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Tag: culture

taste

Published June 3, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Marisa Aragón Ware.

All year I’ve been reading about taste. Someone somewhere identified that one of the things AI can’t do is “taste.” Now it seems a certain part of the world can’t stop talking about taste, and much of it is trying to define taste, presumably to boil it down into a useful prompt.

This is a bit of a shift from the prevailing notion of “you’re allowed to like stuff,” which turned into “can’t we just let people enjoy things,” which quickly warped into “you have to like everything or you are a monster.” Especially if lots of other people seem to like it, which is one reason why the mainstream culture is so completely flat right now. Taste was demonised by poptimists who defined themselves as victims of those with taste.

And now everyone’s turned around and gone, oh shit, the robots can create everything I said I liked and I’m a slop-eater. There is no status or cultural cache in that. People are freaking the fuck out. They’re trying to find out what taste even is.

Tastemakers have discernment. They know they don’t have to and aren’t supposed to like everything, and they immediately distrust anything so flat and edgeless that it screams of being designed to be liked by the largest number of people. They have knowledge and powers of recognition, they have context and they own their idiosyncrasies. They don’t like what other people like, because they have taste and other people don’t. Other people sit on the kerb of a street in a town that isn’t pretty enough for Instagram influencers, their skin aged prematurely by their phone screens and the digital billboards all around them, googling for peptides to restore the collagen their own phones are evaporating out of their faces and being told by the Google AI summary that tobacco reduces skin cancer. Goldfish with tits of congealed microplastic fuck in the black water sludging its way down the gutter. A “celebrity,” which they understand to mean “someone who is on a screen somewhere for a period of time longer than fifteen seconds,” appears on the nearest digital billboard. Its teeth are white. Taylor Swift white, Rylan white, bone-white, skull-white, nothing-white. The alien teeth seem to swell on the screen, as an inhuman voice drones from the frame about low-cost funerals to the musical accompaniment of something Spotify has inserted into eight million playlists this year. They know the song intimately but they don’t know what it’s called or have any context about it beyond the fact that it must be popular because all the machines make them listen to it over and over again. The teeth seem to invert and bend, twisting inwards to become the event horizon of a black hole that emits only the elongated howling word ddddeattttthhh in an utterance that sounds eerily like Pedro Pascal’s because he had a spare three minutes to ensure he was literally fucking everywhere. They run from the town into the countryside, because “people” on X have told them to “touch grass.” But the grass bends away from their feet, because even vegetal microintelligences can tell when something approaches that is essentially Wrong and no longer of this world. They fall to their knees and whisper for mercy to a seedling in the undergrowth, as an AI gardening podcaster had once told them to talk to plants. But the seedling blackens and crumbles under their graveyard breath. They crawl through the undergrowth to the shore, and look at the water, but they do not know how to feel about the water because no mathematics has told them how to feel about it, for they are basically just a meat coffin containing a low-voltage ghost that knows nothing and feels nothing beyond a faint, fearful urge to spend money on tokens to feed huge calculators that might tell them what to like. In the weeks and months to come, even the carrion eaters reject the corpse by the shore, instinctively recognising that its grey fibres contain no nutrition. Because they have taste.

TODAY

TELEMETRY:

OPERATIONS: got a pitch off the desk yesterday, got some prose down, but not enough of anything else. Wiped down the boards, expired some hanging projects
STATUS: the curse of putting the winter clothes away: woke up to a rainy 13C day, so I’m in a grey waffle-knit henley and a grey Wrangler snap-front. A lightless day.

Swatch Metropolis.


READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: AJ Brady warned me weeks ago that a new Boards Of Canada was coming, and I’m only just now giving it a listen.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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mechatronics and the hydrogen line: 14may26

Published May 14, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Politics in Britain has returned to high psychodrama, the kind you normally find in failing states.

Just noticed I haven’t set the date window on this watch! 8C with a feels-like of 4C, which explains the pain in my hands and wrists this morning, and the sky to the east has turned black.

Today I learned “mechatronics” is an actual word:

Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.

“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.

The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.

In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.

The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms…

https://splitinfinities.substack.com/p/boards-of-canadas-prophecy-at-1420

You notice the anxious darting of his eyes, then the makeup: thick, chalky concealer layered over skin that looks irritated, acne ridden and painful underneath it. His content team trails him carrying bright portable lights, but he doesn’t speak to them like a boss or even a collaborator. He speaks to them like an insecure thirteen-year-old midway through a panic attack: rapid little bursts about how the angle is wrong, how his skin looks bad, how he’s not even talking to the right people.

