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sexymemecoin · 1 year ago

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The Metaverse: A New Frontier in Digital Interaction

The concept of the metaverse has captivated the imagination of technologists, futurists, and businesses alike. Envisioned as a collective virtual shared space, the metaverse merges physical and digital realities, offering immersive experiences and unprecedented opportunities for interaction, commerce, and creativity. This article delves into the metaverse, its potential impact on various sectors, the technologies driving its development, and notable projects shaping this emerging landscape.

What is the Metaverse?

The metaverse is a digital universe that encompasses virtual and augmented reality, providing a persistent, shared, and interactive online environment. In the metaverse, users can create avatars, interact with others, attend virtual events, own virtual property, and engage in economic activities. Unlike traditional online experiences, the metaverse aims to replicate and enhance the real world, offering seamless integration of the physical and digital realms.

Key Components of the Metaverse

Virtual Worlds: Virtual worlds are digital environments where users can explore, interact, and create. Platforms like Decentraland, Sandbox, and VRChat offer expansive virtual spaces where users can build, socialize, and participate in various activities.

Augmented Reality (AR): AR overlays digital information onto the real world, enhancing user experiences through devices like smartphones and AR glasses. Examples include Pokémon GO and AR navigation apps that blend digital content with physical surroundings.

Virtual Reality (VR): VR provides immersive experiences through headsets that transport users to fully digital environments. Companies like Oculus, HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR are leading the way in developing advanced VR hardware and software.

Blockchain Technology: Blockchain plays a crucial role in the metaverse by enabling decentralized ownership, digital scarcity, and secure transactions. NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and cryptocurrencies are integral to the metaverse economy, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade virtual assets.

Digital Economy: The metaverse features a robust digital economy where users can earn, spend, and invest in virtual goods and services. Virtual real estate, digital art, and in-game items are examples of assets that hold real-world value within the metaverse.

Potential Impact of the Metaverse

Social Interaction: The metaverse offers new ways for people to connect and interact, transcending geographical boundaries. Virtual events, social spaces, and collaborative environments provide opportunities for meaningful engagement and community building.

Entertainment and Gaming: The entertainment and gaming industries are poised to benefit significantly from the metaverse. Immersive games, virtual concerts, and interactive storytelling experiences offer new dimensions of engagement and creativity.

Education and Training: The metaverse has the potential to revolutionize education and training by providing immersive, interactive learning environments. Virtual classrooms, simulations, and collaborative projects can enhance educational outcomes and accessibility.

Commerce and Retail: Virtual shopping experiences and digital marketplaces enable businesses to reach global audiences in innovative ways. Brands can create virtual storefronts, offer unique digital products, and engage customers through immersive experiences.

Work and Collaboration: The metaverse can transform the future of work by providing virtual offices, meeting spaces, and collaborative tools. Remote work and global collaboration become more seamless and engaging in a fully digital environment.

Technologies Driving the Metaverse

5G Connectivity: High-speed, low-latency 5G networks are essential for delivering seamless and responsive metaverse experiences. Enhanced connectivity enables real-time interactions and high-quality streaming of immersive content.

Advanced Graphics and Computing: Powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) and cloud computing resources are crucial for rendering detailed virtual environments and supporting large-scale metaverse platforms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI enhances the metaverse by enabling realistic avatars, intelligent virtual assistants, and dynamic content generation. AI-driven algorithms can personalize experiences and optimize virtual interactions.

Wearable Technology: Wearable devices, such as VR headsets, AR glasses, and haptic feedback suits, provide users with immersive and interactive experiences. Advancements in wearable technology are critical for enhancing the metaverse experience.

Notable Metaverse Projects

Decentraland: Decentraland is a decentralized virtual world where users can buy, sell, and develop virtual real estate as NFTs. The platform offers a wide range of experiences, from gaming and socializing to virtual commerce and education.

Sandbox: Sandbox is a virtual world that allows users to create, own, and monetize their gaming experiences using blockchain technology. The platform's user-generated content and virtual real estate model have attracted a vibrant community of creators and players.

Facebook's Meta: Facebook's rebranding to Meta underscores its commitment to building the metaverse. Meta aims to create interconnected virtual spaces for social interaction, work, and entertainment, leveraging its existing social media infrastructure.

Roblox: Roblox is an online platform that enables users to create and play games developed by other users. With its extensive user-generated content and virtual economy, Roblox exemplifies the potential of the metaverse in gaming and social interaction.

