Rob Horning
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robhorning.bsky.social
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social
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robhorning.substack.com
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Reposted by Rob Horning
nickseaver.website
nice concretizing of the core idea in the history of information overload: overload isn’t a matter of quantity alone, it requires a certain kind of subject to feel overwhelmed. (the early modern scholar who wants to have read every book in the library, the RSS reader who wants inbox zero)
elliotjaystocks.bsky.social Elliot Jay Stocks @elliotjaystocks.bsky.social · 2d
I love this thoughtful and beautifully presented piece by @terry.social.godier.me.ap.brid.gy (found via @tyfromtheinternet.com’s newsletter), on the anxiety of unread counts and the questionable evolution of app design.

“Phantom obligation — the guilt you feel for something no one asked you to do.”
Phantom Obligation
Why RSS readers look like email clients, and what that's doing to us.
www.terrygodier.com
January 30, 2026 at 4:18 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
an essay I wrote last year about AI "companions" www.emptysetmag.com/articles/lon...
Loneliness Generators
The lonelier you are, the further you can run.
www.emptysetmag.com
January 29, 2026 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
defector.com
Here's a thread of some Dan McQuade blogs that we really loved 🦅

The Garden State Parkway’s Jon Bon Jovi rest stop is playing fast and loose with famous quotes: defector.com/the-garden-s...
The Garden State Parkway's Jon Bon Jovi Rest Stop Is Playing Fast And Loose With Famous Quotes | Defector
CHEESEQUAKE, N.J. — Have you ever scored a touchdown? I never played real football, so my own experiences have been pretty low-key, but man, did they feel great. I think I remember almost all of them—...
defector.com
January 29, 2026 at 3:23 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
think "being online" is a cause of boredom that is presented as its cure; platforms and feeds are engineered to make users consistently feel more bored and less creative, to structure their lives in terms of addiction rather than meaning
nautil.us/why-the-do-n...
Creativity is a wonderful solution to boredom, but you can’t hope that it works the other way around. So the paper from 2014 that everybody cites that says boredom makes you creative: There’s loads and loads of problems with that paper. We tried to replicate it and found the opposite: The more bored we made people, the less creative they were.
January 28, 2026 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
hypervisible.blacksky.app
Worth your time.

