A Dream Without A Dreamer
We are very well aware that this machine doesn’t think. We made the machine, and it thinks what it has been told to think. But if the machine doesn’t think, it is obvious that we don’t think either when we are performing an operation. We follow the very same procedure as the machine. ..“I know well I am being manipulated by an LLM which has been programmed to encourage me to buy happiness rather than explore my subjectivity outside the bounds of capitalism, but nevertheless it appears to have come to that conclusion by objectivity crunching numbers.”- Lacan Seminar II
The world's two rogue states, Israel and the USA, have started a war not against Iran but against the whole world. We stand with Iranians, with Humanity, against the notion that Israel and the US can bomb anyone their fancy takes them to bomb. - Varoufakis
Throughout the past year, institutions across China, both private and state-owned, have proposed variations of the same system: taking big data from China’s extensive surveillance system — including input from street cameras and satellites, noise sensors, social media posts, as well as reports from social services — and feeding it into AI models to aid predictive policing. This is part of the government’s vision of a fusion of human and machine response, making for a more robust domestic security system. The trend does not bode well for the most vulnerable sections of Chinese society. - China Media Project
The paradox is that we’re surrounded by images of killing in an era when violent death itself, outside war zones, has become very rare. The US homicide rate is probably at its lowest since 1900, reckons the Council on Criminal Justice, a non-partisan think-tank. London’s rate may be its lowest in centuries, argues the conservative journalist Fraser Nelson. - FT
German Chancellor Merz: We are simply no longer productive enough. Each individual may say, “I already do quite a lot.” And that may be true. But when you return from China, ladies and gentlemen, you see things more clearly. With work-life balance and a four-day week, long-term prosperity in our country cannot be maintained. We will simply have to do a bit more.
The intellectual foundation of Computer rests on data that Perplexity has been collecting across its enterprise customer base — data that, according to the company, no other AI company has access to at the same scale. At a recent press briefing that VentureBeat attended with other reporters in San Francisco, Perplexity executives shared enterprise usage statistics that illustrated a dramatic shift in how businesses use AI models. In January 2025, more than 90 percent of enterprise tasks on the Perplexity platform were spread across just two models. By December 2025, no single model commanded more than 25 percent of usage across businesses and task types…A new frontier model emerged on average every 17.5 days in 2025, and each one brought distinct strengths rather than uniform improvement. - VB
The contemporary art system presents itself as an imposing edifice built on cardboard foundations. This essay analyzes the structural fragilities threatening its stability: the concentration of value in a few names managed by even fewer galleries, the opacity of legitimation mechanisms, the disconnection between price and cultural significance. Through the theoretical framework of the Esalogia Produ-nied, the analysis reveals how the system does not fail despite these fragilities but because of them transforming instability into an instrument of control and exclusion into a mechanism of artificial value creation. The essay proposes a reading of the crisis not as an anomaly but as a structural condition of a market that has replaced the production of meaning with the production of artificial scarcity. - Structural Fragility in Contemporary Art
How Paramount Beat Out Netflix, Won Warner Bros. and Will Change Hollywood Forever: “Ellison scares the shit out of me,” says one A-list director. “Are the movies they put out going to be catered to Trump’s taste? Are they going to start cracking down on content that they don’t find to be ideologically aligned with the right?”
Using data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the authors found that about half of the 261 species analyzed showed significant declines from 1987 to 2021, and a quarter showed accelerating declines. Hotspots of accelerating abundance decline were located in regions with high-intensity agriculture (high cropland area, fertilizer use, or pesticide use). - Bianca Lopez
We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization.
