Mark Granza

There’s hope

"Brand observes that optimists are especially prone to neglecting maintenance. They resent the drudgery of it, preferring the grandiose and novel to the simple and routine." — @GraduatedBen reflects on Stewart Brand’s 'Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One' im1776.com/on-maintenance/

👇 thenewatlantis.com/publications/a…

"Liquid Internet flows into this void as a mass-vision event, the mythic power of fandom and content overflowing from and washing over millions of minds in placeless America, the new soul of a soulless world. Subcultures and nerd cultures disappear into simply culture, self-oblivious and technicolor and sincere in a way that postmodernism could never permit."

There are so many competing ideologies showing you a constant stream of the worst news and the most degraded content. Yes, it exists. It's easy to dwell on how bad things can be, but it's important to let go of things that put you in a hating mindset. Focus on good social fabric.

👇 x.com/markgranza/sta…

The Brazilians are the only ones to know how to do brutalism and should be the only ones allowed to do it.

After Philip Seymour Hoffman died, the director of the Hunger Games still had 2 scenes of dialogue for his character They played with the idea of doing a CGI version but rejected it because they felt that PSH always brought something unique and unexpected to every performance & creating a CGI version of him would be betraying his creative genius They re-wrote the movie in order to give his character's lines to another character because it wasn't dignified to create a fake version of him

@miamimaxxer I heard people say that before but I never understood why, although I did find it quite enjoyable purely from an entertainment perspective.

@markgranza Hated that year. Parasite was accidentally based though

@miamimaxxer ❤️

@markgranza That’s what I got from it as well, very eye opening and a good reminder that I forget myself. Building something that will live beyond you is something our ancestors understood and something we are painfully learning to appreciate

@Jacob__Siegel I was just thinking about this today while looking for a tweet of mine from earlier this year. The search engine is completely incapable of finding it, even if I type the exact keywords next to my handle. Wasn’t always like this

It's not just that the site has been turned into a hive of schizophrenia and foreign info ops in the name of "free speech." The search function doesn't work half the time. The chat feature rarely works. But the capture of user data assuredly works. My every statement will still help train Musk's planetary AI.

This is the best thing I've read in a long time. "What the taste discourse is actually proposing, beneath its empowering language, is that the social technology of selection is the last uniquely human skill. The ability to signal through choice. Your life filled with beautiful things pointed only at themselves. If this is what saves you—it certainly won’t save your soul [...] The patron who built the cathedral was not exercising taste. He was exercising will. He was exercising worship. And that will was devoted to something beyond himself—towards God, towards the city, towards a future he would not live to see. Strip the transcendent out and what remains is consumption."

an AI cannot look upon God's splendor and rejoice

It is almost romantic that everyone is going crazy together at the same time.

Such a good read. Totally altered my perception on "online discourse"

@arctotherium42 Can confirm as I was introduced to online politics on FB exactly around 2016-2017 or so. Looking back, the private groups were so much better for discussions than any I've experienced here.

Facebook had several major advantages over RW X/Twitter: it was more personal, slower-paced and hence more careful and less sloppy, had better group functions (and hence more privacy) and better vetting. They heyday of RW Facebook lasted ~1-1.5 years.

An admin for one of the biggest right-wing Facebook groups DM'd me with his impressions/experience with Facebook moderation and censorship (and gave me permission to post this thread). RW Facebook was big in 2016/17.

A lot of infighting on the right lately, so I'm reposting my essay from last year on how this platform incentivizes disagreement and ultimately cultivates an environment where dishonourable behaviour among men is rewarded and virtue is punished. im1776.com/2025/04/18/no-…

@gen0m1cs Alternative media failed as an experiment the moment we started to consider anyone with an online account as "alternative media".

@markgranza it’s mostly just the explicit dumbification of twitter under musk + people realizing a lot of alternative media is just conspiratard slop eg.