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Articles by Rob Horning
Internal exile | Rob Horning | Substack
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In the colophon of the mass-market, pocket-paperback copy of Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution that I’ve been reading for no particular reason appears the note on the type pictured above. In case you are like me and you don’t allow images to display in the emails you receive, it reads like this: The text of this book was set in Electra, a linotype face designed by W.A. Dwiggins. This face cannot be classified as modern or old-style.
Why Is No One Fighting for TikTok?
The platform has come to dominate online culture, but in the face of a US ban and pressure from the Trump administration, no one seems to be defending it. How do you fight for – and against – a shadow? For a brief period on 18 January, TikTok went dark in the United States. This was in keeping with the ‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’, a law requiring the divestiture of the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
The thought doesn't count
A recent run of Apple commercials are devoted to highlighting its “Apple Intelligence” features — how the phone can make media for you to help you fake your way through life. You will be able to take credit for the insight and thoughtfulness that Apple has built into its devices and no one will think any less of you.
Habermas machines
Achieving consensus can be hard, so wouldn’t it be nice if a machine could produce it as a kind of consumption good? Instead of having to work through differences and emotions collectively and collaboratively, each individual could articulate their position and their critiques alone and then a model could sort out what the underlying average position of all the participants in a “discussion” should be understood to be.
Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Basically, I think out loud here about the meaning of technology for anyone who wants to read along. In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.
Practico-inertia
Google recently released an generative model called Gemini but had to suspend its image-generation capabilities because of how it was programmed to address brand safety concerns.
Reciprocal human investment
Ever since the introduction of ChatGPT, we have been repeatedly warned of a coming flood of automatically generated content that will inevitably overwhelm us. Email inboxes, social media platforms, retail sites, and search engines will all be rendered useless by automated spam, as if we weren’t already underwater. This panicked discourse sometimes proceeds as though there were still spaces where gatekeeping mechanisms worked for us rather than in the interests of advertisers.
Looking away
The first reviews are in on Apple’s Vision Pro. Does it earn a thumb’s up? Is it an 8.7? Will it be a hit? How many units have sold? Is it trending? It would be pointless for me to pretend to neutrality on this. I’m rooting for it to fail, just as much as tech reviewers are generally hoping new tech will be “transformative” or “disruptive” and testify to the world-determining relevance of their chosen beat.
The Disappearance of a.k.a. Victor Mature
The Aguila Azteca creaks out of Nuevo Laredo at twenty-seven minutes after nine. There is that desert in the night and there is this moon shedding silver from what always looks like a horrified face to me no matter what they say about beautiful or green cheese or rabbit (if you are Japanese) and there is a.k.a. Victor Mature. He and I are sealed into a cama matrimonial.
A sitting duck? Environmentalism and working-class recreation
By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ In May this year, environmental groups held a sort of vigil on the steps of state parliament for seventy-three birds that they had recovered from recent duck hunting, including eight illegally shot protected and threatened species laid out alongside a bouquet of shotgun cartridges.
My Internet: Charlie Bardey
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci. Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
The egg of experience
In the wake of generative AI, the camera maker Polaroid is hoping to re-establish itself as a producer of realness.
The preponderance of the object
This thread by Roland Meyer proposes the concept of “platform realism” to describe the quasi-photorealistic output of generative text-to-image models like Midjourney.
Authentic labour: how influencers train us for the future of work
By its nature, the advertising industry faces a perennial credibility problem. To be effective, its messages must disavow or disguise their inherently manipulative nature and come across as something else—something entertaining or innocuous, something friendly and well-intended.
My Internet: Amanda Hess
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci. Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet. Today we welcome Amanda Hess, a critic-at-large at The New York Times, where she covers pop and internet culture.
What Is the Point of Threads, Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter Killer’?
The much-garlanded new site presents digital life as an institutionalised nonplace, where conversation is meant to be frictionless and circulate as an end in itself On 5 July, Meta launched Threads, Instagram’s Twitter deepfake, and millions of Instagram users duly installed it, porting over their existing credentials and no doubt overtaxed attention spans to yet another feed. Why they did this remains unclear, given that Twitter and a host of other copycat microblogging apps already exist.
Make it new? Art and knowledge in the age of automated content generation
The recent advent of ChatGPT, Midjourney and other content generators has provoked much hand-wringing over the future of creative production in the age of automated art. What these technologies might mean for both art and audience is very much up in the air, though many commentators have imagined that AI is likely to produce a profound change to our very means of making knowledge and artistic works.
Probable events poison reality
This week McKinsey released a report on the “economic potential of generative AI,” which, as the New York Times summed it up in a headline, apparently amounts to “$4.4 trillion in value to global economy.” Tech reporter Jacob Silverman was quick to note that “this is a made-up number from McKinsey to get coverage,” and that McKinsey’s “analysts were saying the same thing about web3 a year ago” — specifically, for instance, in this risible report about the metaverse.