A study published in Nature in January 2026 showed participants deepfake videos of someone confessing to a crime. The researchers explicitly warned participants that the videos were AI-generated. But this didn’t matter. Even the people who believed the warning, who knew it was fake, were still influenced by what they saw. Transparency didn’t work. The standard response to AI-generated misinformation is “just label it” or “tell people it’s synthetic.” This study showed that’s not enough. Knowing something is fake does not neutralise its effect on your judgement. - The Future of AI
What Is Lack? In Lacanian psychoanalysis, “lack” means that something is always missing once we start using language. Before we learn to speak, we experience the world directly. But once we begin using words, we lose that immediate connection. This missing piece creates a feeling of incompleteness—and that’s what drives our desires. We want things because we sense that something is not quite whole. In Lacan’s theoretical framing, to become conscious is to enter the symbolic order; to become a speaking being. But with this entry comes a cost: the experience of lack. We become caught up in this symbolic order with an identity, but that identity is never the full picture, something is always left out. When we enter language, we lose something of the raw, unmediated self because language imposes structure, categories, and meaning that can never fully capture our experience. That irretrievable loss becomes the source of our desire since we experience something as missing. This missing thing is an eternal, unreachable “it”, an impossible wholeness we chase through relationships, accomplishments, consumption, even therapy itself. Lack, however, is not a deficit. It is the motor of our desire. Love, connection, and creativity all emerge from the space of not-having. Fantasy is the imagination that we can attain wholeness. We can become captured by an image of completion that can never be realized. Many love songs echo this: “you complete me,” “I need you.” These are poetic expressions of a fantasy that covers over lack…LLM’s They help us maintain the illusion that our symbolic world—the world of language, clarity, coherence—is sufficient. But Lacan reminds us that the Real irrupts when the symbolic fails. When language collapses, we meet the unbearable truth we’ve tried to avoid. LLMs are built precisely to prevent that collapse. They generate more language, more smoothness, more comfort. They function like the obsessive neurotic: endlessly speaking to avoid touching the truth. - AI and the Risk of Comfort
AI-related stress is consistent across age groups. The report finds 71% of teachers aged 18–34 and 76% of those aged 35–54 feel stressed by the pace of AI adoption, indicating the pressure is not confined to older educators. - HRD
The rules of this game do not allow the AI to conclude that human welfare would be better served by redistributing wealth, which is an idea (some) humans have already developed, much less any kind of nonhuman approach to welfare “free from the limitations of human minds” (Harari 2024, p. 488). So, human minds impose pre-existing limits on AI. Instructions like “maximise economic growth” and “maximise human welfare by redistributing wealth” function as two essentially incompatible games with entirely different rules. It is impossible that an AI could be instructed to maximise economic growth and decide, for itself and against the data which has been programmed into it, that it would be better to instead redistribute wealth. So, we might expect AI to develop new ways to maximise economic growth, but that does not mean that it can produce new ways of conceptualising economics from a position outside the parameters of the capitalist data on which it has been trained…We therefore might imagine a hypothetical science fiction-like scenario where all humans go extinct, but the symbolic order continues to operate within the activity of LLMs. …have been trained on the fantasy of non-castration which can be achieved via capitalist consumption, and are therefore unable to articulate any other relation to castration unless, as touched on above, that relation is something closer to a psychotic foreclosure than a perverse disavowal. This last caveat is important because LLMs muddy some of the orthodox Lacanian distinctions between neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, and this muddying has both ideological and potentially emancipatory consequences. - LLM is a Poem
A new Gallup poll found that for the first time in 25 years, more Americans are sympathetic towards Palestinians than towards Israelis.
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: For decades, we have been sold a story many of us would like to believe is true: that it is possible for our homes to generate large profits and also support the kind of socially cohesive, stable, and vibrant communities where most of us want to live. Decades of evidence has shown this is simply not the case. Time will tell if we will ever be brave enough to elect leaders and enact policies that are grounded in this reality. But if we did, we might find ourselves with a version of home more precious than we ever could have imagined. - Globe & Mail
We are, and this is important, in a moment of confession. That the substantial content of every "democracy" is the existence of gigantic and suspect fortunes, that the maxim "get rich!" is the alpha and omega of the epoch, that the brutal materialism of profits is the absolute condition of every respectable member of society — in brief, that ownership is the essence of "civilization" — this is the consensus, after having been, during almost two centuries, the adventurous and slandered theory of the revolutionaries who wanted to end a rather pitiable "civilization." - Badiou
