"Perhaps I was never looking for a 'realignment' or for any type of conservatism; perhaps I was really looking for a left."

Philip Jeffery on leaving the New Right:
www.commonwealmagazine.org/trump-new-ri...

My latest on Substack, in which I attempt to break through the mystification surrounding AI, and find that it was just people all along: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/is-ai-a-ou...

My latest on Substack: a defense of abstract art, and an attack on being grown up

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/my-five-ye...

My latest Substack post, on the integral ecology of Andrew Wyeth: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/andrew-wye...

How many words is a picture worth? I investigate, with the help of a philosophical thought experiment, over on my Substack: symbolfactory.substack.com/p/seeing-red

A visit to Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum sparked some thoughts about labor in artistic production, and how to find humanity in a world of machine-made symbols:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/how-to-mak...

This week on my Substack, we're talking Francis Bacon and the rapture:

"The seed of the modern, in New Atlantis, which flourishes to encompass everything by the time of Left Behind, is the symbol rendered as object, as opus, as commodity."

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/the-gospel...

On this week's edition of Symbol Factory, we're looking at Fredric Jameson's account of the difference between modernism and postmodernism, and asking what art can do

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/modernpost...

Let's try thinking dialectically about how we make symbols - the internet is bad, and the internet is good. It will work itself out, and it will break itself apart. What comes after it will be bad; and it will also be good. After all, it's happened before:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/a-book-of-...

Thinking in terms of connection, resemblance, and coincidence may be our only hope of conceptualizing a world where every economy depends on every other. Love it or hate it, the internet is only teaching us how to navigate the world it itself has made.
symbolfactory.substack.com/p/we-might-e...

I am a worker in the symbol factory - the economy of news, facts, falsehoods, opinions, ads, images, and sounds that is the internet - and I don’t entirely know what that means.

I launched a Substack to figure it out. Join me here:

symbolfactory.substack.com/p/introducin...