Another way of looking at "flow" is to call it "non-conte...

As the gamer becomes attuned to the game, they become one event, one action; an oscillating between the line dividing self from other, and the line connecting them as one substance. If the line dividing provides a moment of autonomous self; the line connecting provides a moment of selfless purpose. In games, action has its limits. It is an endless bit-flip between targeter, targeting and target. And yet at least it effects a transformation of gamer and game. Games are a repository for a certa...

 Digital Allegorithm of Sisyphus

Digital object, digital subject — these are byproducts of a boredom that, seeking respite from nothingness, projects its lines across all space and time, turning it into commodity space and military space. This is the reckless act of creation with which Katamari Damacy begins — the King’s destruction of the mythic heaven of the old Gods, and the project of replacing it by commanding the transformation of a human, analog movement into an airless matrix of machine code. This is the new la...

 The Digital is All About Boundaries

The digital is all about boundaries. The digital does not follow a moving line, it imposes a grid of lines which produce a series of boundaries. In the analog, difference is the productivity in excess of itself; in the digital, difference is a negation that comes from without. Roll the ball as much as you like, but unless it reaches the size King Digital demands within the time He allows, you fail — and are subjected to His lofty disdain. The analog is variation along a line, a difference ...

 Abstractions Turned Obfuscations

There is an old saying in Silicon Valley, “There is the first 80% and the second 80%.” While it is really hard to create new technologies, it is also really hard to implement them for any measurable advantage. This has always been true: The steam engine didn’t matter until it was put into a ship and locomotive; the Wright brothers’ flight didn’t matter until it moved people; electricity needed to be delivered to the home; and telephony didn’t matter un...

 Immersion in the Simulation Makes it Hard to Question It

Individuals become immersed in the beauty and coherency of simulation; indeed simulations are built to capture us in exactly this way. A thirteen- year- old caught up in SimCity, a game which asks its users to play the role of urban developers, told me that among her "Top Ten Rules of Sim" was rule number 6: "Raising taxes leads to riots." And she thought that this was not only a rule of the game but a rule in life.3 What may charm in this story becomes troubling when professionals lose thems...

 Computers are Associated with Precision, but Really They ...

In physics, too, where computers were used to relieve the tedium of data collection and plotting, relatively mundane applications had significant effects. When calculation was automated and its results instantaneously translated into screen visualizations, patterns in data became more apparent. Physics students described feeling “closer to science” and “closer to theory” when their laboratory classes began to use software for visualization and analysis. As in chemistry...

 What Will be Left After the AI Bubble Pops?

Every bubble pops eventually. When this one goes, what will be left behind? Well, there will be little models – Hugging Face, Llama, etc – that run on commodity hardware. The people who are learning to “prompt engineer” these “toy models” have gotten far more out of them than even their makers imagined possible. They will continue to eke out new marginal gains from these little models, possibly enough to satisfy most of those low-stakes, low-dollar ap­...

 Compatible Connectivity

Connectivity is the rapid circulation of information among compatible units—an example would be an article racking up a bunch of shares very quickly and unthinkingly by like-minded people on Facebook. With connectivity, you either are or are not compatible. Red or blue: check the box. In this transmission of information, the units don’t change, nor does the information. Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bo...

 Pinball Algorithms

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually r...