Sexy Meme Coin (SEXXXY): Sexy Meme Coin integrates metaverse elements by offering a decentralized marketplace for buying, selling, and trading memes as NFTs. This unique approach combines humor, creativity, and digital ownership, adding a distinct flavor to the metaverse landscape. Learn more about Sexy Meme Coin at Sexy Meme Coin.

The Future of the Metaverse

The metaverse is still in its early stages, but its potential to reshape digital interaction is immense. As technology advances and more industries explore its possibilities, the metaverse is likely to become an integral part of our daily lives. Collaboration between technology providers, content creators, and businesses will drive the development of the metaverse, creating new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Conclusion

The metaverse represents a new frontier in digital interaction, offering immersive and interconnected experiences that bridge the physical and digital worlds. With its potential to transform social interaction, entertainment, education, commerce, and work, the metaverse is poised to revolutionize various aspects of our lives. Notable projects like Decentraland, Sandbox, Meta, Roblox, and Sexy Meme Coin are at the forefront of this transformation, showcasing the diverse possibilities within this emerging digital universe.

For those interested in the playful and innovative side of the metaverse, Sexy Meme Coin offers a unique and entertaining platform. Visit Sexy Meme Coin to explore this exciting project and join the community.

#crypto #blockchain #defi #digitalcurrency #ethereum #digitalassets #Sexy Meme Coin #bitcoin

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heckcareoxytwit · 3 months ago

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A preview of Exceptional X-Men #7

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7

COLLATERAL DAMAGE! With Charles Xavier on the run, EMMA FROST and KITTY PRYDE reckon with their own dreams and fears for the future of mutantkind. AXO feels pushed away from the team and pulled closer and closer to charismatic technologist Sheldon Xenos. But is Xenos who he claims to be? (Spoiler: He is not!) Exceptional X-Men #7 Written by: Eve L. Ewing Art by: Carmen Carnero, Nolan Woodard Cover by: Carmen Carnero, Nolan Woodard Page Count: 32 Pages Release Date: March 19, 2025

I miss Krakoaland era....

#White Queen #Emma Frost #emma grace frost #Axo #Alex Luna #alejandro luna #X Men #XMen #marvel preview #marvel

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fandomtrumpshate · 5 months ago

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FTH 2025 Supported Org: Fight for the Future Education Fund

Technology has the power to transform our society, upend injustice, and hold powerful people and institutions accountable. But it can also be used to silence the marginalized, automate oppression, and trample our basic rights. Fight for the Future fights to defend technology as a force for liberation, not tyranny.

Fight for the Future Education Fund harnesses the power of the Internet to channel outrage into action, defending our most basic rights in the digital age. They fight to ensure that technology is a force for empowerment, free expression, and liberation rather than tyranny, corruption, and structural inequality. They are an intentionally small, fierce team of technologists, creatives, and policy experts working to educate and mobilize at an unprecedented scale, achieving victories previously thought to be impossible.

FFtFEF recognizes that tech policy issues have a disproportionate impact on communities of color, low income people, religious minorities, political dissidents, LGBTQ people, and others who face systemic oppression. They fight for policy victories that make the biggest difference for the people who are most affected.

You can support Fight for the Future Education Fund as a creator in the 2025 FTH auction (or as a bidder, when the time comes to donate for the auctions you’ve won.)

#fth 2025 #fight for the future education fund #supported organization #supported nonprofit

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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coochiequeens · 2 years ago

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They all have he/him on their lanyards and it’s extremely clear they identify as men and are here to take opportunities away from the actual women and [non-binary] attendees.”

By Reduxx Team September 28, 2023

A major networking conference focused on centering women in computing is facing backlash from some participants after a flood of males were allowed to attend, reportedly due to the event’s inclusivity policies.

Created in 1994 and inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration purports to “bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.” While the conference was historically focused on women, recent developments in its gender inclusivity policy saw its branding open up to “non-binary” participants as well.

In its most recent Press Release on the conference, AnitaB.org deemed it “the world’s largest gathering of women and non-binary technologists.”

But the week-long conference, which costs $650 to attend for students and academics but over $1,200 for the general public, is facing heat this year after some female attendees noticed a “significant number of men” attending the event.

In a now-scrubbed Change.org petition, one female attendee calls on the Grace Hopper Committee (GHC) to provide women who purchased the pricy tickets a full refund, and commit to banning men in the future.

