Admin
I am a writer, storyteller, and cybernetics researcher.
Joined Nov 2022
My personal newsletter from last week trying to make sense of the things. https://buttondown.com/kin-lane/archive/a-week-of-being-kin-lane-march-3rd-2024/
Anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. - David Graeber
The World Wide Web of Apartness - https://kinlane.com/2025/03/02/the-world-wide-web-of-apartness/
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K LeGuin - https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster - https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse - https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse
I Do Not Have Enough Ideas - https://kinlane.com/2025/02/28/i-do-not-have-enough-ideas/
“If you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart?” - The Unaccountability Machine, Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799883.html h/t @earth2marsh
Spotless Mind Movie Rentals - https://alternate.kinlane.com/2025/02/26/spotless-mind-movie-rentals/
The Cover of Business Efficiency for Dangerous Ideology - https://kinlane.com/2025/02/26/the-cover-of-business-efficiency-for-dangerous-ideology/
Programming Music With the Player Piano on Corner of 58th - https://kinlane.com/2025/02/26/programming-music-with-the-player-piano-on-corner-of-58th/
I find the military origins of compute and AI are important, but overused, and I am compiling list of others:
- Babbage difference engine was managing slaves.
- Turing Test is entirely based upon lying.
- ML images was trained on criminal records.
- LLMs was trained on the toxicity of Reddit.
Kin Lane
boosted
“Though gut emotions have always figured into politics, our most recent election was officially and unapologetically “vibes-based." Meanwhile, our masters of the universe are Twitter trolls and memelords. And our TikTok influencers turn natural disasters into nihilistic satire. We’re not just having more fun. We’re making important matters trivial. Amusement is the master virtue—everything must accommodate it.”
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-price-of-mass-amusement
Kin Lane
boosted
"When I gave a talk in 2016, I asked my audience how many years they thought it would be before half of US households had adopted some of the year’s most hyped gadgets. A smart watch? A drone? A 3D printer? Virtual reality goggles? A self-driving car? Would these gadgets ever see 50% adoption? Turns out 'nope.' Or at least, one decade later, none of these – not even the smart watch – has reached that level." -Audrey Watters https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/not-so-fast/
Seeing People As Resources - https://kinlane.com/2025/02/24/seeing-people-as-resources/
A Week of Being Kin Lane - February 24th, 2024
- https://buttondown.com/kin-lane/archive/a-week-of-being-kin-lane-february-24th-2024/
After experiencing the line of questioning about drug use in the clearance screening for working at the White House personally and the historical zero tolerance policy towards even minimal drug usage, I am guessing there were some pretty messed up situations in the 1950s and 1960s that resulted in that screening process. I don’t think what we are seeing right now is new, it is just really out in the open, where earlier ones were probably covered up like what the CIA was doing.
Admin
I am a writer, storyteller, and cybernetics researcher.
Joined Nov 2022
