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eldritchsurveys · 5 years

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559.

Would you feel funny if you kissed somebody of the same sex? >> I’d feel funny if I kissed anyone outworld, not because of their sex but because I don’t normally do that.

Name three things in your room that other probably don't have in theirs: >> A small pillow with art of Fenris from Dragon Age on it, a Kyuubey plushie, and a bunch of Ayn Rand books.

What's your best jacket like? >> The one I wear the most is hard for me to describe. It’s long-ish (mid-thigh length) and black and fits snugly at the torso but flares out a bit at the bottom. It’s very cute.

If your best friend grabs your hand, what do you automatically do? >> ---

What's something you can cook or bake like a pro? >> I don’t know.

Do you have plans for tonight? >> Just the weekly meetup at Cafe Boba.

Do you tend to flirt a lot, even when the person isn't single? >> I don’t flirt at all.

What deodorant do you wear? >> Dove something-something invisible something.

If you could pull off any hairstyle, what would it look like? >> I could pull off a lot of hairstyles, though...

What is the worst thing that happened so far today? >> Uh... I can’t even think of anything facetious to say. Nothing even remotely bad happened today.

Did that ruin your day? >> ---

What's something good you're looking forward to? >> Going to Bronner’s (the year-round Christmas store in Frankenmuth) tomorrow.

Besides furniture, what's the biggest thing in your bedroom? >> Er... nothing in my room is even remotely big aside from the furniture.

Name three things that are the colour of your fave colour: >> My favourite colour is gold, so I was just like... gold bars... gold coins... lmao.

Do you diet and exercise regularly? >> No. I hate the concept of dieting and exercise is the most un-fun thing I can think to do with my time and I can never make myself do it as a result.

What's something that you think is really cute?

Would you rather donate time, blood, or money? >> Time. I can’t donate blood anyway, my iron’s always too low.

Why are hugs so great? >> I don’t know, I can’t access that part of human nature.

Do you think fashion models are bizarre or beautiful? >> I don’t really... neither of these adjectives apply, for me. I don’t think much about the models, I’m always looking at the clothes.

Describe your feet: >> They’re just feet, bro.

Do you ever stop to think that things could be a lot worse than it is? >> Yeah, it sometimes helps to shake me out of my tunnel vision. Not always, though.

What's a pretty bird? >> Er... what isn’t a pretty bird, really? Birds are just pretty.

Besides sleeping, what do you do in bed? >> Almost everything, because I don’t have a chair in my room.

If you see somebody crying, do you start crying too? >> Nope.

Is the last person you called attractive? >> ---

Are you comfortable naked? >> No.

What does your name mean? >> I’ve answered this enough.

How do you like your hoodies? >> Big and soft and with a substantial hood.

Have you ever hacked into somebody's account? >> No.

Do you get complimented on your looks or personality more? >> I don’t get complimented often enough to have a data set.

Is having to pee really badly worse than being really thirsty? >> I don’t know???

Were you a cute baby? >> I suppose.

What do your nails look like? >> I don’t know... they just look like nails...?

Are you talking to anybody right now? >> No.

Have you ever touched a Qu'ran? >> Yeah, I own one.

Can grills be sexy on a guy? >> I don’t like them.

Are braces cute? >> Not to me.

Do you love animals more than most? >> No, most people love animals way more than I do.

How tall are your tallest socks? >> Only up to mid-calf.

What's in your belly right now? >> Er... water... and I guess whatever remains of lunch.

Which of your friends is the cutest? >> ---

Which of your friends makes you laugh the hardest? >> ---

Why do you eat fastfood? >> When I do, it’s because I’ve gotten hungry enough that my executive function is not going to allow me to acquire anything more complicated than a $2 cheeseburger that I can grab in five minutes. (Generally, I prefer to avoid fast food, but it sometimes is the past of least resistance.)

What's something good that's on your mind right now? >> Nothing is really on my mind right now.

#surveys #survey #random survey

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years

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Beyond the Coming Age of Networked MatterBy Bruce Sterling

I wasn’t too chuffed about the weird changes I saw in my favorite start-up guy. Crawferd was a techie I knew from my circuit: GE Industrial Internet, IBM Smart Cities, the Internet-of-Things in Hackney hackathons. The kind of guy I thought I understood.

I relied on Crawferd to deliver an out-there networked-matter pitch to my potential investors. He was great at this, since he was imaginative, inventive, fearless, tireless, and he had no formal education. Crawferd wore unlaced Converse shoes and a lot of Armani. He had all the bumbling sincerity of a Twitter Arab Spring.

Crawferd could see no difference between physics and metaphysics. The way he had it figured, all matter was code. If you suggested that his trippy hacker mysticism was not entirely plausible—that rocks were rocks and trees were trees, they weren’t “networks”— he’d brood at length, then chase you from the hackerspace, slam the door, and blog compulsively.

Given his deep unworldliness and his intense interior life, Crawferd was a pretty easy guy for me to manage. We got along okay, while Sophia and Fatima totally loved Crawferd. S&F were my two wealthy oil widows from Dubai. Their Gulf State pin money had to go somewhere that wasn’t Cyprus or Bitcoins.

So for a while things were cozy. I’d arrange funding brunches in Gstaad, where Fatima and Sophia went skiing. I’d wheel in Mr. California Ideology while they had their mint tea and shared the hookah. The sparks would fly.