“GHC (2023) is named after our pioneering female programmers, who have paved the way for gender equality within the tech industry. This event was established with the intention of empowering women by creating a safe space where they can connect, learn, and thrive. However, by allowing men to participate, GHC fails to uphold its own mission,” petitioner Agnes Lu wrote in the description.

The petition was uploaded on September 26, but deleted on September 27. A cached version of the page shows that it had collected over 2,700 signatures in the 24 hours it had been active. The reasons for removal are currently unknown.

Similar sentiment was shared on Reddit as a conference attendee posted “why are there so many men at Grace Hopper?”

Posted two days ago, the user wrote: “I’m seeing entire groups of just men, at a conference that’s sole purpose is to give opportunities to WOMEN and non-binary individuals in a male dominated field. I attended last year and did not [see] any male identifying student attendees. This is genuinely infuriating.”

The user goes on to articulate in the replies that there are a limited number of networking slots available and internships are fiercely competitive.

Like in the petition, the user claimed there was an obvious discernible difference between males and “non-binary” individuals, an issue that quickly became a point of contention in the comments.

“They could just be non-binary, gender queer, etc, or that could just be men trying to get a leg up. No way to know,” one user wrote in response, to which the original poster replied: “They all have he/him on their lanyards and it’s extremely clear they identify as men and are here to take opportunities away from the actual women and [non-binary] attendees.”

But the attempted defense was quickly undermined, with some users calling the original poster a “TERF” for failing to include gender-diverse non-binary people.

“Nonbinaries, including he/him nonbinaries, belong at grace hopper and are welcome there. TERFs like you are the ones who shouldn’t be there,” one comment reads.

“Lots of NB go as he/him. The only way you could possibly know is if you asked them,” another claimed.

On X (formerly Twitter), users debated how males could be “gate-kept” from the conference without being exclusionary, to which few solutions were provided.

The conference was held in Orlando this year, in tradition with previous years, but has announced it will relocate for the next iteration due to changes to recent state legislation regarding LGBT people.

In a statement on their site, AnitaB.org claims that Florida has introduced an “onslaught of legislation that not only devalues women and non-binary people and, at the intersections, those who live as members of the LGBTQIA+ community but is also aimed at erasing Black history.” It states that the 2024 conference is being arranged to be held in another location.

One of the featured speakers this year was trans-identified male Sasha Costanza-Chock, who describes himself as a “researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival.”

Costanza-Chock spoke on a panel with Alejandra Caraballo, a trans-identified male attorney, on the “Intersection of Tech and Social Justice.” The panel was described as “diving into the critical intersection of technology and social equity and explore how technology can inadvertently become a barrier for underserved groups.”

#Admiral Grace Murray Hopper #AnitaB.org Grace Hooper Celebration #Women censored by Change.org #Grace Hopper Committee (GHC)

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probablyasocialecologist · 10 months ago

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Generative AI was always unsustainable, always dependent on reams of training data that necessitated stealing from millions of people, its utility vague and its ubiquity overstated. The media and the markets have tolerated a technology that, while not inherently bad, was implemented in a way so nefariously and wastefully that it necessitated theft, billions of dollars in cash, and double-digit percent increases in hyper scalers’ emissions. The desperation for the tech industry to “have something new” has led to such ruinous excess, and if this bubble collapses, it will be a result of a shared myopia in both big tech dimwits like Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, and Silicon Valley power players like Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Brian Chesky, and Marc Andreessen. The people propping this bubble up no longer experience human problems, and thus can no longer be trusted to solve them. This is a story of waste, ignorance and greed. Of being so desperate to own the future but so disconnected from actually building anything. This arms race is a monument to the lack of curiosity rife in the highest ranks of the tech industry. They refuse to do the hard work — to create, to be curious, to be excited about the things you build and the people they serve — and so they spent billions to eliminate the risk they even might have to do any of those things. Had Sundar Pichai looked at Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and said “no thanks” — as he did with the metaverse — it’s likely that none of this would’ve happened. But a combined hunger for growth and a lack of any natural predators means that big tech no longer knows how to make competitive, useful products, and thus can only see what their competitors are doing and say “uhhh, yeah! That’s what the big thing is!” Mark Zuckerberg was once so disconnected from Meta’s work on AI that he literally had no idea of the AI breakthrough Sundar Pichai complimented him about in a meeting mere months before Meta’s own obsession with AI truly began. None of these guys have any idea what’s going on! And why are they having these chummy meetings? These aren’t competitors! They’re co-conspirators! These companies are too large, too unwieldy, too disconnected, and do too much. They lack the focus that makes a truly competitive business, and lack a cohesive culture built on solving real human or business problems. These are not companies built for anything other than growth — and none of them, not even Apple, have built something truly innovative and life-changing in the best part of a decade, with the exception, perhaps, of contactless payments. These companies are run by rot economists and have disconnected, chaotic cultures full of petty fiefdoms where established technologists are ratfucked by management goons when they refuse to make their products worse for a profit. There is a world where these companies just make a billion dollars a quarter and they don't have to fire people every quarter, one where these companies actually solve real problems, and make incredibly large amounts of money for doing so. The problem is that they’re greedy, and addicted to growth, and incapable of doing anything other than following the last guy who had anything approaching a monetizable idea, the stench of Jack Welch wafting through every boardroom.

