Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)

Post by Animats » Tue, May 14, 2024, 5:45 AM UTC

andybak wrote: post #59

Animats wrote: post #56

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In the post-LLM era, that just isn't good enough. Now that we have well-written automated probabilistic meandering text generation, "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour" copy is everywhere. Usually followed by a clickbait link. It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.

I disagree. AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can do "thought provoking". Part of Adam's appeal is the fact that behind it is a human being struggling to understand the world and struggling to explain it. LLMs are incredible but nobody cares what a hyper-evolved Markov chain pretends to say about culture.

Post by soco » Tue, May 14, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

borgdefense wrote: post #37

smokel wrote: post #25

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It makes a lot more sense to consider Hollywood and video games as the proper successors to classical art, and to see contemporary art as only a small strand in the evolution of art. Somehow someone managed to convince the world that Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird stuff is. (To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary weird stuff.)

Youtube and tiktok also. The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists, pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the bullshit artists in New York are doing because most aren't creative or free thinkers at all. I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.

Post by soco » Tue, May 14, 2024, 11:49 AM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #104

orwin wrote: post #50

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Agree, but i don't think postmodernism can go away. One thing i find fascinating about postmodernism is how antagonistic it is. As it core, it's deeply anti-metanarrative, and i think that it's main structural characteristic. Which is, in a way, a bit anti-intuition, as we like to understand the world with meta-narratives. I won't go into politics (basically, all parties create metanarrative, all use postmodernist ar…

Counter-point: The countries that adopted postmodernist beliefs collapsed within a few generations because postmodernist ideas are incoherent mindrot incapable of leading to human flourishing — and will be gone in under 150 years from their conception, due to their own defective nature. In the US, for instance, we’re seeing a rejection of precisely that — and the accompanying collapse of media companies steeped in a…

Post by rexpop » Fri, May 17, 2024, 2:20 PM UTC

zoogeny wrote: post #181

rexpop wrote: post #168

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Firstly, thanks for engaging in earnest with my response. > Walter Benjamín and Hannah Arendt - and if they aren't considered progressive then I'm not sure what could be. This reads almost like a joke to me, because neither of these thinkers are radical any longer. "American Pragmatism" is "about as progressive a bunch as I think you could reasonably ask for?" It was my mistake to use a meaningless word like "conserv…

> neither of these thinkers are radical any longer I believe the question was whether or not those thinkers were indicative of "anti-collective propaganda" or being "locked inside [...] conservative ideology". I have no interest in the degree of radicalness. I especially have no interest in thinkers who are even more politically minded than those I have already mentioned.