Balaji Srinivasan’s new book, The Network State, lays out a speculative roadmap for the formation of a new kind of political entity — an online community with its own laws and commerce that eventually grows and evolves to the point where it can acquire land and some of the other hallmarks of what we think of […]

The fact that all these disparate people are interfacing with the same Mecha-Niskanenzilla bred in a lab by an EA macropolycule is just a weird artifact of the present moment.

I’ve been tracking the trials and tribulations of a project called Unstable Diffusion — this is essentially an effort to take the Stable Diffusion code and train a model that can generate “erotic imagery.” In other words, porn, though the project’s backers are careful to position the effort as appealing to other than prurient interests.…

There’s an online game I find myself playing way too much of, and I hate it. I would love to never play this game again, but its existence is a consequence of the deep structure of social media, so if I’m going to argue about things on the internet then playing it is unavoidable. I…

I see the circle game, but you see a white supremacist hand sign. I see a good-faith disagreement between two deeply held positions, but you see a mask that has finally slipped to reveal the grifter beneath. I see a successful move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneur with an impossibly successful track record of moving fast and breaking things, but you…