5 August 2024

#ai #artificial intelligence #silicon valley

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alexanderwales · 8 months ago

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My current worldbuilding project is a superhero thing. I will probably not write anything set in this setting, but I like the worldbuilding of it all, marking down major events, names and places, imagining the people and how they react to what's happening around them.

I'm drawn to kitchen sink settings like a moth to flame, but I've abandoned the idea of having a true kitchen sink, one that actually has everything. Instead, we'll have a kitchen sink that has a little bit of everything, but which does not contain a near-infinity of power sources and concepts.

So there are a single kind of aliens. There are fairies, with their Crocus Court, but they're all of a single breed, or at most three. We have wizards who get their specialties from the same foundational base. There are technologists, who are pushing into the future, and some time travelers who are coming from both the future and the past, and maybe twelve other things. But then that's it. We have a tightly contained kitchen sink, one that sprawls but is very limited, and should probably be described some other way than kitchen sink. Maybe "genre orgy".

I'm still noodling whether this approach will bear fruit. Aside from the kitchen sink being a staple of comic book continuities, part of the aim is to plunge straight at the heart of the overwhelming nature of the information age and to a lesser extent, globalization and multiculturalism.

You see a woman with butterfly wings at the grocery store and you know fuck all about butterfly-winged people and you just sort of roll with it, not actually your business, but there's a part of you that thinks "man, do I need to be learning about butterfly-winged people?" But this sort of thing happens so often that you're just left with a feeling of alienation, and you rarely find any kind of lasting illumination on why there are guys with freeze rays holding up a blood bank, or why everyone suddenly cares a lot about a famous couple that you've never heard of before.

(It's been pointed out to me that I wrote a kitchen sink setting for Worth the Candle, and hopefully this isn't a retread of some kind, but it's mostly just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, seeing where the seams are, where the best stories sit within it, what the setting might be trying to say to me.)

#worldbuilding

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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Children have long played a symbolic role in a debate that was carried out far over their actual heads. For everyone who saw them as the ultimate affirmation of life itself, someone else saw our treatment of them as reason to despair. The poet Philip Larkin wrote, “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf. / Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.” It didn’t much matter. Most people went ahead and had them anyway.

It seems as if we might now be transforming an old and insoluble philosophical conflict into an empirical experiment with real stakes. Sometimes it seems as though we’re in a hurry to do so. The fertility-rate culture war wields children as symbolic extensions of ourselves. People look to the birth rate as an index of what is normal, and no one is safe from the dread of judgment. Conservatives with large families fear they are seen as zoo animals. Liberals without children fear they are seen as selfish careerists or libertines. This may not just be a consequence of the fertility decline; it might be intensifying it. Children could survive being yoked to the value of humanity as a whole. It feels much more perilous to treat them as instruments of our own identities.

Children are variables in our lives. But they are also strange birds of their own. Religious people talk about them as carriers of the divine spark, technologists as messengers from the future. Secular humanists are content to mumble something about the imagination. In any case, they should probably be prevented from sticking their fingers into sockets or setting fire to our homes. But we might otherwise trust them to figure out what they mean, or how to mean it. We might stand before them as models of humility and ambivalence. It is not fair for us, as individual parents or as a society, to expect them to bear the weight of our certainties. They are, after all, just children.

The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

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berrypass-de-murdler · 4 months ago

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3 - 23 Terror at TekCo Tower

Technologist Turquoise, I'm not super proud of him lol

An 8-foot-long dragon who was artificially created through a computer. As such, his knowledge is limited to computers and ONLY computers. And he has a few programming errors, so he often freezes - which is really bad considering his precise job.