“fundamentally you are in love with a business product”
When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object. Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people. So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them. Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.
January 28, 2026 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
lelandnally.bsky.social
I wrote about prediction markets, where we’re at and how we got here for Defector
January 27, 2026 at 7:23 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
wonder if part of this is that using chatbots leads some users to lose whatever "theory of other minds" they used to have; the chatbots' fluency "proves" that other people are no different from and no better than machines www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...
While many mentioned positive effects of the bots — like helping patients understand their diagnoses — they also said the conversations deepened their patients’ feelings of isolation or anxiety.
January 26, 2026 at 8:34 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
January 25, 2026 at 4:11 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
this means that for most people, AI simply is a tool for coercion; its use case is to allow others to make them experience powerlessness
theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/you-have-t...
All those who have power over workers and consumers are going to need to use it to make them start accepting and using the Generative AI tools our industry has collectively invested trillions in.
January 23, 2026 at 7:24 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
at a glance
www.wired.com/story/china-...
At a glance, existing companion products seem good enough to replace human boyfriends
January 21, 2026 at 9:59 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
a cause for optimism newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
Unlike the fibre-optic cables of the dot-com era or the railways of the nineteenth century, AI chips must be replaced frequently as their performance fades and technology improves. If, due to profitability concerns, investment suddenly seizes up, a shrinkage in AI availability relative to its current abundance is a material possibility. Theoretically, if the scale-back of capital expenditure outweighed cost reductions from improvements in AI processes, the legacy of the AI boom would not last long, and available computing power for ordinary AI queries could decline.
January 20, 2026 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
jwherrman.bsky.social
Now that AI-generated fake news video is everywhere, I think it's notable that its main function didn't turn out to be sophisticated and unpredictable deception but rather just more soothing, hermetic propaganda for willing rubes and ideologues nymag.com/intelligence...
The way it actually moved through the world tells a weirder story, though. Shadowy actors did create fake videos to advance a particular narrative in a chaotic moment, reaching millions of people. But the spread of these videos didn't hinge, as the default AI-disinformation hypothesis suggested, on misunderstanding and an inability of curious but well-meaning people to discern the truth. Instead, they were passed around by a powerful person with a large following who is perhaps the best equipped in the entire world to know that they weren't real - a politically connected guy who runs an AI company connected to a social network, with a fact-checking system, where he's promoting posts inviting people to use his image generator to change Maduro's captivity outfits - for an audience of people who do not care whether they are. In other words, they provided texture for a determined narrative, stock-image illustrations for wishful ideological statements, and something to find and share for audiences who were expecting or hoping to see something like this anyway. For a clear example of an earnestly misled poster, we're left with Grok, which took a break from automating CSAM to respond to skeptical users by saying the video "shows real footage of celebrations in Venezuela following Maduro's capture" before, after being told to "take a proper look," suggesting that the video "appears to be manipulated," albeit in a completely incorrect way. (On X, the Musk-sanctioned spread of videos like this is less like a disinformation contagion running rampant and destroying a deliberative system than a news network simply deciding to show a fabricated video and refusing to admit that it's fake.) In contrast to the focused deception of a romance scam, or the targeted harassment or blackmail of an AI nudification, content like this isn't valuable for its ability to persuasively deceive people but rather as ambient ideological slop for backfilling a desired political reality. Rather than triggering or inciting anything, it instead slotted in right next to other more familiar and less technologically novel forms of social-media propaganda - like simply saying a video portrays something it doesn't and getting a million views for every thousand on the eventual debunkings:
January 7, 2026 at 2:35 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
data-collection and programming are not sufficient to run an economy because economies should not be focused on optimizing for one particular goal newleftreview.org/issues/ii153...
This is where the limits of technical reasoning become clear. Determination of the optimal solution set is a problem for technical reasoning to solve, but choice among the options in that set is not, since from a technical perspective, these options are equivalent in rank, no matter how different they are in content. Hopes that advances in computational power might overcome any need for social and ecological choice—making it possible to digitally plan the economy—fundamentally mischaracterize the problem, once we recognize the existence of multiple, non-compensatory social goals. The challenge is not simply processing more data. It is deciding what matters—negotiating trade-offs and choosing among possible futures. Reason, experience and collective deliberation will inform these choices but never entirely resolve them.
January 2, 2026 at 6:56 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
“slop” as the new “nonplace” maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...
One idea I’ve been circling around is that “slop” is that which is “fully optimized” to its domain to the point of texturelessness or characterlessness. “Slop” in this sense is anything designed to be as easy as possible to produce, sell, and consume, but it’s particularly slop at the point where all or most other players in the same space adopt the same strategies
December 19, 2025 at 6:34 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
the curse of streaming media: "the ability to cheaply deliver content is matched by its inability to produce anything new"
www.unemployednegativity.com/2025/12/livi...
The idea of AI produced art or music is in some sense of culmination of the dead weight of existing intellectual production over the living. One of the striking things of the streaming model, of movies, television, and music, is that its ability to cheaply deliver content is almost matched by its inability to produce anything new. Spotify can make the entire discography of dead artists available at the click of a button, but it cannot pay or support living artists; Netflix can buy up Warner Brothers, Disney can buy everything else, but the cost of this is an undermining the entire film industry by shifting distribution to streaming. In some sense AI solves a problem that the streaming services has created. Spotify may turn out to be better at creating the basis for AI generated songs than promoting living artists.
December 18, 2025 at 11:11 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
pursuing the dream of a life lived as pure "data creation," with the ultimate goal of being completely manipulatable by the data processors who have a plan for your life
hypervisible.blacksky.app Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Dec 17
Tech companies are actually pretty explicit about this: The point is to have a device that you can’t escape, one that always has access to you and makes you a constant source of data beyond what a phone does. Surveillance-first devices.
In 2025, wearables made a hard pivot to AI
If you want to put AI on someone 24/7, wearables are the best bet.
www.theverge.com
December 17, 2025 at 4:48 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
one of the dumbest things I've ever read
www.wired.com/story/people...
Petter Ruddwall knows the idea of AIs becoming sentient and seeking to get high with code-based “drugs” seems “stupid.” But the Swedish creative director couldn’t get it out of his head.
December 17, 2025 at 4:12 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
these findings suggest that people should always understand that interacting with chatbots is like talking to an advertisement, not talking to some supergenius
In two large peer-reviewed studies, AI chatbots shifted voters’ views by a substantial margin, far more than traditional political advertising tends to do.
December 16, 2025 at 7:49 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
this reminds me of theories about advertising, and how much we seem to want to believe that we are intrinsically hard to persuade and have something like "firm, established beliefs" when the evidence usually suggests otherwise
www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/05/1...
In the coming years, we will see the rise of AI that can personalize arguments, test what works, and quietly reshape political views at scale. That shift—from imitation to active persuasion—should worry us deeply.
December 16, 2025 at 7:35 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
when something that seems to belong to you (a device, your identity etc.) can be modified remotely at will by outside forces, you're always already expropriated
December 12, 2025 at 5:31 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
any device that is "always connected" is either working against us or forcing us to work unpaid for someone else
December 12, 2025 at 5:29 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
it's almost as if the purpose of such devices is to incapacitate you and make you dependent
December 12, 2025 at 5:01 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
i.e. how algorithmically sorted social media already works
sambiddle.com Sam Biddle @sambiddle.com · Dec 10
We need an app where you just input an opinion you hold and it generates two synthetic podcast experts explaining why you're right
maxtani.bsky.social max tani @maxtani.bsky.social · Dec 10
The Washington Post is launching a personalized AI podcast, saying users will be able to "shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology."
December 10, 2025 at 6:18 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
this gets at the question of whether one can close-read a generated text or image; the contingencies in them indicate something about the training data, but there seems to be nothing aesthetic in it www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
In twentieth-century theory, however, the accidental, unintended, seemingly insignificant photographic detail has become a defining feature of the photographic as an esthetic phenomenon, most notably for Barthes (Citation1981). The famous ‘punctum’, the almost accidental detail that cannot easily be subsumed under the more obvious culturally coded meaning of the photograph, is analyzed by Barthes as a kind of excess of contingency that transcends any legible caption, written description and ultimately any intended meaning. As visual details that were never prompted, the strange distortions in AI-generated images also create an excess of visual contingency beyond the reproducible patterns, stereotypes and clichés that the model was trained to reproduce, thus transcending any intended meaning. In contrast to Barthes’s punctum, however, the contingency manifested in the impossible and distorted spaces of AI image generation is not the contingency of the material world, but the contingency of the statistical process that generates these images.
December 8, 2025 at 9:58 PM
robhorning.bsky.social
feel like an ethnography of the people who get paid by the piece to "rank" LLM outputs would also explain a lot about the kind of prose the models are optimized to generate
maxread.substack.com/p/will-ai-wr...
much of what we dislike about A.I.-generated text from a formal perspective--it’s generally cautious, inoffensive, anodyne, predictable, neutral, unmemorable and goes down smooth--is a product not of some inherent L.L.M. “voice” but of the training and fine-tuning processes imposed by A.I. companies, which are incentivized to make their chatbots sound as annoying and bland as possible.
December 5, 2025 at 9:10 PM