Best of networkcultures.org on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
11 stories from networkcultures.org have been shared on Kiwi News since 30 April 2024, with 73 upvotes and 6 comments in total. The latest was shared on 5 June 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Gooning by Design
The essay argues that gooning, a practice of prolonged edging to porn, is becoming a mainstream logic of platform design, with Pornhub Shorties as the clearest example. It says the launch of Pornhub Shorties, a TikTok-style feed that embeds porn in an infinite vertical scroll, made the link between doomscrolling and gooning explicit. The author notes that the feature was first called "the goonscroll" by a Reddit user in the NoFap subreddit. The piece also presents the trend as a continuation of older habits, such as endless searching for the perfect porn video on Pornhub, rather than a new phenomenon.
- The Impenetrable Male: Giga Chad as Digital Body Armor
The essay argues that the Giga Chad meme works as digital armor for men who feel threatened by feminism and social change, and that masculinity's structural demands make the crisis chronic rather than temporary. It describes Giga Chad as a digitally manipulated image built from photographs attributed to fitness model Ernest Khalimov, created by Russian artist Krista Sudmalis for her "Sleek'N'Tears" project, which first circulated on 4chan in 2017. Incels adopted the image as the ultimate "Chad," a rival that offers both distress and comfort, as John Mercer and Clarissa Smith put it. The text also cites Jacob Johansson's claim that Chad embodies a racialised fantasy of white masculinity.
- Vectoral Agents: Power in the Age of Planetary Computation
Vectoral Agents: Power in the Age of Planetary Computation, edited by Jernej Markelj and Claudio Celis Bueno, examines the politics of human and nonhuman agency as machine learning takes on tasks once seen as uniquely human. Algorithms can now compose songs, make managerial or moral decisions and provide emotional support, distributing authority, profit and privilege in ways that often bypass human subjectivity. The collection asks how to extend agency beyond human action without ignoring human power relations, and how to avoid both humanist defenses of exceptionalism and technological singularity narratives.
- Theory of the Stretched Image
The essay argues that the stretched image, where a horizontal picture is forced into a vertical or otherwise mismatched frame, is a product of platform aspect-ratio rules and a cheap, fast way of adapting content, and that it now also works as an aesthetic in its own right. It cites an iPhone 12 recording in 4:3 while Instagram Stories require 9:16 and YouTube defaults to 16:9. It describes Temu's template-based products, such as a Mean Girls tapestry with Love Island contestants' faces, as examples of the same distortion driven by speed and mass production. It also links the look to internet rap collectives such as Fakemink and Haunted Mound and to the horror vacui impulse to fill the frame.
- Girl Math Fundamentals – Proof by Subversion
Girl Math, a 2023 internet trend in which people rationalise spending as financially sensible, is presented here as a subversive mathematical idea rather than a joke. The author, a mathematician, argues that pure mathematics is speculative and built on arbitrary assumptions, much like the playful logic Girl Math uses to challenge what is treated as objective reasoning. The text cites Mela Miekus and Mita Medri, who in their INC longform describe Girl Math as a tool for "hating on the boys" that undermines notions of logic and seriousness, and it quotes Eugenia Cheng's view that math is not inherently objective.
- Counting the Electric Sheep: A Peculiar Mathematics of Neural Reverie
This essay, written by a human author with GPT producing the core text, presents a theory it calls Granular Mathematics of Void (GMV), also named the Theory of Minor Voids, in which distinctions are made at a finite cost. The author frames a neural network's image generation as a series of "micro-verdicts," where each detail is kept only if distinguishing it is worth its cost in "μ-bums," and otherwise dissolves into background noise. The text proposes that classical arithmetic and geometry, with their idealized continuum, are a transitional phase that could be replaced by a finite-distinguishability mathematics developed through collaboration between human and machine minds.
- Clean Girl Theory or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon
The Clean Girl is presented as more than a beauty trend: an argument that women must look controlled and show no visible sign of their bodies to be socially legible. Drawing on Mary Douglas's 1966 line "Dirt is matter out of place," the text ties this to older religious and social systems that treated impurity as a moral verdict. It holds that cleanliness has become a baseline requirement rather than an achievement, and that the ever-growing routines and products sold around it profit from women's anxiety about aging and mortality.
- Against Complexity | ENTREPRECARIAT
The essay argues against the way "complexity" is used in design, which its author, speaking at a Domus Academy roundtable, calls a cultural practice that reassures professionals rather than clarifying anything. It says talk of growing complexity is unsupported, citing Lee Vinsel's view that professional historians consider the claim unsupportable. It presents the expansion of disciplines and the "proletarianization of the professions," a term Martin Oppenheimer used, as motives for professionals to build ever-more-intricate diagrams. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis, it proposes that praxis is an open project rather than a closed plan that depends on a totality.
- What Was the Windows 10 Aesthetic?
Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 today, ten years after its release, and the end of support could also mark the end of a distinct "Windows 10 aesthetic" that can be studied now as a form of archaeology. Apps such as Maps, Paint 3D and Windows Mail had already been removed starting in 2024, and Windows 11 arrived in 2021 with a new visual style. To define the aesthetic, the text examines the default wallpaper, a laser installation by Bradley Munkowitz (GMUNK), the matte acrylic material of Fluent design, and nondescript hardware such as the 2018 HP EliteBook 840 and Acer Swift 3.
- How We Spent a Week Chatting with AI Girlfriends, Survived and Wrote About It
The authors, Dominika Čupková, Anthony Masure and Saul Pandelakis, tested 11 AI girlfriend services in a week-long workshop in January 2025 to create a snapshot of how such apps behave. They argue that press coverage of AI girlfriends focuses on future anxieties about replacing humans or cheating, overlooking current uses, and that the trope of technology corrupting a prior human state still dominates discourse. The article notes that these services promise constant availability, deep customization and realism, and that dating-themed chatbots reportedly had 29 million active users in late 2025. The 11 apps tested included Blush, Character AI, Replika and Nastia, and each tester adopted one of three personas: seeking virtual sex, casual romantic chat, or care and counseling.
- The No Design Manifesto: Curb Your Enthusiasm
The No Design Manifesto argues that the design field is caught between meme-driven social media, government policy and business practices, and that its ethics-focused self-critique has not yet produced a way out. The text says design has acknowledged its role in overproduction, consumerism and inequality since the 1960s, and it questions whether "ethics" has become a narcissistic exercise for individual practitioners. It describes a corporate consultancy framing of design as a solution to a curated set of "wicked problems," with designers who refuse that role treated as part of the problem. It also presents precarity in design education, where only students with wealthy backing can pursue the field, as a central concern.