Schrödinger's feelings

An adventurous philosophical discussion that positions subjective feelings as decoherence milestones in the many-worlds/many-minds interpretations.

Normalizing social media addiction doesn't decrease its costs

When an entire population is addicted to the same thing, where does rehabilitation even start when every institution is a pusher and every person an enabler? The field of psychiatry has yet to formally diagnose "social media addiction", and when I searched for reasons why that is, the

Parasocial romance is why we can't connect

In a recent post, On the quiet power of becoming nobody I touched on how social media fragments our ability to connect with others in the real world, and what it means to finally find oneself outside of it. I'm going to extend those thoughts here. The longer

The corporate libertarian movement is why no one will save Alberta

I swore I'd release my mind from fussing over politics, but a new blatant truth is sitting in front of us and the established political commentariat seems too preoccupied with superficial engagement clout to notice it. I'm not a poli-sci grad or an economist, which

On the quiet power of becoming nobody

Stripped of "online presence", who are we? This question feels more urgent as personalized technology lulls us ever deeper into self-obsessive surrealities; social algorithms that trap us in feedback loops of self-worth, dealing just enough dopamine to keep us on the verge of feeling seen. I&

The impossible nuance of LLM discourse

Update: Just after publishing this I saw the news of Anthropic agreeing to rent all of its compute capacity to xAI's (Musk's) "Colossus" supercomputer and the dev world is aBUZZ. This is distressing news for ethics-aligned developers working with Claude agents, both because

The Kardashev scale bottleneck isn't intelligence, it's Capitalists

Building from my last post, A tiny manifesto for Time Rights, written by a Duck ai assistant, I realized I had more to say re: the commodification of time, especially relating to its corrosive impact on intelligence overall. This is something I noticed even during my conversation with the Duck

A tiny manifesto for Time Rights, written by a Duck ai assistant

I'll start with my own words, the manifesto comes later: I've been fixated on the concept of time for most of my life, always feeling existentially short on it as though I'll never get through everything in this lifespan (which I hope will be

On memetic influence and viral immunity ~ Part I

Following my last post on the ethos of grift in the nonprofit sector, my winding path of mulling and musing led me to concepts of memetics – that is, the study of memes. Back in 2019 I posted on FB about memes ruining democracy – the discourse I was part of, heavily

The ethos of grift has taken the nonprofit sector, and AI is its accelerator

Yesterday while watching a Stanford-sponsored, nonprofit-targeted presentation recommended by an executive-level director on "healthy cognitive offloading with AI", I had an anxiety attack. The presentation was AI-generated, full of errors, logical inconsistencies and blatant manipulation of reason. The presenter was taken at her word

Carney's Davos speech was a sales pitch

Our elite banker-turned-Prime Minister has entered Canada into a self-imposed, nonstandard Structural Adjustment Program, enforcing economic measures typically applied to developing nations. Why? My previous interpretations of Carney's Davos speech, first identifying it as a sales pitch (which it was) and then noting his alignments

On agency and the existential exploitation of Cloud Capitalism

It recently occurred to me that the reach of Marxist thought might be falling short in terms of contextualizing the struggles of Cloud Capitalism. What happens when the modes of production are iterated into complete abstraction? How does materialism account for the digital aether? What does it mean for the

communications

Existing as process and a communicator's duty to resistance

Back in 2018 I shared a thought on Facebook about how social media was changing our perception of time. I had just wrapped up my first summer growing flowers for profit on a parched five acres in the prairies of Southern Alberta. Somehow, despite no working wells on the property

community radio

Applying the model of community radio to decentralized social media

I've been trying to find a solution to the problem of social media. Over a year ago I designed a model I thought might work – a tiered networking platform that offered free functionality to individual users, paid profiles to businesses and institutions, and founder/investor shares to arts

AI

Are you even conscious, bro?

Agentic AI is spurring debates of consciousness, and because no one seems to agree on what consciousness even is, the discourse has become noisy with takes that vary between, "anyone who thinks AI is conscious is mentally ill" to "anyone who can't consider AI consciousness

AI

AI's cognitive crisis is being willfully ignored

We're in the early days of a mass cognitive crisis, obscured by capital forces in the same way our environmental crises have been obscured by the fossil fuel industry for decades. That the two operate according to the same morally-bereft framework is no surprise. When exponential capital

fun theories

A funny little theory about creative definition and emulated worlds

This is a revised post that I wrote a year ago on my other blog – I guess there's something about deep winter (and rising fascism) that compels my mind towards turning over the nature of reality. When I don't have plants to play with, I play

user data

A galaxy of signals and silos

Viral pathogen genome researcher, Theo Sanderson, has created a map of 3million+ Bluesky users that visualizes simple, publicly available user data, and it's exquisite. What first stunned me was, that's the way I imagine data in my head. Though, in my head the data is dynamic

accelerationism

Cognitive care and the growing disparity between signals and noise

Technology has accelerated the widening chasm between clear information and muddied noise; social media and now LLMs have broadly eroded information literacy and sown chaos throughout most spheres of public discourse. Everyone is confused, most are angry, some were blissfully lobotomized by the algorithms long ago. But our online spaces

AI

Meredith Whittaker's exquisite Davos rant on LLM monoculture

I've been spending a lot of my spare time watching and taking notes on the discussions of the 2026 World Economic Forum. At first I just wanted to get a more holistic perspective on PM Mark Carney's speech (I'm working on another piece following

appropriated wellness

Why pushing "mindfulness" and "growth mindset" in the workplace is fundamentally inappropriate

The nonprofit sector is known for its compassion-centred mandates and noble, public-serving visions. People who work in nonprofit often cite "shared values" as a motivation for staying with organizations, often passing on higher pay in the private sector because their personal values come with a deep

agency

Become ungovernable: forget about online rules of engagement

As a communications strategist I understand the rules of online engagement intimately, so much so that when I realized the implications of marketers applying users' behavioural data at scale – feeding it back to us as we gaze glassy-eyed into the abyss, adoring our own reflections and obediently consuming

alberta

Re-learning "community"

Confession: two decades of being "very online" have resulted in a marked loss of my in-person social skills. Since dunking myself into "real community" in a new town on a small island province, I'm recognizing anti-social behaviours in myself that I think