronenburg's films and contrasting them with today's sexual politics and lack of eroticism.
passage i enjoyed: In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be.Ā 
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and marvel at the progress you've made. im reading my old journal entries and i was actually a mess, but i've grown so much in a year :) always love and appreciate your old self because she's still within you