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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
It was the public service-oriented BBC and Channel 4 that perplexed and delighted me with the likes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Pinter plays and Tarkovsky seasons; it was this BBC that also funded the popular avant gardism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which embedded sonic experimentalism into everyday life. Such innovations are unthinkable now that the public has been displaced by the consumer.
Capitalist Realism
Mark Fisher
AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | the New Yorker
Ted Chiang
Sharing a made-up world you love is, very often, practically easier than sharing the real one, and the more that human beings living in the acute crisis phase of late-stage capitalism become more isolated, alienated and exhausted, the more it feels like the canon of our common social reality is disputed, the more important fandom becomes. Immersing oneself in a participatory fiction at times like these is not simply escapism, although it would be enough for any writer to think they’d provided simple escape.
The Room of Requirement
Laurie Penny
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