Rob Horning

Rob Horning

@robhorning.bsky.social

robhorning.substack.com

4.7K followers273 following681 posts

Rob Horning reposted

Vicky ACAB
@vickyacab.bsky.social

In my book I argue that IP fandoms are a crucial part of the economic model of the current media monopoly landscape, as fan campaigns drive down the value of creative labor via harassment and disposability, scare artists from taking risks with IP, and give execs a direct fan base all their own

Charlotte@fireantprincess.bsky.social

I think a lot could be said about how fandoms are very much structured to be consumerist without any critical analysis of capitalist production, and how this is the logical end result of that.

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

If subjective desire was once in and through language, what happens to it now? Are we left only with “drive” — I.e compulsive repetitions, fruitless spasms of pseudogratification, annihilating jouissance?

Rob Horning reposted

Josh Scannell
@frannyrecounts.bsky.social

With the book’s release, I want to give a brief overview and outline a few of the key arguments. I’d include links to contemporary events but there are too many connections. The worst part of writing about race, computation, and police power is that it is always timely.

University of Minnesota Press@uminnpress.bsky.social

Today's nonfiction release reveals how policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. "At once an expansive study of the framework of policing and an indictment of its logics." —Simone Browne R. Joshua Scannell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lS9... @frannyrecounts.bsky.social

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

"Rather than cultivating personal brands, they prioritise speed, scale and adaptability, pointing toward a post-creator mode of cultural labour in contemporary platform economies"

Gavin Mueller@gavinmueller.bsky.social

great article looking at an AI slop factory in China link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.comBehind the “AI slop”: exploring the AI-generated viral short video production in China - AI & SOCIETYAs generative AI becomes embedded in platform-based cultural production, new forms of creative labour are emerging that challenge established understandings of what it means to be a “creator.” This ar...
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Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

the ephemerality and emptiness of figures like MrBeast (who seems to have no personality but is an algorithm tat has assumed human form) perhaps marked this transition in process

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

"Rather than cultivating personal brands, they prioritise speed, scale and adaptability, pointing toward a post-creator mode of cultural labour in contemporary platform economies"

Gavin Mueller@gavinmueller.bsky.social

great article looking at an AI slop factory in China link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.comBehind the “AI slop”: exploring the AI-generated viral short video production in China - AI & SOCIETYAs generative AI becomes embedded in platform-based cultural production, new forms of creative labour are emerging that challenge established understandings of what it means to be a “creator.” This ar...
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

makes me wonder whether this shift away from neoliberalist-style self-exploitation makes having a "personal brand" seem more aspirational and out of reach, or if personal brands are now becoming irrelevant to a zero-sum hustle culture focused on exploiting others

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

indicative of the shift away from people posting things meant to project an identity to other people and towards posting directly for algorithms that monetize other people's attention at a remove

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

I don't find it useful to redescribe mechanical processes as sense perception or to talk about "nonhuman photography"—makes more sense to me to see machines as extensions of human sensing, which is sometimes deliberately obscured by those who don't want to held accountable for it

Rob Horning reposted

👁️
@nathanjurgenson.com

a through-line from social media metrics to prediction markets: the fantasy of simple numbers that make us feel we know an unknowable world

Rob Horning@robhorning.bsky.social

I think that prediction markets encourage a blinkered, binary view of the world in which "reality" is resolved into yes/no propositions capable of being framed in unambiguous, uncontested language—an impoverishing way to think of both events and language as cognitively corrosive as AI use

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

I think that prediction markets encourage a blinkered, binary view of the world in which "reality" is resolved into yes/no propositions capable of being framed in unambiguous, uncontested language—an impoverishing way to think of both events and language as cognitively corrosive as AI use

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Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

maybe this is what "speculation as a mode of production" means, but its implication is that gambling becomes a way of organizing our relation to reality, so we understand it as a series of disconnected throws of the dice and not something built socially www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-series/...

historicalmaterialism.orgSpeculation as a Mode of Production. Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital - Historical MaterialismMarina Vishmidt Author: Marina Vishmidt In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories o...
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

prediction markets aspire to be the arbiter of what is real, replacing other social ways of making sharing reality with a system that makes winners and losers—no reality can be shared; all "reality" places atomized individuals on one side or another of a bet

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

when I saw the title "Just send me the prompt" it reminded me of those conceptual art pieces that are just instructions; made me think the idea was going to be we can all have our own personal LLM "finish" any given communication in our preferred style

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

as it scales up, LLM text becomes collectively worse wherever and whenever it had appeared, regardless of how it might have looked to a prompting user from their isolated standpoint

Rob Horning reposted

👁️
@nathanjurgenson.com

AI as having a parasocial relationship to your own self and life

Rob Horning@robhorning.bsky.social

and of course current cultural logic points to ultimately having an "AI agent" do all the consumption for you while you get to check the boxes (as with the Axios worker who had AI process The Last of the Mohicans for him)

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

and of course current cultural logic points to ultimately having an "AI agent" do all the consumption for you while you get to check the boxes (as with the Axios worker who had AI process The Last of the Mohicans for him)

👁️@nathanjurgenson.com

cultural consumption as to-do list. new albums, movies, tabs, even travel and going out as list-making and list-completing

Rob Horning reposted

slo ~|•
@slo-slo-slo.bsky.social

“Those lines are drawn in terms of friction: devalued things like labor and politics require and generate friction, whereas scalable value must minimize it.” “In 2026, slop scales. Actual musical labor and the critical labor involved in interpreting music does not scale.”

Robin James@robinjames.bsky.social

“Friction/scale is coming to replace low/high or pop/rock hierarchies” www.its-her-factory.com/2026/08/slop...

its-her-factory.comSlop-doom-ism: a new era for pop music & criticism
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

"scale" as something individuals are (paradoxically) supposed to consume and enjoy is inculcated by all metricized platforms—the numbers reveal what is valuable. Numbers once were a proxy for social significance. Now scale means a stack of atomized consumption acts

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

this gets at the same idea with "sameness" as the lens: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want" — i.e. people consume "easiness" as the content, as the substance

hallowbij@bijan.bsky.social

really unbelievable piece here on recommender algorithms and their mechanisms of making the world look and feel the same laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperatur...

laurenleek.substack.comTemperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the SameWhat 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.
Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

"friction vs. scale" is one way of putting it; algorithmic force-feeding is another, or "fast" vs. "slow" consumption, as when people rhapsodize about reading long books or watching 10-hour movies or whatever

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

feeds teach us to value ourselves for the velocity of our consumption— that is, to enjoy "speed of scrolling" as a kind of content, the substance of our acts of consuming that gives the ambivalent "pleasure" of being numbed out by the overwhelm: the slop sublime

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Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

"The more models are designed to seem like living beings, or like persons, the less agency users have to decide how they relate to them": i.e. the pseudosubjectivity of a product allows the consumer to be further dominated and controlled by it — it is a fundamentally coercive interface

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

this need to be wary was already fomented by "context collapse" situations on social media platforms, but automated language makes the onslaught of opaque speech from entities whose intentions cannot be inferred far more relentless

Rob Horning
@robhorning.bsky.social

reading reduced to "skill nostalgia" can become part of the political project of deliteracy; this is why "close reading" needs to be taught as a political practice rather than an exercise in aesthetic appreciation and self-soothing

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Rob Horning reposted

Rachel Coldicutt
@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

One of the really difficult lessons of the last 100 years is that convenience - drawing on mass market capabilities to do things faster - is isolating and individualising. We become one in relation to the market rather than one in relation to other people. GenAI is the peak expression of that.

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