Within thirty minutes he’s completely withdrawn, sitting alone at the edge of a banquet, scrolling on his phone. Every few seconds his face twitches slightly, tiny repetitive tics perhaps a side effect of the chemical cocktail he’s on.

I had no desire to speak to him. I watched several girls try, only for Clavicular to speak about them while they were still standing there, openly complaining to his entourage that the interactions weren’t interesting enough to clip into content.

Before I leave I glance over Clavicular’s shoulder to see what he’s scrolling on.

No surprise: himself.

He flips between platforms checking views with total concentration, pausing at different uploads like a trader monitoring stock performance.

STATUS: spring is apparently on pause, and this week has turned into a cluster – lost yesterday to plumbing issues that cost me five hundred quid, the day after I said, we’ve got a little money, let’s go out to that very expensive restaurant on Friday…
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)

At dawn, he walked a short distance to a stream to wash. He had just knelt to splash water on his face when a tremendous blast of hot air flattened him among the rocks. When he recovered his senses, staring upwards, he saw the afterburners of two Israeli F-4 Phantom jets disappearing into the sky and, very close to him, a small green lizard that he would remember for the rest of his life. Apart from cuts and bruises, a bloodied forehead and singed hair, Ekberg was unhurt. As he staggered back, unable to hear anything other than the ringing in his ears, he saw men running and gesticulating, a severed leg on the ground, what looked like entrails caught on tree branches. Fires were burning among the trees and the air smelt of roast meat, cordite and faeces.


LAST WATCHED: season 2 of THE BOYS

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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21apr26

Published April 21, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Trifid Nebula.

Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX are changing how America wages war.

the Trump administration is turning to a new clique of defence upstarts that are reimagining how to wage war. They are led by Palantir, a software giant providing intelligence systems; SpaceX, whose Starshield satellite network provides reconnaissance and connectivity; and Anduril, an up-and-coming favourite that makes air and sea drones alongside anti-drone weaponry. This trio of so-called “neo-primes” have close ties with gung-ho figures in the Trump administration. And they are making the giants of the military-industrial complex increasingly nervous.

America’s legacy “prime” contractors have, in the government’s telling, grown stodgy, overpriced and risk-averse as a result of their lucrative sinecures. “If the [newcomers] are good and they get their sea legs, they’re going to win some of that business that otherwise would have gone through a traditional prime,” Mr Michael says.

n case you haven’t gotten around to reading Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s 2025 book, The Technological Republic, (because why would you do that to yourself?), the company best known for supplying AI-driven defense and surveillance software to the likes of the US Army, ICE and NYPD shared a 1,000-word X post this weekend covering its main points. The entire thing is both bizarre and deeply concerning. “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal,” one of the 22 points states. “It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”

The book is billed as “a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality,” and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: “Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public”; “National service should be a universal duty”; “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone”; and “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, run by the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) at the University of Barcelona and led by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, has identified a papyrus containing a fragment of Homer’s “Iliad” inside a Roman-era tomb dating to approximately 1,600 years ago, in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, ancient Oxyrhynchus. The discovery is exceptional: it is the first time in the history of archaeology that a Greek literary text has been found deliberately incorporated into the mummification process

Link to shop. May have to get myself one of these.

My colleagues’ takes are often quite diverse, but this year a chorus has emerged — of strategists proclaiming 2026 to be the year of nostalgia. Wired headphones, workwear (back, so soon), medievalcore, landlines for kids, #90s TikTok. Reading this year’s reports, I find myself agreeing with the observations — nostalgia is big right now, and there’s an opportunity for brands to tap into it. 

But I also see nostalgia not just as a passing 2026 trend but a full-scale, post-digital revival — one that’s been a long time coming and will last beyond the end of the year.

OPERATIONS: aiming for another ten pages, plus other stuff
STATUS: incoming, new plants for the local wildlife to destroy before I can get them in the ground
READING: THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
LAST WATCHED: rewatched several episodes of TWIN PEAKS Season 3.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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telemetry 4dec25

Published December 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Nature has retracted a headline-grabbing climate-economics study after critics found flawed data that massively inflated its predicted global economic collapse. The New York Times reports: The decision came after a team of economists noticed problems with the data for one country, Uzbekistan, that significantly skewed the results. If Uzbekistan were excluded, they found, the damages would look similar to earlier research (PDF). Instead of a 62 percent decline in economic output by 2100 in a world where carbon emissions continue unabated, global output would be reduced by 23 percent. Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a major threat, as recent meta analyses have found, and that more should be done to address it — but, they say, unusual results should be treated skeptically. “Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20 percent reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who co-wrote the critique published in August. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60 percent is off the chart.”

A man stands before a sinking ship. The ship will go down, the audience will watch, the metric will spike. Another entry in an endless algorithmic archive.

