Rob Horning
robhorning.bsky.social
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social
robhorning.substack.com
Reposted by Rob Horning
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)
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
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
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
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...
January 28, 2026 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
Worth your time.

“fundamentally you are in love with a business product”
January 28, 2026 at 12:35 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
I wrote about prediction markets, where we’re at and how we got here for Defector
January 27, 2026 at 7:23 PM
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...
January 26, 2026 at 8:34 PM
January 25, 2026 at 4:11 PM
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...
January 23, 2026 at 7:24 PM
January 21, 2026 at 9:59 PM
January 20, 2026 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Rob Horning
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...
January 7, 2026 at 2:35 PM
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...
January 2, 2026 at 6:56 PM
“slop” as the new “nonplace” maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-sl...
December 19, 2025 at 6:34 PM
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...
December 18, 2025 at 11:11 PM
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
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
one of the dumbest things I've ever read
www.wired.com/story/people...
December 17, 2025 at 4:12 PM
these findings suggest that people should always understand that interacting with chatbots is like talking to an advertisement, not talking to some supergenius
December 16, 2025 at 7:49 PM
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...
December 16, 2025 at 7:35 PM
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
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
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
i.e. how algorithmically sorted social media already works
We need an app where you just input an opinion you hold and it generates two synthetic podcast experts explaining why you're right
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
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....
December 8, 2025 at 9:58 PM
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...
December 5, 2025 at 9:10 PM