Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 9h

Has the Guardian spin-out* actually developed … good fashion coverage?!

(It’s 3x-ed its acceptable price point and stopped fearing its readers’ piousness, which certainly helps.)

* I refuse to believe it was ever a separate paper: are you from the print era or something? Same website.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 9h

Is this the Observer describing famed fashion ‘sletter Blackbird Spyplane as ‘the sort of hypnotic, highly idiosyncratic manifesto that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, might have written if he’d traded domestic terrorism for trend forecasting’?

observer.co.uk/style/fashio...

Blackbird Spyplane are the coolest people in your inbox

The writers behind the fashion newsletter have changed how we talk about style

observer.co.uk

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 9h

‘On Instagram there is a growing number of rightwing influencers gathering evidence to show that Lamy is a witch.

“It’s silly. If I was a witch I could do something about this,”’ — meaning the world.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 9h

‘How does she feel about entering her 80s?

“Well, I have no notion of time.”’

Michelle Lamy is magnificent.

observer.co.uk/style/fashio...

Michèle Lamy: ‘This is me, every day’ | The Observer

The iconic designer and muse, 81, shares her thoughts on the unruliness of beauty

observer.co.uk

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 1d

First two weeks are peak party season — I suspect w/c 15 Dec will be quieter and easier to attend things?

But yes, quite a lot of people will be taking holiday that week to use up annual leave

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 2d

By Matt Levine, obv. No one explains it better.

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

OpenAI Keeps Doing Deals

Also crypto liquidations, inverse levered ETFs, stock buybacks and trade secrets.

www.bloomberg.com

Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 2d

‘The financing tool is you go to Broadcom and you put your arm around their shoulder and you gesture sweepingly in the distance and whisper “omniscient robots” and they say “do you have hundreds of billions of dollars” and you whisper “omniscient robots” again and they are enlightened.’

On Open AI

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

In the 2010s, this wasn't a dichotomy: Black creators drove online trends.

Now, Nitsuh Abebe argues, it’s gaming and incels, the latter ‘especially prolific creators of in-group jargon, huge amounts of which seep into mass internet-speak — alphas and betas, mewing and mogging, Chads and Staceys.’

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

‘All across the board, the language that comes from this layer of the internet has a mechanistic, gamelike aura, as if life were mostly just a web of tactics and hacks and mutual manipulation.’

The internet has overtaken Black culture as the source of American slang

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/m...

The Suffix That Tells Us to Ruthlessly Optimize Everything

www.nytimes.com

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

And the choice of LLM-text as a medium is of course also highly communicative: ‘I want you to think well of me’; ‘I am insecure about my own capabilities to use language’; ‘I do not value sincerity highly’.

All useful things to learn in a dating capacity.

Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

Though a proper communication-theory analysis of what’s going on in these conversations quickly gets into grey areas.

Plenty of organically-typed language is essentially predictive text, uttered because it’s the correct thing to say in those circumstances moreso than it's specifically 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘵.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

Yet ‘For the same reason that a dog can go to church but a dog cannot be Catholic, an LLM can have a conversation but cannot 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘦 in the conversation.’

As various people in that Guardian article realise, we render ourselves NPCs by using it?

mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-machine...

What Machines Don't Know

Imagining Language Without Imagination It's important to acknowledge that Large Language Models are complex. There's an oversimplified binary in online chatter between the dismissive characterizatio...

mail.cyberneticforests.com

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

I am in fact sympathetic to some use-cases – I think it’s fairly smart to AI-test your profile text, for example, because it’s very easy to self-sabotage there or allow one’s general frustration with the whole infernal process to show through.

Occasional meaning-checking, if yr autistic? Okay.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

Yep. I reckon only 1 or 2 in 6 have the level of literacy required to recognise 'AI style', tbh.

I run into a lot of men on the apps who think they're smarter than me and that I won't be able to tell - presumably because they can't really themselves? They don't know what they don't know.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 3d

Dating: it just gets worse.

Also arguably a crisis of literacy, in that if you can’t tell – from both style and content – that someone’s using AI to write a reply, then you’re not going to knock their chat on the head as fast as it requires.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder

Where once people were duped by soft-focus photos and borrowed chat-up lines, now they have to watch out for computer-generated charm. But it’s one thing to use a witty phrase – another thing entirely...

www.theguardian.com

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 4d

‘Coolness is a distinctive feature of modern art, its capacity to generate “relevance” its stock-in-trade & the battle to define and express “the now” a central organizing principle of art-world competition. A crisis of cool is then an existential problem.’

chrismarino.substack.com/p/the-death-...

“THE DEATH OF THE COOL”

Theory of the Networked Individual #3

chrismarino.substack.com

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 4d

A really fantastic essay that pays deep attention to the text yet also isn't afraid to go where the litty set might think gauche and talk of art! & meaning!

‘How books help us live in this way is always individual, always private; there’s something indecent in speaking of it publicly as I am now.’

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 4d

‘Baldwin’s sentences conveyed dignity not in their content but in their style; they suggested that in order to make language adequate to these characters’ lives, one had to max out language, to reach for all the resources of poetic art, of biblical cadence, to search out the most exalted diction.’

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 4d

‘When I was a 14-year-old gay kid in the American South and pulled Baldwin’s novel off a bookstore shelf, it radically reoriented my relationship to dignity. The more I’ve read and taught the novel, the harder I’ve found this to explain.’

— @garthgreenwell.bsky.social

harpers.org/archive/2025...

Enamored of the Abyss, by Garth Greenwell

On the place of affirmation in art

harpers.org

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

Oh I quite agree - if I look at my own failure modes and those of most people around me, it's far more likely to be inaction, procrastination, feigned helplessness and so on rather than actively fucking up. In this context, "Just bloody do something" is generally good advice.

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

But to give the last word to @jjvincent.bsky.social:

‘Everywhere the world is ceding control to automatic systems,’ hence why ‘so many people are keen to [say] that “you can just do things.”

It’s a reaction to a world in which, instead, things are just done to us.’

thebaffler.com/latest/high-...

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

MacKenzie Scott (reputedly): “I’d rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless one.”

nymag.com/intelligence...

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

Anyway - @jjvincent.bsky.social’s piece partners well this from Benjamin Wells on how Silicon Valley parents are seeking to raise the ‘high agency individual’ with a chance of surviving the future.

Again, both not stupid and also pretty wild.

nymag.com/intelligence...

The Techno Optimist’s Guide to Futureproofing Your Child

AI doomers and bloomers are girding themselves for what’s coming — starting with their kids.

nymag.com

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

Bluesky culture feels kind of the same, tbh.

The internet culture and futures people didn't seem to come across (they just went IG-first, or stayed on Twitter).

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Jay Owens @jayowens.bsky.social · 7d

Are you lot online enough to know what EAs and 9-9-6 mean without me spelling them out, btw?

As @samcircle.bsky.social wrote last week, the 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳
‘can really frustrate with its insistence that its supposed “general audience” has obviously heard of Ligeti but needs an explanation of Linux.’

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