Freddie deBoer

Welcome back. Here’s where we really get started with our Neuromancer book club. If you did the reading for today, you’ve been through all of Part One, “Chiba City Blues,” and the first chapter of Part Two, “The Shopping Expedition.” If you haven’t done the reading yet, you’ve got plenty of time to get that assignment (the first three chapters) done and…

So. Some progressive people, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are expressing measured regrets about their past embrace of the most extreme expressions of social justice insanity, and other people are feeling feelings about that.

I’m tempted to say that Brooklyn was an odd place to ride out Covid, but I guess it was an odd experience everywhere. Besides, my life was pretty damn strange in those days, too, pandemic notwithstanding. I was two and a half years into a different kind of lockdown, self-inflicted. I had not written anything for anyone in that time, save for a couple of health updates, and I was spending almost all of my time alone. Then March of 2020 started and I was suddenly in good company in that regard.

there are some bad, bad covers for this book Welcome to the Neuromancer book club, and thanks for being here. If you’ve gotten your hands on a copy of the novel, you’ve done as much as is required up to this point; our first reading assignment will be for next week. If you don’t have the book, they should be both cheap and easy to come by, and our readin…

Folks! The Neuromancer book club starts tomorrow evening. Read all about it here. The first reading assignment will be in that post, so it’s not too late to get involved. Make sure you check the instructions for how to receive the book club emails. I’m excited. The answer to Ms. Stock’s question is not particularly complicated: human behavior is the product of incentives and the limitations imposed by social boundaries.

Last New Years Eve, Stranger Things came to an end. Netflix released the series finale of the (once) beloved series, the adventures was concluded, the story told. And that final season was… not good. There had been skeptics of the show like me all along, but the series ending was notable for how thoroughly it turned off the larger fanbase; the critics were many and loud, the defenders few and cowed.

I was unsurprised to find that my post on the AI writing detector Pangram was controversial. After all, people who argue for a living have suddenly been caught up in a lot of angst about all of this and people who do discourse for a living respond to discourse about discourse with discourse. And when Substack quoted a different piece of mine when they announced their Pangram-powered automated AI checker, I was inevitably thrust into the broader conversation on these things.

Hello folks, I’ve been waiting to read this Emmet Rensin piece on Laura Delano for The Lamp for a long time. I highly recommend you check it out. Its publication has given me a kick in the ass to share with you the first of several excerpts from my forthcoming book, All In Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered.

You are aware, I imagine, of “vibe coding.” The large language models that have received so much fanfare in the past four years have thus far not delivered on the outsized promises that have been made on their behalf; limitless free energy, an end to hunger, and immortality have all conspicuously eluded us. One thing that LLMs really appear able to do well, though, is to write code.

Hello friends. It has been a shamefully long time since we did one of these, and I don’t have much of an excuse beyond the usual, which is to say, the new book and my toddler. My apologies to everyone who’s asked when the next book club is coming, and thanks for doing so.