Overland literary journal
The phrase artificial intelligence is a profoundly ideological way to characterise automation technologies. It is an expression of the general tendency to discuss technologies as though they were ‘powerful’ in and of themselves—as if power weren’t a relative measure of the different capacities and prerogatives of social classes.
April 11
In this Guardian article about interest rates and investment in startups, Alex Hern emphasizes something that I tend to overlook: that AI models are expensive to operate. How many people would subscribe for chatbot access? Businesses might subscribe for it without necessarily wanting to, as it will be rolled into the software licenses for productivity suites (i.e. Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite) that they already pay for.
April 4
If “generative AI” reaches the point of proliferation and saturation that its promoters predict for it, it will mean that anyone with access to a content generator will be able to chat the kind of content they want into existence simply by putting it into words. If you need to know how to do anything, you can just ask an LLM model to explain it.
Overreliance as a service
I am imagining a scenario in the near future when I will be working on writing something in some productivity suite or other, and as I type in the main document, my words will also appear in a smaller window to the side, wherein a large language model completes several more paragraphs of whatever I am trying to write for me, well before I have the chance to conceive of it.
Doom loopism
Concern about algorithmic culture often recurs to the fear of a doom loop, the idea that nothing new will be possible because we will be fully embedded in a predictive simulation that has become the horizon of our reality.
The signal of compliance
“Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization,” cyberneticist Norbert Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). “Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization … That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives.
Freeing the arts from the markets: a reading of Chokepoint Capitalism
‘It’s moving to hear,’ writes Jennifer Mills recently for this publication regarding the new national cultural policy and the place of artists in it, ‘that we are essential workers… [that w]e want to know our work is meaningful, that we are valued not just by ‘the economy’ but by society as a whole.’ Even if you aren’t a worker in the creative sector, it’s easy to grasp how artistic labour contributes to making society bearable and the human experience joyful.
From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author
When he declared the death of the author, in 1968, Roland Barthes was attacking the idea that our understanding of any particular text should be conditioned or constrained by the person who happened to write it or what they intended. A year later, Michel Foucault posed the question ‘What is an author?’ and concluded that it is not a person but rather a ‘function of discourse,’ a posited ‘principle of unity’ that forcibly harmonises and conceals the different voices speaking in a text.
Paralogisms of AI
In a since-deleted tweet, Ars Technica reporter Benj Edwards, after hearing reports that Bing’s chatbot was making up information about chats it had with other users, declared that it was “a cultural atom bomb primed to explode.” This reminded me of a memorable exchange from the 2003 film The Room, during the bizarre surprise party sequence: In describing the Bing chatbot’s “temperamental” interactions with beta testers, Edwards argued that “what we're witnessing is somewhere on a fuzzy...
Overland literary journal
259: Feb/Mar 2026 In this highly anticipated new issue, we encounter brilliant examples of what writing can do in a hypernormal time – whether that's Benjamin Gready on the absurdity of fieldwork on land under active occupation or Zahid Gamieldien's short story about a dancing rat who finds itself enmeshed in systems too shadowy to be true. But, as with the emotional cycles of resistance, hope and snark are features too.
Inspired prompts
After Buzzfeed announced last week that it would use ChatGPT-derived tools to “enhance” and “personalize” some of its content, its stock price immediately rose from under a $1 a share to nearly $4 — it has since dropped back to $2. That trajectory perhaps reflects something of the hype cycle with generative AI, which seems to provoke an overreaction that is then met with only a partial correction; there remains a stubborn sense that LLMs really will add some tangible value, and who knows?
Overland literary journal
We were in a car, and the movement may have been particularly fast, or it might not have been, but those motifs remain, as in most memories, separate from finer feelings or the consequence of detail. As is only natural for that kind of brilliant day, we thought of that thing called ‘the beach’ and we were moving with the inevitability of numbers getting crunched. We were like items in a video game, dormant but desperate to be made into a means for progress.
The reign of the scriptor
Making the rounds this week was a mundane critique of AI that was notable mainly because it was made by musician Nick Cave, who was unsurprisingly unimpressed by ludicrous ChatGPT efforts to mimic his songwriting.
Prompt windows
There are still some material and administrative obstacles to the dream of an ongoing, free-flowing conversation with a chatbot. ChatGPT is often overburdened and tends to time out. Users, when they can access it at all, are limited to a certain number of queries per hour.
Not this again
Periodically I’ll come across someone saying how they learn so much on TikTok or get so much out of it, and I’ll feel obliged to yet again make an effort to use it as I imagine a typical person does. I open it up and try to start watching with a Chauncey Gardiner–like blankness, ready to go willingly wherever its algorithm wants to take me. But impatience sets in almost immediately.
