TODAY: we welcome our NEWEST HYDRA @mcmansionhell.bsky.social with a look at fascist aesthetics. “Fascists rarely make art. Instead, the fascist aesthete’s job is to appropriate existing art for the purpose of aestheticizing a political goal.” flaminghydra.com/r/161364b8?m...
Vampiristic. Fascists rarely make art. Instead, the fascist aesthete’s job is to appropriate existing art for the purpose of aestheticizing a political goal. Because fascism relies on the fetishization of the past—whether real or imaginary—nothing truly new can come from fascist art. Violent. Dehumanization, augmented by technological abstraction—the sublimation of man into machine—creates under fascism an extreme predilection for violence. In Italian Fascism, this role was played by the automobile, as evidenced by the fascination of Futurist artists like Marinetti with car crashes. (Today, AI deepfakes play a similar role.) Fascist aesthetics are ruthlessly hierarchical and their satisfaction is derived from the maintenance of that hierarchy. They are antisocial and rely on shock value.
Good one by new @flaminghydra.com @katewagner.wehwalt.net
flaminghydra.com/issue-513/
Same!
New episode • “Walking Tour for Anywhere” produced by friend of the show Matt Bunk.
Lace up your boots (literally or metaphorically) and take a tour of the city. Doesn’t matter which, as long as you’re there. // link in bio or in your podcast app
youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY?...
a podcast about sound, made at a desk in the mountains.
More at thewind.org/subscribe
SCOOP: Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground.
Inside the app called ELITE—what ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid.
Did you know that the word "Bitcoin" comes from an old mining phrase? A story about lies, squibs, hoaxes and tall tales in 19th century frontier journalism.
On the latest “Sound School,” listen to the story Champika Fernando produced at a Traveling Workshop this summer in Amherst, MA. And be sure to listen for the surprising maneuver they pulled at the end of the piece. transom.org/2025/its-mag... @prx.org
Definitely agreed
Year 6 Episode 1 : walking a big circle around the mountain where the radio comes from. Wild fire, Mark Twain-penned real-estate battle and a suicidal Frank Sinatra all make an appearance.
Listened to this new Scott Carrier piece on a dark walk up the mountain. Highly recommended. Really excited for this new @transom.bsky.social series
The acoustics of a snow storm!
An aspen grove in the Jarbidge Wilderness, Nevada, USA in Autumn 2019 – by @thewind.org fieldrecordings.xyz/2025/11/30/a...
I’ll be at resonate this weekend if anybody wants to say hey! Will have a bag of cassettes
Won Gold for "Best Writing" www.signalaward.com/winners/#202...
Had a piece on All Things Considered yesterday! All about Nevada's official state drink (as of June), the Picon Punch. @npr.org
Well One Battle After Another was as good as everyone says, if not better
what's the pact?
Anyway not a particularly unique experience but it was my first interaction with AI as a bafflingly bad search tool with no basis in reality. I imagine many people would have seen chat gpt’s claim that the quotes were verified and called it a day, which is concerning.
Since I was desperate at this point, I tried it out and it said every quote I used was correct, accurate and completely attributable to the source. But not a single one offered a verifiable primary source. They all just pointed to other quote sites, which pointed to eachother.
I found a quote verification page run by humans but the quotes I used didn’t appear, so I searched for a “quote verification tool” at which point chat gpt came up.
Google ai kept popping up and confirming quotes were “accurate and correct” but the sources were garbage sites that were definitely unreliable
first I used Google to search, but every quote was filtered through a million other seo articles and quote pages so I couldn’t find a single page that could confirm some of the quotes (just a million reposts of it)
Anyway, they provide assignments and a recent article assignment had me include a few “famous quotes” about the topic. The assignment said to make sure the quotes are accurate and attributable.
Obviously not glamorous or particularly useful work but it pays well and lets me make art.