DON'T READ THE EPISODES WITHOUT READING THE BOOKS!!

Logico has a burning migraine. It’s all because of TekCo Futures! He hates this place, and wants to leave immediately. So he bolts. Running frantically like a maniac, he wonders if there is an exit. After all, he didn’t come here by choice…

Eventually, after a sickening trip through a spiral elevator (why??), he sees a photo of the CEO - one of the scariest things he’s ever seen. Looking out the window, it turns out he accidentally went up in the elevator instead of down! (It was impossible to tell with the vertigo.) And now he’s stuck in TekCo Tower.

OLIVE: Looking for something…

Logico screams and tries to run downstairs. It’s an impossible moving staircase that just brings him back where he was.

LOGICO: I HATE THIS PLACE!!

Olive reappears in front of him.

OLIVE: So did they.

They mean the body, but Logico is startled to see Grayscale the cardboard man.

GRAYSCALE: It’s Deductive Logico. LOGICO: You work here?

A slow zoom-in on Grayscale’s nonexistent face as distant screaming and shredding is heard.

GRAYSCALE: Yes. This is my job. I work here.

How can he be so patronizing, without any inflection in his voice? Logico sees a new person who looks much, much friendlier than most of the staff here. He’s playing golf with a plastic cup.

LOGICO: Excuse me… PERSON: Hello! LOGICO: Do you know where the exit is? PERSON: Hm… no, I don’t think so. I’m only the computer ethicist. LOGICO: This place has an ETHICIST? GRAYSCALE: I thought you solved murders.

Logico growls. He hates Grayscale. And Olive. But maybe this other man can still be of help.

LOGICO: So… you are… PERSON: My name is Lemon. They don’t give me much work around here, so I find ways to pass the time. LOGICO: Figures.

Logico sees a muffin on the table, and realizes how hungry he is. He definitely didn’t eat anything during investor dinner.

LOGICO: Do you mind? I haven’t eaten in a while… LEMON: Oh no, not that one! It’s poisoned! LOGICO: … LEMON: I was saving it for the boss when he comes around!

And just like that, he’s proven insane too. Logico smacks himself. He should know by now that no one can ever be trusted.

Speaking of which, where is Irratino? He fell asleep, and when he wakes up, Logico isn’t there.

IRRATINO: Logico? HEY, LOGICO! LOGICO!!

He screams again when he runs into Olive, who is directly in front of him now.

OLIVE: You’re in my space. IRRATINO: I’ve been here for an hour! OLIVE: GET

Irratino runs and hides. He sees them bring out an envelope and count money, and is reminded of yesterday with their giant bag. Why does Olive have so much money??

Logico meanwhile is concerned about why Grayscale has a golden pen, as Lord Lavender had previously made it very clear that it was two-of-a-kind.

LOGICO: Where did you get that?? That’s supposed to be two-of-a-kind! GRAYSCALE: I know. I stole it from Lord Lavender. LOGICO: HOW? GRAYSCALE: It wasn’t easy, and he killed me for it. But I was printed out again. I can never die.

That's a horrifying thought. Logico waddles over to the glowing stone in the corner.

GRAYSCALE: No, you can’t go there. LOGICO: Why? Because the person you killed is there? GRAYSCALE: I am sorry, but I was just doing the books. That individual was costing the company more than he was bringing us in revenue, and so I had to have him killed. It was nothing personal. LOGICO: Look I don’t actually care… GRAYSCALE: But about the glowing stone, it doesn’t generate any income, but don’t you appreciate its… spiritual enrichment? Doesn’t it make you feel good?

Logico looks at it and feels like his throat is full of spiders. It reminds him of the Ancient Ruins.

LOGICO: No.

Irratino continues to search the building.

IRRATINO: LOGICO!! WHERE ARE YOU?!

The end!

Grayscale is kind of terrifying

Damn this book is shoving a lot more new characters to me than book 2, careful what you wish for ig lol

The power of Goat Lord compels you!

See you next time murdlers!

#murdle #cartoonmurdleverse

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radiophd · 2 months ago

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youtube

caustic wound -- technologist hell future

#2929s #metal #death metal #mtv #caustic wound

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beardedmrbean · 1 month ago

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Did you hear that Chanel is giving grant money to CalArts to fund some kind of LLM/AI art initiative.

