The Stillborn God: the Age of AI is (Un)Dead

The problem, though, is that these tools will remain cheap, and will continue to be so even deep into their derangement. The people generating cognitive poison for children up above spend almost no money and almost as little time on their work. They can repeat this process hundreds of times in the space it takes a legitimate children’s book to be made. It produces garbage, but the margins are incredibly friendly. Why do six months of work that involves thought and skilled labor if you can just spend the same period of time churning out digital slop for the same payout?

The Great Reassessment: On Nostalgia and Experimentation

Somehow, though, famously bad – or just forgettable – movies like Super Mario Brothers, Waterworld, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, Event Horizon, Starship Troppers, and Demolition Man are getting treated as hidden gems. Some of these I see the point with, others I don’t. Hell, I’ve done similar things in my own life with such films as Mystery Men. Is this simple nostalgia, or is it something else?

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersApril 26, 2023Film, Popular Modernism, nostalgia, Subcultures, Cult MediaComment

The Fallacy of Efficiency

Because of the Jevons Paradox, which can be boiled down to the fact that increased efficiency leads to greater, not lesser consumption: because when we live in a world that prizes maximum output, it never makes sense to do any less than everything. In such a situation, efficiency means something very different from how it’s normally construed: it means great output, greater cost, and greater waste. For the people whose tasks have been made more efficient, it means either a higher work load or (for those who have been made redundant) destitution.

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersMarch 8, 2023Efficiency, Materialist AnalysisComment

Story, Scene, Setpiece: The Base Units of Narrative

The primary shift, it seems to me, is a kind of rebalancing of literature and storytelling away from exposition and toward scenes. The adjective “cinematic” is noted as a selling-point for stories, more so than “musical” or “architectural” or “sculptural” or “painterly,” because the ideal of storytelling is no longer the epic novel, but instead the film. This shift isn’t just a slow move, though, it’s an ongoing vector of movement: because film and literature – as major narrative art forms – are tied together, a shift in one often has a knock-on-effect on the other.

Notes on Literacy Education

At the very least, since we’ve perceived literacy to be in crisis since the inception of higher education as a more open project, roughly a century ago, it behooves us to be skeptical of the idea that literacy is in decline.

CommentaryCameron SummersJanuary 25, 2023Education, LiteracyComment