Constellations: August

Trying something new: A list of things I’ve encountered this month, and which have stuck with me for one reason or another.

  1. Jörg M. Colberg on accidental drone photography in wartime:

I’ve been looking at the imagery emerging from the war in Ukraine in part because I am interested in both the use of images and in whether or not there are new types of images.

  1. Cage for reviving canary, with oxygen cylinder, made by Siebe Gorman & Co. Ltd, London

  1. How Socialist Realism and AI images compare.

  1. W. David Marx on our human defenses against AI-generated culture:

At the moment, generative A.I. produces works by repurposing a large body of pre-existing material, which means it mostly recycles clichés and drips out stale kitsch.

  1. Yanis Varoufakis has a new book coming out: Technofeudalism.

Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech’s hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism’s twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech’s platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism.

  1. Rosetta S. Elkin’s stunning Landscapes of Retreat

I love a good website project, and this one translates the entire book onto the web.

August 30, 2023 W. David Marx Daisy Alioto Yanis Varoufakis






A Rumination

Over the years, this page has steadily evolved from a kind of diary to something more like a public notebook: When I find something that sparks my interest, I will often create a post to either link to it, or to share some thoughts on whatever I’ve encountered. It’s what Matt Webb has called having thoughts in public”.

Last month, I added a sentence to the front page that notes down some of the things I’m currently the most interested in. I’ll call it a mission statement of intent: A list of topics I care about, have written about, and plan to write about in the future.

The fascinating aspect of collecting all these links, ideas, and text snippets is that themes are slowly emerging: Concepts that I keep coming back to, that I get to weave together into an ever-expanding quilt of ideas. As with photography, I’m learning that its the context that matters: An individual snippet is great, but its the contextualization where it all starts to sing.


I keep a list of books I want to read, and I’ve long had W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn on it. On my recent trip to Spain, I remembered it because a friend was reading that same exact book, which chronicles the author’s walk through rural England and the various ideas the walk sparks for him. When I came home, I looked up the book and got stuck on the table of contents. And man, if it isn’t perfect:

Table of Content from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of SaturnTable of Content from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn

What I ultimately want this whole endeavor to become is exactly what that TOC promises: A kind of rumination through the various topics and interests that I keep encountering, both online and offline, with nothing ruled out out by principle, no matter if that happens to be Lithuanian photography, the Spanish Civil War, or timekeeping in revolutionary France. It might not seem connected, but it is in my brain. And what more do you want from a person’s website?


There’s an idea making the rounds that blogs shouldn’t be chronological feeds of posts”, but a much loser collection of entries, unconstrained by time. This is commonly referred to as a Digital Garden” and the blogger Maggie Appleton describes it as follows:

They’re not following the conventions of the personal blog,” as we’ve come to know it. Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory — notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.

When I started out blogging many years ago, I shared the general notion of posts being a finished entity: You would write them, adorn them with an image, press publish, and that would be it. They would go live” on the day of publication and time stamped accordingly. Sure, you could go back to edit a typo, but you wouldn’t retroactively change the overall message.

Looking back at it now, I think it was treating the blog too much like the printed magazine I was working for: We had a deep pride about finishing each page, a deep satisfaction of having given edges to a though process, and to have obsessed over each detail while wrapping up the magazine. Of course you couldn’t make any changes after it went to press.1

The truth is that the digital space is entirely unlike a printed magazine—in fact, I think the metaphor of the printed page (or of the web page” if you will) has been holding back websites. These pages aren’t printed, which means they are never actually finished. And that actually means I can use them for get to the bottom of some gnarly questions, like What is History” or Why do we Forget”.

The rumination, in order words, never reaches an end point. Instead, we keep going in circles, revisiting and revising ideas, with the journey very much the destination.


  1. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s something beautiful about finishing something, and particularly about the process about what makes the cut and what doesn’t.↩︎

August 30, 2023 Blogging Website Maggie Appleton Matt Webb W.G. Sebald






Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up, and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting.

—Virginia Woolf, Orlando


A psychiatrist friend explained to me recently that, when we remember something, we do not return to the moment itself, but to the last time we thought about it. That’s how memories can get twisted and bent out of shape over time.

Whenever we reach out for them, we disfigure them a bit more. It is a terrifying thing to know, because it means I cannot trust myself. Every evening I go to bed and I think about things that have happened, old and new, big and small. I think about them again, and again, and again, because there isn’t anything else to do. Every time I do it, they move one step further from reality.

Marie Le Conte

July 27, 2023 Memory Virginia Woolf Marie Le Conte






The Flipside of Fake

This restaurant had put tables out, but there no single guest. You could watch the table cloth flapping slowly in sun, forming waves.This restaurant had put tables out, but there no single guest. You could watch the table cloth flapping slowly in sun, forming waves.

Indulge me for a moment. Lately I’ve been noticing the occasional street scene that looks like an AI-generated image. That’s a clear reversal of logic: I’m aware that AI mimics the real world, not the other way around. It’s just that the aesthetics were similar—and though I was objectively looking at reality, my brain would signal that I was seeing something artificial. What was going on?

