New posts from jordanlee.life
📚 Muskism by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
I’ll start this review with a confession: I try to ignore reactionary rich guys who try to dominate the news cycle. I think of it as a practice to protect my mental health and a way to deprive them of the attention and clicks they seem to crave. Yet after hearing these authors give a compelling book talk I ended up picking up this slim work analysing the Musk economic and ideological system and couldn’t put it down.
Slobodian and Tarnoff cover Elon Musk’s South African upbringing, his uncanny ability to be technologically ahead of the curve and raise capital through “finacial fabulism”, and eventually his fear of AI, the desire to merge with it, and his social media fuelled rightward turn to some truly repulsive ideas about race, gender, class.
The authors avoid the traps painting him one dimensionally as a genius, or villian, or lunatic. Instead it is well researched with his bizarre behavior well contextuallized within broader movements. The authors idea of “cyborg conservativism” where Musk both is a transhumanist while hating trans people was especially illuminating. To him the “woke mind virus” isn’t a joke. He seems to see the world as code and human empathy and progressivism as a suicidal bug that must be erradicated before humanity can ascend.
I wonder how we stand stand up against the worlds richest man who is literally fighting to change what it means to be human, who is using his immense capital to accelerate the exact idealogies and technologies that I fear the most.
Aidan Walker's review of Language Machines by Leif Weatherby
Aidan Walker aka How To Do Things With Memes wrote a interesting review of Language Machines which turns to the 20th century structuralist (and deconstructuralists) philosophers to understand how we got to the point of LLM’s making “language without cognition”. I think he makes some good points about language already being artificial and how this moment forces us to peel away the some of our assumptions about what language is and how it relates to the supposed uniqueness of humans.
So I think as we search for a “real humanism” — one that lies in actual people and their tangled experiences of the world, rather than in some ideal, untouchable essence the computer can never replicate — we must be careful and playful in equal measure. Careful, because the stakes are high and the situation demands diligent work that watches closely. Playful, because in a moment when language has become “a service” on tap that constructs itself without the steering of a human hand, all the cliches, omissions, and biases that are coded within language will bloom unchecked like algae in an unmoving pond.
In the era of its autonomous construction, the task of deconstructing language — looking at language and saying “hold up a second,” Uno-reversing the binary, joking, probing, unpeeling — becomes even more important. Which is why I love Language Machines, and why the way forward must include poetry, rhetoric, and memes.
🎵 Jeanines - How Long Can It Last (2025)
I spent my birthday weekend at Providence Popfest in Rhode Island and revelled in two days of indie pop of all stripes. The festival was well organized and curated but still clearly from the DIY tradition with small shows, happy reunions, and a refreshing level of transparency from the bands and organizers.
One of my favorite performances was Jeanines who blasted through a set of 100 second pop gems which all managed to have great melodies and lyrics and Mamas And The Papas level vocal harmonies, I was blown away. My favorite song was Turn On The TV from a 2022 album but overall I’m drawn their newest record, How Long Can It Last.
