I'm talking about Mar-a-Lago face. Really obvious facial reconstructive surgery, it's not subtle and it's not meant to be. It's a group indicator signal.
Study about how primitive humans identified themselves. Not like they had business cards. No recording of anything at all, really. This is really old stuff, like before agriculture and all that mess.
You might be able to talk to a stranger. Might not. If you could, you could then figure out who each other was. Where each of you were from. You might both recall the same recent event. You could figure out whether to trust each other, but it was time consuming.
Not so with stuff like body modifications, scarification, tattoos, and body paints. That stuff indicates a lot of information. And if it doesn't, that's information, too. You're either in, out, or a threat.
So, these freaks I'm talking about. This surgery indicates a ton of stuff, most obviously either great wealth or aspirations of/attachment to the same. It's an in-group tattoo indicating membership - or desire for membership - in some profoundly anti-human, sociopathic club.
Looking at a human face rings bells all the way from your prefrontal cortex to your limbic system, a big zap that throws everything into overdrive until you figure out exactly who you're looking at. Trust that. You really should be scared of these scary-looking people.

There's a growing ambition of detecting emotions with AI. My first question is, what is the context in which this would happen? Why not just ask people what they're feeling and expect them to answer honestly?

Emotion-detecting AI implies a context of mistrust. It would be done by states that don't trust their citizens, or corporations that don't trust their workers, or social media platforms that don't trust their members.

The science is clear: emotions are not the kind of thing that AI can detect. They're so soft-wired that even electrodes in our brains could not unlock their mystery. What AI can detect, and it's getting better, are facial expressions. Facial expressions are not emotions, because they map differently to emotions in different cultures, and because they can be faked.

Ideally, it would be illegal to use AI to detect facial expressions. More realistically, it will be done in special cases, like in the theater of security, detecting shifty eyes in airports. But I want to jump to the worst-case scenario: Everywhere you go, there will be cameras on your face, feeding computers that might reward or punish you for your expression.

Already on social media, everyone is carefully crafting their profile so that they appear to be more happy, successful, and normal than they really are. And in the context of these performances, everyone feels like a weird loser. Expression-detecting AI has the potential to make this nightmare panopticon universal. In the future, everyone will be famous all the time, if "famous" means that your persona is crafted for an audience of strangers.

I see three broad strategies for dealing with this as an individual. 1) Perform the rewarded expressions, and really believe that that's how you're feeling. 2) Perform the rewarded expressions, but keep track of the difference between who you're pretending to be, and who you are. This takes more cognitive energy than the first strategy. 3) Live as if nobody is watching, and accept the punishment.

"AI" is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. Given that any such replacement is a mirage, this ideology has strong resonances with other historical ideologies, such as technocracy and central-planning-based forms of socialism, which viewed as desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite.

Sjoerd sends this video, What Gives AI-Generated Text Away? Almost everything that supposedly gives it away, AI can be trained to not do. Meanwhile, human written text is increasingly being flagged as AI written, and this is more likely to happen to people who are neurodivergent or not native English speakers. One thing that AI cannot fake, yet, is that humans tend to skip around while AI is very linear.

A follow-up video by the same person: Did AI Write It? That's the Wrong Question. "The useful question is not simply whether AI touched the text, but what the writing was meant to accomplish, what the AI changed, what the person reviewed and reworked, and whether the final result worked." So we need to stop the AI witch hunt and accept that machines can contribute to creative work that is still human-centered.

A good essay, The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World, also titled "Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?" It covers a lot of stuff, including David Graeber's bullshit jobs and Guy Debord's society of the spectacle. This is the part I find most relevant:

There are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome. The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey.

AI is forcing our whole culture to confront the distinction between product and process. If all you want is the product, fine, let AI crank it out. But AI can never replace the experience of making something. I wrote this in a 2018 post:

Technology saves time and labor with total indifference to whether we enjoy spending time doing certain things. It assumes that we never do -- that sitting and doing nothing while machines do the thing, is always preferable to doing the thing ourselves. Taken to its logical extreme, the message is that nonexistence is preferable to existence. A milder conclusion would be that everything useful should be done by technology. No wonder we increasingly feel that life is meaningless.

This sports article, Soccer Assassins, describes two coaching styles, where the normal one is to use physically strong but uncreative players as chesspiece thugs. That wins more games in the short term, but in the long term, the best players and the best teams are built on a foundation of individual skill and improvisation.

This confounds modern thinking about "individualism" because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. The trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. They're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."

This is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if I'm totally selfish." It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine. That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.