I had not until just now. I thought they were smart, how did they spell LLAMA wrong like that is the big question.

Let's go with the CalArts story on their gift.

[April 24, 2025 – Valencia, Calif.] California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the CHANEL Culture Fund together announce the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology at CalArts, a visionary initiative that positions artists at the forefront of shaping the evolving technologies that define our world. The Center will provide students, faculty, and visiting fellows across the creative disciplines access to leading-edge equipment and software, allowing artists to explore and use new technologies as tools for their work. Creating opportunities for collaboration and driving innovation across disciplines, the initiative creates the conditions for artists to play an active role in developing the use and application of these emergent technologies.

The Center builds on CalArts’ legacy as a cross-disciplinary school of the arts, where experimentation in visual arts, music, film, performing arts, and dance has been nurtured since the institution’s founding. In this unprecedented initiative, artists will be empowered to use technology to shape creativity across disciplines—and, ultimately, to envision a better world.

Funded by a five-year, transformative gift from the CHANEL Culture Fund, the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology establishes CalArts as the hub of a new ecosystem of arts and technology. The CHANEL Center will foster research, experimentation, mentorship, and the creation of new knowledge by connecting students, faculty, artists, and technologists—the thinkers and creators whose expertise and vision will define the future—with new technology and its applications. It will also activate a network of institutions throughout Southern California and beyond, linking museums, universities, and technology companies to share resources and knowledge.

The CHANEL Center at CalArts will also serve as a hub for the exchange of knowledge among artists and experts from CHANEL Culture Fund’s signature programs—including more than 50 initiatives and partnerships established since 2020 that support cultural innovators in advancing new ideas. Visiting fellows and artists will be drawn both from CalArts’ sphere and from the agile network of visionary creators, thinkers, and multidisciplinary artists whom CHANEL has supported over the past five years—a network that includes such luminaries as Cao Fei, Arthur Jafa, William Kentridge, and Jacolby Satterwhite. The CHANEL Center will also host an annual forum addressing artists’ engagement with emerging technologies, ensuring that knowledge gained is knowledge shared.

The Center’s funding provides foundational resources for equipment; visiting experts, artists, and technologists-in-residence; graduate fellowships; and faculty and staff with specific expertise in future-focused research and creation. With the foundation of the CHANEL Center, CalArts empowers its students, faculty, and visiting artists to shape the future through transformative technology and new modes of thinking.

The first initiative of its kind at an independent arts school, the CHANEL Center consists of two areas of focus: one concentrating on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, and the other on Digital Imaging. The project cultivates a multidisciplinary ecosystem—encompassing visual art, music, performance, and still, moving, projected, and immersive imagery—connecting CalArts and a global network of artists and technologists, other colleges and universities, arts institutions, and industry partners from technology, the arts, and beyond. ____________________________________-

I wish they'd write this kind of stuff in English.

Legendary art school California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) will soon be home to a major high-tech initiative funded by luxury brand Chanel’s Culture Fund. Billed as the first initiative of its kind at an independent art school, the Chanel Center for Artists and Technology will focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as digital imaging. While they aren’t disclosing the dollar amount of the grant, the project will fund dozens of new roles as well as fellowships for artists and technologists-in-residence and graduate students along with cutting-edge equipment and software.

That's easier to understand I think.

Interesting.

#anonymous

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theresattrpgforthat · 2 years ago

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I really enjoy the Technomancers from Shadowrun, especially with the whole innate ability to connect to the wireless Matrix without augmentations and expensive hacking tablet. As fun (for me, not the characters) as it is for technomancers to be the central boogeyman that all the megacorporations are rounding up, it can be a bit disheartening that technomancers are treated like parayas, both in and out of game, with technos existence is basically illegal in the world, and long time wired matrix fans not liking them and the wireless Matrix because of the complex rules and lore in our world.

Do you think you got any games that have something similar to the Technomancers from Shadowrun, especially the ones from the later editions, since technomancers was more of a colloquial term for hackers instead of the mystical cyber wizard hackers.

Also, I'm more looking for hacker vibes with a side of mysticism rather than "Merlin emailed you a Fireball," but if you are feeling cheeky about it, both are good. :3

Theme: Hacking (with Magic!)

Hello friend. I tried to approach this request from a couple of different directions, so I can't guarantee that the following suggestions are exactly what you're looking for. I tried to approach this from both the sci-fantasy and cyberpunk routes. I hope that there's something in this collection that you can pick up and play around with!

