The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Tag: internet

  • AI is a dirty word

    Sketch by me. Originally I was going to crop the post-it out, but the accidental context couldn’t have been more perfect.

    Last week on LinkedIn, I posted this:

    Right now is a difficult time to be doing anything AI-related. The conversation has somehow polarised even further — and the extreme ends are doubling down in their zealotry. Being in the humanities means that I’m often surrounded by (well-meaning!) folx who are reluctant, if not downright hostile, to the technology and/or the corporate interests peddling the frontier versions of that technology.

    Reading social posts saying “if you engage with genAI you’re dead to me/an awful person” is difficult to take, particularly when I know some of those folx absolutely still use the tech to some degree behind the scenes (or are unaware of the embeddedness of other AI/ML technologies). I myself have been privately negotiating the line between creative misuse and active complicity since I started experimenting with genAI 3-4 years ago.

    But I still believe that fun and play are valid methods for critically interrogating how these technologies work, what they’re made of, and what they’re useful for or not. I am not ignorant: Big Tech ideology, environmental impacts, and IP concerns are very real. But there is a lack of basic understanding and literacy about these tools: absolutely not society’s fault, particularly when the media are completely clueless, and it’s in Big Tech’s interests to obfuscate the mechanisms of the machine. All of this means that fear and uncertainty dominate the conversation.

    My smol and weird AI work over the last few years has been technically challenging, ethically confronting, occasionally disturbing… but it has also been surprising, educational, sometimes delightful, useful, deeply weird (positively), and so much fun. Importantly, this work suggests alternatives to [gestures broadly] whatever this is. Fun, play, and mess are not just valid methods — I would argue that they’re more necessary than ever at a time when things feel like they’re out of our control.

    It got a handful of likes in the first couple of days, but over the last 24-48 hours I’ve seen engagement well beyond my network: likes and reactions, and comments from a few folx I don’t know. The long tail of LinkedIn posts about topical issues is perhaps something for another time and place (this post has nearly 3000 impressions at time of writing… like WTF??).

    The comments bear out what I suggest in the post: that opinions remain polarised, that people are skeptical, concerned, or on the flip side, excited or inspired.

    I left a great many things out of that post. It went through many, many drafts. I tossed up whether or not to post it at all. And I’ve gone through the wringer of emotional/psychological states as I’ve watched the reactions pile up.

    But as a creative, as a researcher, as a teacher and writer, I feel like I have to put myself out there in this way. Being scared of what people might think is a completely normal feeling; but using that as an excuse to not engage with the conversation, with other people, feels dishonest. It also means that my blog posts, newsletters, academic writing, sits in a bubble where others might not find it, or where it may be interpreted as volleys over the parapets without owning them or being accountable for them.

    Less drastically, perhaps, I’m genuinely interested in what others have to say. I’m at a stage in my life and career where I’m open to other perspectives, to having my views challenged, for others to pick up on my errors or foibles; before now, I was scared because I was just trying to figure out what on earth my values and opinions were at all.

    Sharing my work publicly, as it happens, is something that I really only began trying in earnest in 2025, mainly as a way to document my work and experiments with genAI. I’m still not remotely comfortable doing so. But it’s something I feel is really valuable, for me and, hopefully, for others.

  • Push the button for a sweet treat

    I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

    The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

    The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.

    As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

    Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

    The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

  • The handmade internet

    A fragment from random notes over the last few days, weeks…

    There seems to be a return to an idea, philosophy, or practice of “just make stuff!” or “just do it!”; “just write something, ffs!” (Maybe that last one is more for me…)

    I noticed this most recently with Rick Rubin’s odd but intriguing Squarespace tie-in promo for his book; he’s seeking to spawn or to gather online folx who are just doing cool, interesting, intriguing stuff. At least that’s how I saw it in my cursory glance over the copy:

    A collaboration with Rick Rubin to build tetragrammaton – an online world of curated materials – and a new website design, Transmission, to inspire your creativity.

    From “Co _ Rick Rubin“, Squarespace, accessed January 22, 2024 (archived).

    It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

    There are other offshoots of this movement, like tiny-internets, and lovely lite micro-blogging services like bearblog and Plume, even Neocities. Larger companies like Automattic, for all their faults, are (at least at a surface, front facing level), trying to champion this kind of crazy, personalised, creative internet.

    Whether this is a return to the internet of old, or a new evolution entirely, remains to be seen.

  • Reorientation; tides; houses and rivers; databases and archives; a new moment to sit and think

    Photo by mali maeder.

    It’s a real back to the future moment, this. Where I’ve headed off for a year or two on a journey of personal inspiration, seeking new knowledges, grand new themes, new looks, new designs, new vibes, only to come crawling back to the place where it all started. It’s all very Joseph Campbell.

    My very first proper blog ran on a website called Blog-City, and for some insane reason I remember that my first post was on the 15th of July, 2003. This followed many years of experimenting with all sorts of web hosting and design services (all completely free) including GeoCities and Angelfire. I had websites for myself, for my made-up career, for imagined airlines and businesses and all sorts, not to mention links outwards to rudimentary social media services and websites like Neopets. The internet was simpler then; maybe it will be simple again some day, but probably not.

    Once I started working properly on my career, I tried to separate out all the different parts of my life into different web presences. There was social media, of course, and since 2007 I’ve had Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (most of them are private or deactivated now, apart from Mastodon, which I’m enjoying playing around with). I had separate sites for my filmmaking, for my work and profile as an academic, for my photography stuff, as well as a blog archive just kind of floating around. When I registered danielbinns[dot]net back in 2014, I thought ‘right, time to link everything up’, but I never quite got there in a way I liked. Everything was still floating, still nebulous.

