if none of your needs or desires are app-shaped

Mandy Brown, riffing on the late Joanna Russ, labels the sustained hysteria of Those Two Letters discourse as a sort of addiction. Regular readers may recall that I’m really not keen on addiction as a diagnostic concept, and especially not in its more metaphorical deployments, such as this one; I much prefer the term habituation, and here as most other places I think it’s a far better fit. Nonetheless, Brown is right on the money when she writes: If there is anything novel about the language of AI (and I’m not convinced there is), it’s not the mystification of capitalism or the threat of a power out of our control or the manner in which technology is used to obscure human choices and human agency. It’s that we seem to have forgotten how to talk about anything else. mandy brown https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-addiction (Yes, I suppose that I am also caught in that same loop of habituation—well spotted! It’s almost as if there were inescapable discursive connections to and from…