Today in Labor History March 24, 1834: William Morris, British author, textile designer and revolutionary socialist was born on this date. He wrote the utopian novel “News From Nowhere” and founded the Socialist League in 1874. He was influenced by both Marxism and anarchism.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #williammorris #anarchism #socialism #writer #author #novel #books @bookstadon

"If a chap can't compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all."

So said the Victorian artist William Morris, born on this date in 1834.

9 more things he said:

https://topicaltens.blogspot.com/2026/03/24-march-william-morris-quotes.html

#BirthAnniversary #Quotes #WilliamMorris #ArtsandCrafts

Heh. I find a lot of William Morris'/Liberty's patterns on fabrics on Temu. So if you hear wild buzzing accompanied by random screams, all the way from Britain it's Morris rotating in his grave. If we could attach a generator somewhere we'd solve the energy needs globaly for generations to come.

#WilliamMorris #temu #LibertyPatterns

Snowflake by ComicBookXL

https://ai.forfun.su/2026/02/19/snowflake-by-comicbookxl-19/

"A machine can be constructed that can make anything except a work of art".

William Morris.

Morris was raging against Britains newly created factories which churned out vast quantities of cheap, poorly made, shoddy goods. The factories extracted raw materials from the environment, exploited the workers labouring in them and spewed pollution into the back into environment. Their goods were often "exported" into newly colonized territories whose inhabitants were forced to buy them at gunpoint. (cf Opium wars). All of this pillaging and destruction was for the financial benefit of the newly minted capitalist class.

The factories turned skilled artists and craftspeople into mere cogs in the machine. What was once a craft that took years to perfect that was carried out in the home at a time and pace chosen by the worker became mindless drudgery in a factory ruled by the clock.

You could say that Morris was an elitist. He was a member of the capitalist class himself. The dividends from a large stake in what was then the largest copper mine in the world gave him a handsome and wholly unearned income. Perhaps he thought the lower classes would not appreciate quality, craftsmanship and art or even thought they did not deserve it. Perhaps he thought that only wealthy, well educated people like himself should have art in their lives.

I think that viewpoint is totally wrong and is based on misguided and dogmatic views about capitalism in the period, Morris as a person and his thought. Morris was a socialist and one of the pioneers of the labour movement in Britain. By his own admission he found some of Marx and Engles analysis of economics difficult to follow but he instinctively grasped the concept of socialism and understood the message of their work. While his personal political projects failed to have any real impact he inspired and paved the way for the next generation of socialist thinkers, agitators, activists and politicians. The one thing he recognised above all else in the new capitalist factory system was the replacement of skill, craft and art with mindless machines that exploited the workers like never before (slavery excepted of course)

In Morris's view the factories removed all art from the goods it produced. A complex pattern in a piece of cloth that took a skilled weaver weeks to produce on a hand loom could be reproduced in hours at most on a machine loom. His own business championed quality craft and art and produced high quality goods. Being forced to market the products to the wealthy capitalist elite who could afford to buy them was a constant problem for him that he never resolved.

Now we have so called "AI" churning out endless media "content" / "slop" created by statistically anyalysing vast quantities of human art of all kinds to try to find patterns which it can replicate. The machine does not understand the meaning of the art it consumes. "AI" steals the mathamatical patterns and overlays them onto random gibberish to trick the human mind into seeing __believable__ patterns in gibberish

This is what slop is. Patterns overlaid on random gibberish. Humans are hardwired to spot patterns in our environment and assign meanings to them. We __believe__ in patterns and we __believe__ patterns have meaning. Two blobs of paint above a line of paint on a piece of paper instantly becomes a human face. An infant instinctively recognizes this pattern when they see it. They __believe__ those smears of paint represent a human being.

"AI" steals the patterns in human produced art and uses them to create slop content. Without the patterns AI is trained to steal from art slop text would be random words in a random order, slop images would be random color and slop music would be white noise.

All of the stolen patterns are meaningless as the "AI" has no comprehension regarding why the human creator of art chose to use the exact words in a sentance to covey meaning in one tiny part of the speech of a character in a novel. It cannot comprehend an artists use of light and shadow in a painting to confer meaning about good and evil in the painting as a whole. It cannot comprehend why hearing a sequence of musical notes played in a certain key and time signature makes most listeners feel lonely and blue,.

Humans have always screamed into the void. We have done that in the hope and belief that other humans are listening and that they will understand us. From those screams indiduals construct art, culture, civilization and humanity itself.

Slop is the void screaming back at us. It is artless, has no value and is literally inhuman.

Sooner or later it will be impossible to believe anything that you do personally perceive. All mediated experiences will be comprised of meaningless, worthless, artless inhuman slop. Slop is gibberish that will reduce humans to a state of collective insanity. Catch22 is a hell of a catch after all.

#AI #Slop #Art #culture #civilization #media #insanity #catch22 #WilliamMorris

@cupofteasocial
#mugshot

Good morning lovely people 💕💕
And Tuesday just dropped 🥰
Spent another lazy day yesterday mainly crocheting 🧶 so I was in my happy place 🥰

I found a pretty new #williammorris mug in the shop in Saturday.
This afternoon I will be in the charity shop again, I think we're short on numbers today so I may be a little busy.

Sending massive love and hugs to you
🥰🥰🤗🤗

AI girl by RealCartoonXL

https://ai.forfun.su/2026/02/05/ai-girl-by-realcartoonxl-27/