This is the logic of ultra-viral content: stunts, baroque challenges, a leap into lava. Each dare is designed to spike the dopamine drip yet leave no trace. The true danger was never the volcano, but the possibility that it might be lost in the scroll.

Culture is flattened by engines that reward repeatable extremes. A looped performance of risk reprocessed as engagement. Death, illegality, impossibility. All reduced to formats. 

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morning computer meme rot

Published November 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Alison Friend.

Memes thrive in a culture that’s endlessly accelerating – rotting and regenerating at the same time. This is also why the format rarely works for brands. Rather than relinquishing control, brands often end up producing content in meme-like costumes. Organic memes self-replicate and survive because people use them to express what hasn’t been said before. While brands chase the organic transmission real memes achieve, it’s often the anti-memetic campaign ideas – the ones that should resist spreading – that end up being shared the most. Anna Rose Kerr

See also ANTIMEMETICS, which I need to re-read.

In a particularly meta twist, the page for “brain rot” — let’s just go with Wikipedia’s definition, which is the “negative cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral consequences” of consuming content that’s “trivial, simplistic, or low in quality” — has been defaced so much that it’s now protected against public edits until early next year.

And specifically what it’s been defaced with? Pure, unadulterated brain rot — like this edit, from back in February 2025, when the page was replaced with references to the brain rot mainstay Skibidi Toilet and Donald Trump, along with the phrase “Goofy ahh brainrot 💀” repeated 96 times in succession.

See also morning computer brain rot 2025

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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telemetry 1nov25

Published November 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

On All Hallow’s Eve, Jennifer Lucy Allan turns the cards and listens for what they reveal, tracing sonic lines across the tarot deck. From the ghostly atmospherics of William Basinski’s Wheel of Fortune, to the arcane explorations of early electronic pioneer Ruth White and Swiss krautrock mystic Walter Wegmüller, the spread unfolds in unexpected ways, its order uncertain, its juxtapositions surprising. Expect new sounds from Argentinian artist aylu, whose spiritually-charged album journeys from personal struggle to collective resistance, as well as slow-motion noise conjured by New Zealand’s drone trio Surface of the Earth.

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The Last Days Of Social Media

Published September 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Last Days Of Social Media

“While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren’t connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they’re just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.”

September 17, 2025 at 04:39PM

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marks 2sep25

Published September 2, 2025 by Warren Ellis

“The most likely scenario is that the severed upper limbs were trophies taken from the bodies of enemies fallen in battle or raids immediately after death and brought to the village. Heads and hands seem to be the most common human trophies documented in the archaeological record, although written and ethnographic sources often refer to other body parts, including soft tissues which would not generally preserve, such as scalps, ears, or genitals,” the authors write.

Disney is suddenly freaking out about losing its “boy” audience. No, really—they’ve finally noticed that the demographic they’ve spent the last decade ignoring might actually matter.

Variety is reporting that the studio has been quietly putting the word out to producers and writers: bring us films that can lure young men (ages 13–28) back into the fold. That Gen Z demo has been drifting for years, preferring video games and viral meme cinema (“Minecraft”) to whatever Marvel or Star Wars are serving up.

The United States may be losing its edge in mRNA technology­­.

The technology, which powered life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and is now rocketing new cancer therapeutics forward, will soon undergo a scientific slowdown. On August 5, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would wind down mRNA vaccine development under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.

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IShowSpeed Gets Uploaded by EDGLRD

Published May 15, 2025 by Warren Ellis

IShowSpeed Gets Uploaded by EDGLRD

“If EDGLRD’s aesthetics could be boiled down into brain rot lingo, it might be that they find joy in the idea that the flavour profile of a single Dorito would have fatal implications on a Victorian child. Where other cultural observers see Speed’s content as over-injected with processed ingredients, EDGLRD sees a fellow risk-taker who opts out of 2025’s boring-dystopia, nostalgia-porn culture.”

umbrella, bicycle, sewing machine

May 15, 2025 at 04:02PM

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Viral WitchTok

Published April 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The resurgence of interest in witchcraft coincides with periods of social and political instability, as anti-progressive movements gained traction after years of strong progressive sentiment. In this context, marginalised groups turned to esoteric practices not as reactionary escapism but as tools for self-preservation and empowerment. Viral WitchTok content often emphasises spells for protection, manifestation and enlightenment.

I’m not sure “viral WitchTok” was a phrase I ever needed to see, but apparently that’s where we are. Or where we’ve been, actually. I noted otherwise intelligent, educated and alert persons talking way too much about astrology in the 2010s. Maybe there’s a conversation to be had about the retreat from the real that started pre-pandemic.

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