&&& Publishing is an independent purveyor of theoretically informed, publicly engaged publications, circumventing academic/popular distinctions in order to open up a more accessible platform for public intellectual practice. As the publishing platform operated by The New Centre for Research & Practice, our aim is to shape new forms of knowledge production and circulation within and against both past and present modes of intellectual production, distribution, consumption.
The dead keep surfacing on the interface. A social media profile reappears under People You May Know, a birthday reminder fires for someone buried in the spring, a subscription renews against a card nobody thought to cancel, a playlist refreshes itself for no one.
The systems are not being callous, requiring a death already registered and then overruled. Strangely, nothing has yet registered. The addressee was never the one who died. It was the profile, the behavioral outer form, assembled from years of signaling, and the profile is now in perfect health again.
The living are now addressed in the same form; death simply makes the separation of the thing and time easier to observe. A feed never overlaps perfectly with a whole life lived; it meets the signal, then rewards whatever performance it can classify. Users learn the lesson without needing to understand it. Some versions travel, others stall or disappear. Over time, this creates pressure toward a self that can revise itself at the system’s speed.
That training takes place inside an infrastructure (platforms, models, attention routes, finance, law), and the means of reproduction is owned. No one has to command the trajectory. Platforms set out to maximize engagement and predict conduct, which requires many users who can be addressed at scale. Because some forms of subjectivity are easier to measure and route than others, optimization selects for them effortlessly, almost as a side effect.