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The Fascist Playbook IX: Dissonance or what 'One Battle After Another' Misses that Pynchon gets

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    There is perhaps a strange similarity between Antigone and the fate of the revolutionaries in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), a novel which recently acquired a second life through Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Both works are concerned with the extraordinary difficulty of distinguishing a revolutionary subject from the conditions through which he or she becomes its opposite.  Vineland begins in California in 1984, where a certain Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie, must perform an annual act of public insanity in order to continue receiving disability benefits. This year he has decided to wear a woman's dress and attack a bar with a chainsaw, a performance which must be witnessed by television cameras if he is to continue being recognised by the welfare state as a lunatic. Unfortunately, the bar has been gentrified, the loggers have developed expensive tastes and his entire performance has been moved by somebody else to another location. Even ...
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The Unseeing Gaze II: Can an LLM make a judgement of Beauty?

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Between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgement Kant produces at least two senses of the term judgement, on the one hand a system of reason that through a kind of grammar, produces the world in relation the self-conciousness or in Kant's terms the unity of apperception and on the other we have judgement from the first half of COJ, referring to Aesthetic Judgement.  Beauty as a popular idea has it, is based on symmetry, proportionality etc. However Kant's question to this judgement would be, what kind of systems of values are the values 'symmetry' and 'proportionality considered beautiful. Is it a system where the utilitarian is judged in majoritarian terms, that is the larger part of mankind agrees on it, rather than being judged by something inherent in the value itself, a virtue.  In any case of late a sufficient amount of ink has been spilt on arguing that forms of the modern internet, through mega corporations have prdoduced a kind of centraliz...
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The Unseeing Gaze I: What kind of 'person' is an LLM?

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“ Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on? The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language. ” "An LLM is not a Subject" Of late I have out of curiosity, been involved in learning about how prompting trains Large Language Models that we use. Having worked in the sector and completed a course on the matter, and also having gone over in some detail documents pertaining to how AI companies see their models, I arrived at a question that I find of some importance in the field.  The question of whether AI has what we in common terms might call 'subjectivity' and if so of what kind has been baffling Mechanisitic Interpretability operators for a while now. In the discourse surrounding AI this question takes on two forms: the first ...
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