> Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif [...]

This part near the end caught my attention:

> One could effectively claim that Smith [...] stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.

In the Hyperion sci-fi novels, (spoilers ahead) the godlike AIs are ultimately characterized as parasites of humans. Their existence was stored in some high-dimensional quantum medium, but the hardware they ran on was the old fashioned human brain. Then I read that in the initial draft of The Matrix, that's why the machines needed to farm humans; but test audiences were confused by it and so they changed to story to "body heat is energy."

I usually scroll a page to see how many headings it has, but I'm looking for the opposite. Too many headings is one of the quickest aesthetic clues that I'm looking at slop, as it doesn't require me to read any of the text. (Emojis and over-usage of bullet point lists are the others I can think of in this category.)

I noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU).

When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.

This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.

I can only consume information where each nugget of truth can be contained in 160 characters. Nothing extra, each insight must be a atomic and self contained, an element in the larger tweet stream. When I pull my phone out to scroll instagram in the middle of reading your piece, I get lost if it's not formatted like this.

zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?

Esaias Tegnér (Sweden, 1782-1846): Det dunkelt sagda är det dunkelt tänkta.

“That which is dimly said is dimly thought."

I've read lots of Zizek as a high schooler. This doesn't even come close to how dense some of his writing can be, I'm sitting here drunk on a few beers and it was a simple read. I think lots of people are actually illiterate.