I encounter these moments on my walks through Berlin, always during the day. It’s summer here, and we’ve been experiencing weeks of bright, clear weather when the sun floods the streets with light. Not only does that make the colors pop, it also illuminates the shadows for a strangely hyperrealistic look. And then, every once in a while, the city’s chaotic layers would overlap to form a scene that looked to my brain as if it had been assembled by an algorithm rather than by chance.

This (real) photo by artist Pia Riverola shows a huge bushel of flowers, one of the telltale signs of an AI-generated image—and immediately looks fake to me.This (real) photo by artist Pia Riverola shows a huge bushel of flowers, one of the telltale signs of an AI-generated image—and immediately looks fake to me.

All of this is undeniably weird: After half a year of looking at AI images I’ve somehow accepted their oddities and instead spot the uncanny in the everyday.


A few weeks ago, we had a friend visit from Sweden and got talking about the advent of fakes. I’m not so worried that people will think an AI image is real,” she said. But what if people no longer accept a real photo as proof that something happened?” In other words, what if the same reversal I’ve been experiencing becomes commonplace and the real things start looking fake?

It’s a notion echoed by the photographer Boris Eldagsen, who caused a minor scandal in the photo world by winning a photo award with an AI-generated image and then protesting that very fact.1 In the latest issue of Der Spiegel, the photographer is quoted as saying that In the future, we have to approach any image with the assumption that it isn’t real.”


What’s been bothering me about all this, including in my own writing (and lord knows I’ve been writing about this a lot) is how speculative the take on AI has been: We talk a lot about future scenarios, threats, and fears. But I sometimes feel like the speculation about these possible consequences of AI-generated photography is distracting from what photography demonstrably does to the present. Lately, I’ve been wanting less Sci-Fi and more gritty realism.

That’s why the latest article from photo critic Jörg Colberg resonated with me, in which he analyzes odd photos of Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin that make him look ridiculous, all in the wake of Prigozhin’s attempted coup in Russia. Colberg’s wider point:

[…] there is more to photography and fakeness. It’s good to be aware of photographs being made to look real even though they are not. But it’s also important to be aware of photographs that are real even though they either don’t look real or they look too ridiculous to be real.

A vintage car, sticky windshield full of linden seeds, illuminated from the back.A vintage car, sticky windshield full of linden seeds, illuminated from the back.

Update: That didn’t take long: The New York Times reports that current coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict is marred by widespread doubt on social media that the images shared are actually real.

There has, of course, always been the proverbial fog of war, but a mixture or generated-but-credible images along with pictures of a different conflict have helped manufacture increasing doubt:

For now, social media users looking to deceive the public are relying far less on photorealistic A.I. images than on old footage from previous conflicts or disasters, which they falsely portray as the current situation in Gaza, according to Alex Mahadevan, the director of the Poynter media literacy program MediaWise.

People will believe anything that confirms their beliefs or makes them emotional,” he said. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how novel it looks, or anything like that.”


  1. Though it bears mentioning that the jury of the award maintains it was aware the image had been generated and decided to nevertheless award him a price in the Creative” category, after which Eldagsen very publicly retracted the image, arguing that these types of images shouldn’t qualify. It smacks of an engineered controversy, but that’s beside the point of this article.↩︎

July 10, 2023 Post-Truth Generative AI Photography Midjourney Boris Eldagsen Pia Riverola






Flood the Zone with Shit

The article I just linked about photographer Boris Eldagsen contains an interesting, and much wider point about propaganda that jibes perfectly with a prophetic statement by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon:

Mick Gordon, studying for a PhD in AI at Queen Mary’s in Belfast, explains: Rudimentary AI is specific pattern recognition. It’s really tricky, and it still has hallucinations, or struggles to recognise the difference between a dog and a cat. The panic is, ultimately, you’re going to have truth, and you’re going to have reality, and reality’s going to be a mixture of truth, hallucinations — that’s what they call it when the machine does something weird — and deliberate non-truth. Propaganda used to deliver a singular message to the exclusion of other messaging. Now propaganda will just deluge you with everything.

From an article by Sean Illing in Vox, written on the eve of Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial:

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Bannon’s statement, of course, is remarkable because he admits to the spin, acknowledges the bullshit, and knows that winning a culture war isn’t so much about content but about volume. You can’t fact check your way out of an avalanche.

If what we’re worried about is the survival of truth, then the worry shouldn’t be about how fakes are made and whether or not they need to be reigned in—it’s about how any human being can proceed to live in this oversaturated and heavily mediated society without either tuning out or becoming radicalized.

Continues Illing:

In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is to follow a strong leader.”

Update, 07 Aug 2023: This week’s episode of This American Life is all about debates between families that share Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Writer Masha Gessen, who narrates the story, tells makes a very similar point about propaganda:

By suggesting that maybe things aren’t so clear, so black and white, so knowable, Alex was, in fact, doing what Russian propaganda does. Its main message is that no one really knows what happened. If you weren’t there you can’t know, can’t judge. Everyone has a vested interest in everything. No one is a reliable source. It provides people with a myriad of ways to avoid the truth and no way to know it.

July 10, 2023 Post-Truth Generative AI Populism Mick Gordon Steve Bannon Culture Wars Sean Illing Masha Gessen Propaganda Boris Eldagsen