Weekly reading (w/c 24/11)
The vulgar + weird issue
Mind-bending piece in Spike on ‘images that approach a new aesthetic of the present'. Those images being vulgar — grotesque, offensive, AI-assisted, ‘the most nonsensical images ever made’, a ‘reduction of the image to its dumbest form’. A folk-art reaction against the ‘tasteful mediocrity’ we thought we were going to decline into. Lots to unpick here on what the ‘Vulgar Image’ says about our present reality. My main complaint would be that not enough actual images are included — I want to see the vulgarity without letting the algorithmic overlords know I want to. My other complaint would be that the images included are already too much. Eesh.
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More weirdness, this time about the world’s most famous death-defier, Bryan Johnson. Using a one-off ‘intergenerational blood plasma transfer’ episode, where Bryan’s son gave a litre of blood to Bryan, who then gave a litre to his own father — do not read over dinner as I did! — to make the case (semi-ironically?) for a more ‘intercorporeal’ path for life-extensionists. Where the boundaries between bodies are broken down so health can be shared, rather than walls going up. A communism of blood. (Yes, it gets strange.) Particularly liked the section on how the life-extensionists really need to get on board with environmentalism if they’re going to save themselves (they can’t escape pollution!). And the fact that it took me down a rabbit hole into Balaji Srinivasan’s ‘Network School’, Roko’s basilisk, and the Zizians — a rationalist, vegan anarchotranshumanist cult thought to be involved in three violent deaths in the US over the past three years… You can always rely on the rationalists to be the most unhinged. I await the Hollywood interpretations.
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I was introduced to it late, only a few weeks ago, but keep coming back to mirror life. I.e. the proposed artificial creation of molecules (or potentially cells/organisms) in the mirror image of their ‘natural’ equivalents. (So where DNA and RNA are currently made from ‘right-handed’ nucleotides and proteins from ‘left-handed’ amino acids, mirror life would invert this.) This comes with potentially beneficial scientific and medical applications, but also the risk that a mirror bacteria is introduced to the world that can evade human/plant/animal immune systems, due to the inverted chirality, and wreak havoc on life. Although the realisation of mirror life is thought to be at least a decade away, some scientists have pushed for research down this path to be halted entirely. I’m mainly intrigued by the fact that science as an endeavour tied to the understanding and control of the world around us can veer so hard towards the uncontrollable. C.f. gain of function research, AI (arguably), nuclear weapons (obviously)…
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Less time reading things online this week, more time consuming other cultural forms:
Book Javier Marias — Thus Bad Begins
Music MARAUDEUR — Flaschenträger ~ Mohammad Reza Mortavazi — Nexus ~ Various Artists — CAR CRASH AND SIREN ~ Kinesis @ Vespers 22.11.25
Film Julia Ducournau — Alpha ~ David Lowery — The Green Knight