    Part of this was the technology, maybe, but primarily it was due to my trying to force things to fit in a particular way. This is personal and psychological as much as it has anything to do with a particular host or platform.

    Several things have happened in the last few years to make me reconsider all of the above. The pandemic was a player, for sure, but it also took me reading stuff and watching videos and learning about different ways of managing my time, my notes and knowledge, my skills and expertise, and just figuring out who on earth I was and accepting that person.

    Long story short, we’re back here on WordPress, under a new domain, The Clockwork Penguin. TCP isn’t a business, necessarily; for now, I still like making stuff under the Deluded Penguin moniker. TCP is more of an ethos, a place to play and experiment, to reflect. To look back over some notes and some things I’ve been thinking about; to post fragments, or more developed work, works in progress, or just some cool links I found. I don’t know if it’s a cozy place or a mysterious place; if it’s a house sitting next to a river, or a garden where I can plant things and watch them grow. But I look forward to finding out.

  • Shift Lock #3: A sales pitch for the tepid take

    After ‘abandoning’ the blog part of this site in early 2022, I embarked on a foolish newsletter endeavour called Shift Lock. It was fun and/or sustainable for a handful of posts, but then life got in the way. Over the next little while I’ll re-post those ruminations here for posterity. Errors and omissions my own. This instalment was published May 5, 2022 (see all Shift Lock posts here).

    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    Twitter was already a corporate entity, and had been struggling with how to market and position itself anyway. Not to mention, its free speech woes — irrevocably tied to those of its competitors — are not surprising. If anything, Mr. Musk was something of a golden ticket: someone to hand everything over to.

    The influx/exodus cycle started before the news was official… Muskovites joined/returned to Twitter in droves, opponents found scrolls bearing ancient Mastodon tutorials and set up their own mini-networks (let’s leave that irony steaming in the corner for now).

    None of this is new: businesses are bought and sold all the time, the right to free speech is never unconditional (and nor should it be), and the general populace move and shift and migrate betwixt different services, platforms, apps, and spaces all the time.

    What seems new, or at least different, about these latter media trends, issues, events, is the sheer volume of coverage they receive. What tends to happen with news from media industries (be they creative, social, or otherwise) is wall-to-wall coverage for a given week or two, before things peter out and we move on to the next block. It seems that online culture operates at two speeds: an instantaneous, rolling, roiling stream of chaos; and a broader, slightly slower rise and fall, where you can actually see trends come and go across a given time period. Taking the Oscars slap as an example: maybe that rise and fall lasts a week. Sometimes it might last two to four, as in the case of Musk and Twitter.

    How, then, do we consider or position these two speeds in broader ‘culture’?

    Like all of the aforementioned, Trump was not a new phenomenon. Populism was a tried and tested political strategy in 2015-16; just, admittedly, a strategy that many of us hoped had faded into obsolescence. However, true to the 20-30 year cycle of such things, Trump emerged. And while his wings were — mostly — clipped by the checks and balances of the over-complex American political system, the real legacy of his reign is our current post-truth moment. And that legacy is exemplified by a classic communications strategy: jamming. Jam the airwaves for a week, so everyone is talking about only one thing. Distract everyone from deeper issues that need work.

    This jamming doesn’t necessary come from politicians, from strategists, from agencies, as it may once have done. Rather, it comes from a conversational consensus emerging from platforms — and this consensus is most likely algorithmically-driven. That’s the real concern. And as much as Musk may want to open up the doors and release the code, it’s really not that straightforward.

    The algorithms behind social media platforms are complex — more than that, they are nested, like a kind of digital Rube Goldberg machine. People working on one section of the code are not aware nor comprehending of what other teams might be working on, beyond any do-not-disturb-type directives from on high. As scholar Nick Seaver says in a recent Washington Post piece, “The people inside Twitter want to understand how their algorithm works, too.” (Albergotti 2022)

    Algorithms — at least those employed by companies like Twitter — are built to stoke the fires of engagement. And there ain’t no gasoline like reactions, like outrage, like whatever the ‘big thing’ is for that particular week. These wildfires also intersect with the broader culture in ways that it takes longer-form criticism (I would say academic scholarship, but we often miss the mark, or more accurately, due to glacial peer review turnarounds, the boat) to meaningfully engage and understand.

    Thanks partly to COVID but also to general mental health stuff, I’ve been on a weird journey with social media (and news, to be fair) over the past 3-5 years. Occasional sabbaticals have certainly helped, but increasingly I’m just not checking it. This year I’ve found more and more writers and commentators whose long-form work I appreciate as a way of keeping across things, but also just for slightly more measured takes. Tepid takes. Not like a spa but more like a heated pool. This is partly why I started this newsletter-based journey, just to let myself think things through in a way that didn’t need to be posted immediately, but nor did I need to wait months/years for peer review. Somewhere beyond even the second trend-based speed I mentioned above.

    What it really lets me do, though, is disengage from the constant flow of algorithmically-driven media, opinion, reaction, and so on, in a way where I can still do that thinking in a relevant and appropriate way. What I’m hoping is that this kind of distance lets me turn around and observe that flow in new and interesting ways.

    Below the divider

    At the end of each post I link a few sites, posts, articles, videos that have piqued my interest of late. Some are connected to my research, some to teaching and other parts of academia, still others are… significantly less so (let’s keep some fun going, shall we?).

    Reed Albergotti (2022, 16 April), ‘Elon Musk wants Twitter’s algorithm to be public. It’s not that simple.’ Washington Post.