Intelligencemaxxing: 5 Things to Read/Watch This Month
In an internet saturated by looksmaxxing moids, dopaminergic slop content, and AI “art” we gotta start intelligencemaxxing. Smartmaxxing. Read-a-book-maxxing. Forget about your canthel tilt, we need to be mogging people with our minds 🤯
On a serious note I love reading, I love learning. I am consistently researching for essays, and have to read a steady stream of a wide range of material for my job. Sometimes with the oversaturation of content online it can feel overwhelming to sift through material to find something that is actually thought provoking and stimulating. I also love sharing the pieces I read/watch with my friends and wanted to share them with the community here on Substack as well because I know a lot of you are similar to me and make reading/learning a consistent practice in your life, and are interested in similar material! So this will be a new monthly series! I have curated a list of 5 things to watch/read that I have recently consumed that will help you intelligencemaxx, most available online for free. This list includes university lectures, essays, and books.
Deep Blue or Computer Meloncholia
By Jean Baudrillard
Available on page 67 of linked PDF
Deep Blue or Computer Melancholia is an essay featured in Baudrillard’s essay collection Screened Out discussing the famous chess match between chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov the chess computer Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first match against Deep Blue, though Deep Blue won the second. This second match marked the first defeat by a reigning world chess champion by computer under tournament conditions. In this essay Baudrillard reflects on the cultural ripples of this game.
What I find to be fascinating about this essay is that the ripples Baudrillard discusses have only become persistently relevant in a world increasingly saturated by AI tech. Baudrillard’s musings on the tech takeover of chess and “games” can be aptly applied to the nature of AI art and creation. As he often does, Baudrillard situates himself a prophetic cultural critic with this essay.
The linked PDF is a link to the entire book Screened Out which is not one of my favourite books by Baudrillard, however this essay is one of my favourites and a standout of the collection in my opinion.
Helen Hester: Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment
“Technological advances, socioeconomic change, and new insights in neurology compel us to reassess our concept of human nature. The “Inhuman” symposium brings together a number of philosophical positions that question the basic assumptions of humanism. It presents current perspectives on human subjectivity and the body that do not rely on the figure of man, transcend biological and social determinations of gender and conceive the self as inherently and permanently mutable.
Within this context, fundamental doubts arise regarding the primacy of the human being, and we recognize the need to reflect upon matter independent of the human being and develop a new materialism.”
This a great lecture I found recently. I feel like we talk a lot now about how tech takes on a “feminized” role through AI assistance that perform an almost domestic role, but this lecture was ahead of its time on this conversation (posted 10 years) and goes more in depth in a very fascinating way about the gendered relationship we culturally have with tech and labour.
Especially in the way that “feminine” domestic roles are minimized and considered “not work” until that domestic labour is performed by machines. Emphasizing that machines act as culturally valued objects while women act as socially denigrate subjects—and this is reflected in the way we value and perceive said labour. Helen Hester says in relation to this—in a quote I love: “This whole phenomenon of the famous feminine slogan I’d rather be ‘cyborg than a goddess’ and more a case of I’d rather be an iPhone than a woman.”