Into the Glowlands, by Laika Small Press.

Into the Glowlands is a game of expeditions and delving in the Glowlands, the hellish tundra of a fallen world. Wielding blades, spells and half-understood technology, venture into the freezing wastes and see what treasures you can return with, while surviving the cold, radiation and the eternal war of the Glowlands' murderous machine armies.

Into the Glowlands combines a quick roll resolution system based on combining your character's Aspects, in an entirely new d20-based dice engine called the Aspect Engine. This is designed to allow players and GMs to play an in intuitive and smooth way, with quick tactical combat and deep character customisation. It is a post-apocalyptic, science fantasy strategy RPG for fans of Ironsworn, Best Left Buried, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Lancer.

Into the Glowlands harks to many recognizable tropes within high fantasy, but re-contextualizes them in a technological post-apocalypse. Judging by the SRD, it looks like magic is available to all characters, regardless of what class you take. There’s a class called the Holographist, which cam create illusions using a substance that exists within most bodies, and there’s also a Technologist, which wields technology and magic together - and has access to something called technomancy. This looks to be a special class of spells. If you like tactical games about combat and strategy, Into The Glowlands might be your cup of tea.

199X: INFEST, by Thursday Garreau.

In the year 199X, the Z-TEK Industrial/Habitation District was walled off from the outside world - apparently a terrible nuclear accident with complete fatalities, swiftly forgotten. The truth is far stranger: a malign cult tore a breach between our world and the home dimension of the psychic parasites they revere, prompting the use of an experimental atomic weapon and a total quarantine of all survivors. Life endures in RAD ZONE 1… but those that rise above the ashes may be something more than human.

This is a future where megabytes are precious and lives are cheap.

199X: INFEST is an apocalyptic cyberpunk microgame using Jason Tocci's 24XX system. You play as mercenaries and scavengers within Rad Zone 1, tackling Jobs with your wits, salvaged technology mutant Twists, and psychic Powers. Clash against corporate kill-teams raiding the quarantine zone, hateful zealots on a petty crusade, vicious bandit warlords, and the cultists of phantasmal alien Bugs.

INFEST is more about a post-apocalyptic dystopia then it is specifically about hacking, but it has a character option called Relay, which gives you the ability to talk to machines. 24XX games are pretty lightweight, so don’t expect a lot of complexity in terms of how this plays out - your basically get a bit of a better chance into getting machines to do what you want, while other characters are turning invisible or zapping the technology around them. You might be able to combine the options in INFEST with the character options in its sister game, 199X: SHUTDOWN, which is created by the same author and meant to be combined with their other 199X games. SHUTDOWN has a Phreaker character option that improves your hacking - although most of the loot you’d be interested in needs to be connected in some way.

Cryptomancer, by Land_of_NOP.

Cryptomancer is a tabletop role-playing game made for hackers, by hackers. It features an original fantasy setting and gameplay informed by diverse security disciplines. Players assume the role of characters on the run from a shadowy organization that rules the world through mass surveillance, propaganda, and political coercion.

This is a game in which a fantastical world has its own version of the internet, and the methods your characters use to maintain secrecy and privacy are allegorical to the ways you can keep yourself safe on the internet in real life. Designed by hackers, this game was designed to educate even the non-internet-literate about internet safety. In terms of the lore, the ability to connect to each-other through the Shardscape does require shard-gems, but any character can use these gems. This is a fresh new take on both fantasy and technology, and I think it definitely merits checking out!

SYZYGY, by Ostrichmonkey Games. (@ostrichmonkey-games)

SYZYGY is a rules-light role playing game where players take on the roles of wandering, exploring, Mendicants in a vibrant science fantasy world.

This is a two-page ashcan of weird science fantasy, that makes tech akin to magic in many ways. All of the characters will have some ability to channel, which gives them access to the artifacts and energy that pass for technology in this setting. The designer cites Destiny, Nausicaa, and Hyper Light Drifter as inspirations for this one. I like that having access to channelling isn’t reserved for a specific character here - all of your characters have the ability to do it, it’s just a question of what they’re using their abilities for. There’s also something called The Strange - paracausal energy, ancient technological ruins, god-machines - all of which can change the landscape and the stakes for your characters.

If you want a light toolbox to play around with, I recommend checking out SYZYGY.

#tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #dnd #game recommendations #asks #technomancy #cyberpunk

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