#criticism (13 links)
- Rethinking space opera antipope.org
Thoughts on space opera from Charlie Stross, touching on work from Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Ursula le Guin and Lois McMaster Bujold.
The romantic impulse renders space opera antithetical to solarpunk. A fictional setting composed entirely of wild individualists isn't going to end up as some sort of libertarian utopia, it's going to be a cat ranch: meanwhile someone needs to stay behind and tend the home fires, someone has to mind the grain silos on that "small farming planet", someone else needs to manage the shipyard that repairs the interstellar freighter.
- “No Man’s Sky” and 10,000 Bowls of Plain Oatmeal challies.com
This article is 10 years old, but even with 10 years worth of constant updates to No Man's Sky I can still very much taste the oatmeal underneath. I reckon it might be impossible to escape the generative trap by layering more on top.
- Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea economist.com
It is right to revere reason. But moral philosophers from Aristotle to Rawls knew that if an argument leads to intolerable places, it must have a hidden faulty step. EAs’ instinct, though, is to enjoy counterintuitive conclusions, even if they seem perverse.
- ‘A crisis of authenticity’: the truth about food influencers theguardian.com
- The AI Great Leap Forward leehanchung.github.io
The sparrows are dead. The locusts haven’t arrived yet. The flowers bloomed full of poison pills. The furnaces produced pig iron stamped as steel that’s now load-bearing. The grain numbers look fantastic.
Via Popular.
The "culture" of a society isn't a blob of random human activity, but an orderly ecosystem arising from the interactions between particular subunits. To maintain ecosystem health, we must reject the cynical “poptimist” framing of culture as a mere vehicle for entertainment and commerce and instead promote the benefits of
- Ephemerality in User Interfaces borretti.me
And so the trend in UI design, for the past 15y, has been towards less information, fewer affordances, and turning free-standing pages into transient modals. Interfaces are stripped, made ephemeral, and apps become Fisher-Price toys for users to paw at.
- The Deaths of Effective Altruism wired.com
- Everything you think you know about homelessness is wrong noahpinion.substack.com
Via Popular.
- Outland outland.art
...a new platform dedicated to fostering critical conversations around emerging digital technologies and their connections to contemporary art.
My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
"I remain convinced that _in principle_, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."