A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.
Learning to Love Humans
A trip to Athens, five weeks before “the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”
The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos
How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?
Investigating ancient human DNA preservation on cave walls and in rock art
Previous efforts to link Palaeolithic cultural records to specific populations through DNA analysis have focused on materials from archaeological floor deposits such as bones, sediments, and artefacts. In this study, we explore whether rock art, a spatially distinct expression of human activity, can also preserve DNA traces from its creators. We analyse DNA preservation in pigment samples collected in and around 24 rock art panels from 11 caves across Spain and Portugal, including simple marks (from nine sites), hand stencils (Maltravieso Cave, Extremadura, Spain), and figurative paintings (Cave of Altamira, Cantabria, Spain). We recover traces of ancient human mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, unaccompanied by faunal DNA, from a pigmented calcite crust at Escoural Cave (Portugal), as well as from an unpigmented cave wall sample from the same site. The absence of faunal DNA in both samples suggests direct DNA deposition through human contact. In contrast, three additional unpigmented samples, from Escoural and Covarón Cave (Asturias, Spain), yielded mixtures of human and faunal DNA, suggesting indirect deposition. Although our results do not conclusively link ancient human DNA preservation to the generation of cave art, we show that traces of human DNA can persist on cave walls for thousands of years.
Read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
1935 essay by Walter Benjamin; proposes that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of an artwork, that—in the age of mechanical reproduction and traditional ritualistic value’s absence—art production would be inherently based on political praxis
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry
Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.
Symbolic Manipulation: an Anthropological Perspective
The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will ex…
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
When Humans Are No Longer Born Human by Zhu Yixuan
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
Rogue
Ad-free video game news, guides, opinions, history, culture, previews, interviews, and reviews written by humans, for humans
Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
🛸 UFOs: Explore atproto lexicons
Sample records and timeseries statistics for *every* collection seen in the ATmosphere.
If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain constant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions, regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.
Nick Land-Meltdown
The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.