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5 days ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
Memorial Day beckons, Southern California’s May Grey has been blasted aside by the sun, and for my friends and colleagues, the annual ritual of sharing summer plans has begun. Should I go to Patmos? I’ve only been to Athens and Hydra and am curious about the other Greek islands. An overnight ferry seems to be involved though. I wince.
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1 week ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
God in the Machine or AI-fueled spiritual fantasiesLast week, I said:AI isn’t immiserating us. It’s giving us delusions of grandeur. Just in time, Miles Klee from Rolling Stone published a piece corroborating my hypothesis. ChatGPT is convincing people they are prophets.
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1 week ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
To some extent the avant-garde has always been self-selected. No one stumbles into a revolutionary art movement. No one anoints you to anticipate the future. And yet, the historical avant-gardes—the cubists, the futurists, the dadaists, the constructivists, the surrealists—were to some extent anointed. Firstly by their peers, as these were to some extent clubs, in which peer approval was essential to membership and secondly by institutions.
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2 weeks ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
Artificial Schizophrenia or AI-induced mental illnessFrom @QiaochuYuan:the era of AI-induced mental illness is going to make the era of social media-induced mental illness look like the era of. like. printing press-induced mental illnessIn the thread:I changed my whole instagram follow list to include anyone I find who is having a visionary or UFO related experience and hooo-boy chatGPT is doing a number on people who are not quite well.
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2 weeks ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
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3 weeks ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
The COVID Divide or the Yale Youth PollPolling is a messy art, but when it replicates the same findings over and over again we should listen. And what keeps being replicated over and over again—this time in the Yale Youth Poll—is that the youngest adults, those under 21, have shifted substantially to the right. This defies conventional wisdom about the political divide in America. On more than one occasion, I’ve had to correct a friend in casual conversation about this.
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3 weeks ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
The nineties. The glare: flashing light, clattering shutters, the subject frozen in the back of a black limousine, facing off with an egregore: a thousand eyes, a Biblically accurate angel—insectoid, unfeeling. Inside the car, claustrophobia. The crush, the sweat, the excitement of other people’s desires surrounding you, closing in on you, compressing you, flattening you.
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4 weeks ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
Money Dysmorphia or "The Economy"People are talking about "the economy" again, which is never a good sign. And people are asking me about "the economy", which is even worse. Though it’s all hard to parse. I’m not sure I remember a "good economy" in this millennium. I recollect the late nineties as a very halcyon time, but then again, I wasn’t even a teenager, so really what did I know.
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1 month ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
Demna at Gucci or 032c’s TransmissionsMy good friend Jordan Richman has a new column up at 032c addressing the departure of Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia and his new role at Gucci. His first question is most pertinent, how much does the luxury consumer actually care about the creative director?
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1 month ago | 
8ball.report | Sean Monahan
Imagine your grandparents' life trajectory. They probably married young. Probably to someone they already knew. Possibly to someone they knew their entire life. They stayed fairly close to home. And when they didn’t, they were probably surrounded by people the same age, who were marrying at about the same time: early twenties for women, mid-to-late twenties for men. And they probably had children young, too. Again, around the same time as their friends.
