Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/

"The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.”

#HenryFarrell, 2025

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis

#HatTip to @laurenshof for bringing my attention to this piece in one of his;

https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/

#SocialMedia #MediaTheory

Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar (26 Jan 2026)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/

#HenryFarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/liberalism-transforms-plurality-from

"... základní otázka, jak budovat moc ve světě reálných, zakořeněných střetů mezi vašimi voliči. Zahrnuje to vytváření silných vztahů vzájemného respektu mezi skupinami, které mají často výrazné rozdíly. Tam, kde jsou tyto rozdíly natolik hluboké, že by mohly koalici rozdělit, je často lepší uznat a připustit tyto neshody, než požadovat, aby se všichni řídili stranickou linií. To může pomoci usnadnit pokrok – i v kontroverzních otázkách..."

#HenryFarrell on #HahrietHan https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-the-left-can-learn-from-evangelical :

... why some organizations can change the world around them, while others are less successful... the difference between "transactional mobilizing,” and “transformational organizing.” Lots of organizations focus on lowering the transaction costs of doing things - pressing a button to send an email expressing outrage to a politician. However, it is the ones that get people involved in deeper ways and build relationships that can forge enduring communities. Organizations do this less often than they might, because building such relationships is messy, difficult and hard.

... how organizations win people over and provide them with opportunities to do things.

... people organized into small groups if each person belonged to only one. They generally ranged from six to ten people...

Small groups created honeycombs of intimacy, connection, and loyalty in those churches. As French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge.” Because people do not naturally possess the skills and inclinations for working with one another, they need venues for learning. Small groups taught people through concrete experience how to act together.

Small groups provide a kind of social glue then, allowing people with different interests or problems to come together, and perhaps support each other. They explain why... so attractive to... movement, as a kind of social substrate to provide it with energy and volunteers. But they also help explain why people are attracted to these... in the first place... provide a community where different people with different interests and problems can find others like them, provided those interests are compatible with the overall mission... That broader mission isn’t set in stone, and is sometimes contested. Arguments over what the mission... ->

The most important book about LLMs that currently exists

I’m glad that Henry Farrell has written this about Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines. It’s a dense, complex and at times frustrating book but it’s also the most genuinely original take on LLMs I’ve encountered. This is how Farrell summarises the outcome of the book:

That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations.

This cashes out as a theory of large language models that are (a) genuinely culturally generative, and (b) incapable of becoming purposively intelligent, any more than the language systems that they imperfectly model are capable of becoming intelligent. Under this account, the “Eliza effect” – the tendency of humans to mistake machine outputs for the outputs of human intelligence – is not entirely in error. If I understand Weatherby correctly, much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.

I’m still processing it but I think this book shows a way through the cultural tensions which have made it conceptually difficult to get to grips with what LLMs fundamentally are: actions without actors, creativity without intentionality, even thought without a thinker? They are a sociotechnical infrastructure which facilitates the generativity of the linguistic system, unbinding it from the direct dependence upon individual subjectivity in order that we can prod and prompt it in newly intentional ways.

#HenryFarrell #LeifWeatherby #LLMs #poststructuralism #socialOntology #structuralistLinguistics

What interests me about these "big systems,"
where #HenryFarrell proposes science about them,
is the relationship of us, little dwarfs, to them.

Namely:

Okay, we use them. But:

Let's not consider them divine(??) creators of truth, values, experiences(?)...

Truth, values, experiences happen
in lived(?) bodily(?) relationships
of us,
little dwarfs,
little monkeys.

The life of individuals
and society
is the life of parasites
on big systems.

Mold
on their surface.

That about us:
dwarfs, monkeys, bodies, parasites, mold...
By this I mean to separate enthusiasm
from large systems;
not to humiliate.

We are those
in whose eyes there is beauty,
in whose hearts there are values,
in whose minds there is truth,
in whose actions there is love.

And this is not given to us
by large systems,
nor by Mother Nature,
nor by God the Father.
This is what we give to each other.
Solidarity.
Community.

#enEU #tg444269288🧵