Culture — Culture & Technology

Our Aesthetic Categories: zany, cute, interesting

Late capitalism has injected an aesthetic gloss over all of the ways one can–and generation z and below has been forced to–interact with everything: how we labor (zany), communicate (interesting), and consume (cute). Remember those from the subtitle?! Those are are our aesthetic categories (whoa, that’s the titular line!). I suspect that continued reliance on ML agents will fortify categorization: it is harder to index things if you aren’t stuffing them into neat little substacks. Tell me again if Muddy Mudskipper is more like this or that, please, disembodied robot guide.

David DinaburgSeptember 7, 2026Literary Theory, Culture, zany, cute, interesting

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

There is as much detail packed into every page of Because Internet as there is meaning packed into a period at the end of a short text message. Sometimes having information bursting at the seams means there is little room for authorial voice, quirky digressions, or the myriad other pleasantries that make modern non-fiction fun to read. Not so Because Internet. Maybe because I love Internet Culture Books (note the capital letters? I used to assume this was a convention of SFF [double brackets, but I won’t make you play my twitter game if you don’t know SFF is Science Fiction & Fantasy] genre when talking about Talents or Powers or Magic, but it tends to be deployed in writing across styles to convey impact!), but the author finds a way to push voice and appealing examples on every page.

David DinaburgMay 14, 2022Culture, Language, Linguistics, slang