The Spotifyification of music
Launched in 2016, Spotify’s Wrapped has joined Black Friday, non-ratings television and year-end lists as another monotonously predictable pre-Christmas ritual. Released annually in early December, the viral marketing campaign shares data with users about their listening habits during the year to date and, crucially, encourages them to share this information on social media.
What of the national throat?
I’ve been reading articles about ChatGPT all week, ordering them in my mind to make the discourse about it into a kind of coherent narrative that has ebbed and flowed from excitement to panic to backlash to counter-backlash. It’s apparently never to late to say “it’s early days” with generative AI, or to rehash concerns that have been aired with each new development in the means of mechanical reproduction.
Can We Return to an Innocence Before Social Media?
Mastodon has emerged as a possible new home for online community, but can it really change anything? A few weeks ago, Elon Musk completed his Twitter takeover and began an overhaul so haphazard and incoherent that many wondered if he meant to bankrupt the company on purpose. After firing critical employees, reinstating bigoted users, alienating advertisers, kneecapping content moderation, and jeopardizing the app’s Apple Store status, it wasn’t clear if Twitter would survive.
Overland literary journal
When we talk about the influence of Silicon Valley, we often imagine how the design culture and business models influence our communities and identities in online spaces. In Paris Marx’s new book, Road to Nowhere, it becomes plain that the influence of tech industry is not confined to cyberspace, but reaches into our lived environment in insidious and powerful ways. Road to Nowhere spends time tracing the history of the automobile and how it has shaped our urban landscape.
Twitter May Not Be Dead Yet. But ‘Social Media’ Is
At a time of prosperity for TikTok and turbulence for Twitter and Meta, the function, modality and power of social media is being redrawn The regime change at Twitter has come at a particular vulnerable time for the idea of ‘social media’, which in some quarters is being declared ‘dead’ or ‘over’.
Doing dumb things: the problem with leaving Twitter
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, it has been unclear whether the platform can survive. Not only is its ad-based business model failing and its debt increasingly hard to service, but mass firings and staff departures make it unclear who will maintain basic aspects of its functionality.
Mass extinction event
Earlier this week, I got caught up in the zeitgeist and thought that I’d better sign up for an account on Mastodon, a social media service being touted as an alternative to an Elon Musk–controlled Twitter.
Topographic oceans
When I was of a certain age (11), I spent a lot of time with Yes’s 1973 album Tales From Topographic Oceans. While trying to absorb its diffuse sonic sprawl — each side of the double LP consists of a single indigestible song — I would scrutinize the liner notes, hoping for insight into some basic questions, like what a “topographic ocean” was. But there is only a glancing reference to the phrase, in the middle of the few bizarre paragraphs in all-caps provided to explain the album’s origin.
Solitary confinement
It remains true that no one looks quite as guileless and credulous as when they are wearing VR goggles. Not only are the goggles an unmistakable visual emblem of submissiveness, a willingness to let some corporation constrict your entire sensorium and mete experience out to you on its terms, but they also indicate your complete vulnerability in the space where your body actually is.
Automatic outs
Earlier this week, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy released what it calls a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” Not only does the name mix policy- cliche metaphors (are we building something or amending the U.S. Constitution?) but it also embeds the obfuscating hype term “AI” rather than pointing at the automated systems and their human designers behind them.
Interesting drug
In the wake of the fascists’ electoral victory in Italy, I saw this quote from Toni Morrison’s 1995 “Remarks Given at the Howard University Charter Day Convocation” circulating on Tumblr: Often fascism is represented as a desperate and lamentable response to a crisis in the capitalist status quo, an anomaly. But Morrison’s claim here is that it is already embedded in consumerism, where its smooth reproduction of inhumanity often goes unremarked upon.
Clutter images
These diagnostic images accompanied a London Review of Books “Diary” essay by Jon Day about hoarders. They are meant to provide an objective baseline for evaluating the severity of pathological hoarding, but they immediately struck me as a metaphor, a time-lapse series capturing the evolving condition of my mind on any given day as it precedes.
Coming soon
This is Internal exile, a newsletter about about technology, art, philosophy.
Sneak Peaks - Real Life
The below was adapted from an earlier Real Life newsletter. Subscribe to weekly installments here. The app BeReal is not subtle in its marketing.
Word Processing
IN THE ORIGIN STORY FOR SURREALISM that André Breton provides in his 1924 manifesto, he claims that “a rather strange phrase” came to him in the hypnagogic state before sleep: “There is a man cut in two by the window.” Easy as it is to link the phrase with Surrealism’s preoccupation with transgressing binaries and seeking passages between life’s apparently divided aspects (what if dreams are real and reality a dream?), Breton seems to ignore the phrase’s substance to fixate on the means of...
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