David Graeber piece, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun? When industrial age biologists see animals playing, they assume it must have some hidden utilitarian value -- but this assumption is purely cultural, a projection of our selfish and mechanistic society onto nature. Graeber looks at some other perspectives that could put play at the heart of reality:

Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely -- if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, "does anything it likes" -- it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake -- which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

So if electrons are playing, and bacteria and insects and squirrels are playing, and tribal humans are playing most of the time, and modern humans are hardly playing at all, then what happened? One answer is that this is a dead end and we should go back to the stone age or go extinct. I like to think we're a work in progress, an attempt by universal play to manifest at higher levels of complexity, or within our particular mode of consciousness.

Right after reading the Graeber essay, I went with Leigh Ann to a catsit where part of the job was to play with the cat. Watching it jump around chasing a toy on a string, I thought, how often do modern adult humans get to play like this cat?

Basically never. When we're "playing" sports or games we're much more serious, especially at higher levels where winning and losing have heavier consequences. Even board games and card games are more about competitive focus than strict-definition play. One partial exception is Cards Against Humanity -- and that's an interesting name given the idea that modern humans might be the least playful thing in the universe.

Video games can focus and expand our minds in valuable ways, but I can't think of a single one that's truly playful. Is this a failure by human game designers, or is it built into the hardware? How hard would it be to build an AI that could design and improvise a virtual world more creatively than a good human game master? Would we have better artificial intelligence if we judged and improved it by looking at playfulness, instead of using the Turing test which is based on symbolic language? Do we need to start over and build AI from a foundation that cannot be reduced to numbers and logic?

What can we do to make ordinary life more playful? Today I rode my bike to the store, and I noticed that there's a lot more room to playfully ride a bicycle than drive a car. Play is about sudden unpredictable movements, and if you try that in a car you're going to crash. So the most playful society is the one that can tolerate and use the most surprising behavior.

You can read more about this subject in a book called Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. Huizinga uses children as an example of what real playing looks like, but that doesn't work in the 21st century because even children's activities are too structured now. I had to use a cat. Maybe that's why so many Millennials have social anxiety.

Ninety percent of every field is bad.... We have now removed the throttle and left the ratio intact. Ninety percent of an infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse. The noise became free, and free noise rises without limit, and every real thing you make now arrives into a sea of plausible nothing that looks, at a glance, exactly like it.

Which means the scarce act is no longer making. It is choosing. Deciding what, out of the endless generated plausible, deserves to exist and be kept. Curation was a minor virtue when things were expensive to make. It is the whole game when they are free.

People in this thread are using the phrase "AI slop" as if everything made by AI is automatically slop. If you believe this, fair enough, but then you must support the abolition of AI.

If you believe that AI is capable of making good things, then it doesn't matter whether this article, or anything, was AI generated. Whatever it is -- software, prose, images -- if you have taste, you don't have to figure out if it was made by AI or not. All you have to do is apply taste and determine how good it is.

New subject, Bandcamp Friday! Five album suggestions:

The Flowers Still by Star Cinema is solid dream pop, and so obscure that I was just the seventh person to buy it.

Also from Brooklyn, and almost as obscure, Immeasurable Heaven by Freaky Wilderness is fun stoner rock.

There's No I In Spice World by Spice World is endearing Australian lo-fi.

Florida Water Blues by Twisted Teens is raw New Orleans garage rock.

Just released today, Cannonball by Man/Woman/Chainsaw is well-produced indie rock and the only one of these bands that might make it big. Here's the YouTube video for one of the best songs of 2026, Nosedive.

Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems -- poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment -- are related and how they might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage point: Growth.... The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.

American-style "freedom" means you can zip around the world and buy toys and choose from 200 varieties of soda. Autonomy means that as you go through your daily activities, nobody is riding you -- you're not micromanaged, coerced, or denied participation in power.
...
The techno-elite, lacking experience in bad jobs, don't understand what makes a job bad. The reason we hate low-status jobs like burger-flipping and toilet cleaning is not that they're physical or dirty. We love to do physical and dirty things like work on our own cars and tend our own gardens and play sports and go on hikes. The jobs are bad because the story they're part of is "you do what I say," and because the focus is on quantity or speed, rather than quality. Our quantity-worshipping culture thinks "sustainability" means not running out of kilowatt-hours, but it's even more critical for a system to not run out of human will, to be psychologically sustainable.

At the end of that post I've just stuck a link to this 2024 article, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. The author moves from eeevil behaviorism, which does not even acknowledge the existence of intrinsic motivation, to Self-Determination Theory, "a legitimate scientific enterprise, and yet outside of certain academic circles, its ideas don't receive any air time at all." The basic conclusion is that intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I would add, society is falling apart because autonomy and competence are more scarce than ever, while relatedness is being monopolized by the culture wars.

Also, here's a 2025 PsyPost article on intrinsic motivation, What really keeps people committed to long-term goals?