There is an interview with Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias about their new book Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech (and How to Fight Back).
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My piece on J.G. Ballard and computer generated poetry in the 1970s
Having stumbled on some weird 1970s poetry generated by a computer I’ve written a piece about it for The Conversation. The poems were commissioned by the Novelist and short story writer J.G. Ballard. And that’s where things get even weirder. I tell the full story in the piece. This strange case seemed to me to tell us something about generative AI and automated creativity today. My piece contains some images of the poems too.
I found it to be an interesting story to write about and I really liked how this strange little case gave a different context on the current generative AI debates (and the response to things like ChatGPT etc).
The whole thing came out of one sentence in Ballard’s autobiography. In passing he mentions a scientists who produced these computer generated pieces. Ballard saw the possibilities and the provocations.
I really enjoyed the little bit of investigating I did that led to this piece, and writing it too. It’s a long-read piece in The Conversation‘s ‘Insights’ section.
I really hope you might read it and also share it with anyone you think might be interested.
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Call for stories for So Fi Zine
Ash Watson has a call out for pieces of sociological fiction, poetry and visual art for the next issue of So Fi Zine.
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Creative differences
Irina Dumitrescu explores differences in approaches to creativity and writing in a new instalment of The Process Substack.
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Enjoying writing?
Mark Carrigan has a post on ‘How to enjoy writing‘. This post is an introduction to a planned series of posts on the topic that will appear on his blog.
Mark has already posted the first two pieces on ‘capturing your fringe thoughts‘ and ‘placing limits on your writing‘.
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The university that didn’t happen
I just remembered this piece by Daryl Martin on the university that never was. It’s about a planned university that wasn’t realised and what those plans reveal. The conclusion to Daryl’s article still feels particularly poignant.
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AI event
On Friday there is an event on “AI – Environment & Social Good?”. It’s taking place at the Guidhall in York and is also available online too. Details for booking either in-person or online are here.
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How will you know when AI has won?
An extremely short story I’ve written – it’s a drabble, so takes less than a minute to read (a drabble, for those who aren’t familiar, is a story of exactly 100 words). I’ve called this one ‘How will you know when AI has won?‘.
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Analogue’s comeback
A long-read on the different ways analogue technologies are being revived, by Michael Beverland and Giana M. Eckhardt for The Conversation.
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Turning waste into value
Dan Robins has a piece on ‘Rendering, waste disposal and the production of value‘ in The Sociological Review. The article develops the new concept of rendering as a way for understanding disposal as a production process. The article offers three ‘mechanisms of rendering’.
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‘Silicon future’
John Cheney-Lippold has a new article on ‘The silicon future’ in New Media & Society. Focusing on temporality it looks at how tech firms ’employ’ a ‘silicon future’ to ‘claim authority’. It argues that:
‘To excavate, to understand or return to history, is to reject their futurism. To believe in the fact of history is to unseat the silicon futurist from their temporal paternalism. But more importantly, to think through history is to suggest a sense of temporal responsibility, a sense that their silicon future may not be the actual future anyone else might desire.’
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J.G. Ballard was looking for society’s wiring and fuse box
Vanora Bennett: Your mature fiction focuses on what is just about to happen in a given community. What kind of real-life event will suggest a novel to you?
J.G. Ballard: I just have a feeling in my bones: there’s something odd going on, and I explore that by writing a novel, by trying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surface and looking for the hidden wiring. It’s as if there are all these strange lights, and I’m looking for the wiring and the fuse box.
Interview with J.G. Ballard from 2004 included in The Complete Short Stories: Volume One (2014).
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Future thought
Bryan S. Turner has written a wide-ranging afterword on ‘Thinking Futures’ for a forthcoming special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory. He opens by sketching out the topics the piece covers:
‘This Afterword considers the many ways in which social theorists have thought about the future and the end of modernity such as post-histoire and postmodernity. The accelerating speed of modern society and the destruction of the natural environment has been captured in the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’. To understand our future, we depend more and more on experts, but with unknown threats to democracy. Finally, the potential technological disaster confronting us with advanced AI is known as ‘the singularity’.’