Crawferd was cool about Sophia and Fatima. He never asked them for much, and he always brought them nifty digital fitness toys. All tech chicks kind of dug Crawferd. He had this spooky geek tenderness, a possibly sensual, my bits-might-turn-to-atoms thing going on.

So S&F hung on his every word, but the truth was, the guy simply didn’t know how to cash in. He was all sci-fi and no megacorp.

Then he missed a couple of gigs and he stopped updating on LinkedIn. I was busy helping Microsoft waste some Kinect money, so I didn’t bother him.

Then I breezed through Palo Alto and he spotted me on Foursquare. He shot me a mysterious, incoherent SMS full of sick Tweet orthographics. “W3 sh4ll overl4p time, space, and dimensions,

and with0ut bodily motion, peer to the .”

I got rid of that thing pronto. I always erase after reading, my lawyer taught me that. But seeing his freaked message, I took good care to meet him F2F.

Crawferd was lurking and had gone very downside-scenario. He had tinfoiled all the windows inside a nameless AirBnB, which he’d rented from some shivering TumblrGoth who was way into, like, black candles, inverted pentagrams, and big plastic 3Dprinted gargoyles.

Fancy LED lights in Shapeways Nervous-System lamps were segueing through every color in the spectrum, while Soundcloud was streaming the shriekiest works of Grimes.

This was not his customary scene, and I further perceived that my man Crawferd had shed several kilos, dyed his hair pastel, and failed to shave. He kept compulsively stroking the filthy screen of his Chinese-knockoff fondleslab.

“Buzz, old buddy,” he croaked at me, “it used to upset me, because I couldn’t deliver a massive breakthrough in the networked- matter space. I talked a great game sometimes. But I couldn’t execute. But now I’m so freaked out! Yes! Freaky from success! I have networked matter!”

Crawferd had this thousand-mile killer-drone stare now, and also that rigid, pedantic, coder tone of voice, that grammar-nazi thing you see mostly on Ayn Rand websites.

My deliverable seemed clear to me: reduce fever, resume chill, and restore functionality.

“Crawferd, pal, listen up. You’ve been way overdoing it in an overheated tech scene. I’ve got your back, and I’m thinking Oahu. There’s this cool yoga-hula ashram out there, no Internet connectivity, no cell-phone bars, nothing. Some exercise, brown rice, and vitamin B, and you’ll be the old Crawferd in no time.”

“Buzz, this matter is about matter. We see matter because we’re constructed from matter. We imagine we’re made from matter because all we can measure with our network sensors is a narrowly materialistic set of inputs. But that is not the cosmic truth, Buzz. A new science underlies ‘matter.’ It’s about a cellular- automata framework in which all material manifestations are computationally equivalent.”

I’d seen these sad symptoms in other guys like him. My fave Californian tech boy had gone straight off the ledge into full Erik Davis techgnosis. “Oahu’s just hours away. Beaches, blue sky, maybe a sweet, understanding hippie lady with some pakalolo.”

“I have found the grail for the coming age of networked matter, Buzz. I have seized its Philosopher’s Stone. I have found a way to transform all matter into network.”

“Why?” I said.

He got that look on his face. “What do you mean, ‘why’?”

“Where is my user benefit? Where is the business model? You can’t get VC backers for that scheme! That is pure Tim Leary mystic woo-woo! You’re a coder, Crawferd. I can hear crap like that from L.A. screenwriters.”

“Do I look like I’m handwaving at you? I have built a freaking demo! I can run it for you, right here, off my phablet.”

Crawferd was a proud and touchy fanatic, but then again, so was Steve Jobs. You can take one fatal step too far into the Reality Distortion Field, and all the typewriters will vanish. They don’t come back, either. “So, what does your demo, uh, demo?”

“You remember those two Maker kids? The ones I had hacking those beehives for me?”

I remembered his interns, all right. Two cute Millennial designer kids. Their names escaped me, but she was, like, very Kevin Kelly techno-emergence, while he was very Jussi Parikka insect media. They were Crawferd’s start-up slaves. Being Makers, they worked around the clock without a salary, just like bees did.

“Your beehive kids,” I said.

“Great design research team! They went deep into the bee ‘umwelt,’ that sensory world of bees that only bees can perceive. Bees are intensely illustrative of matter-networking principles. Bees scarcely have brains, yet they still assemble and congeal all the nectar and pollen within a given area.”

“So that’s your demo? It’s bees? Cut to the chase! Where’s the humming and stinging?”

“That’s not my demo yet . . . but here, look what they did on

Kickstarter. You’ll appreciate this.”

Crawferd caressed his cruddy little “phablet”—man, I really hate that word—and there they were, Crawferd’s two favorite Maker kids. Nicely dressed up in black and yellow bee-themed cosplay duds, with that embedded video that crowdfunding projects always do.

“Hi there, people of the Internet! I’m Adrienne, a graphic interface designer from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and this is Julio, my coder and Significant Other!”

There followed ninety seconds of jerky handheld from Adrienne’s iPhone. Her pitch was all about the graphic interfaces through which bees perceive and manipulate matter. Bee sensors, mostly, their compound eyes, antennae, and their big tonguey mandibles.

Then Julio horned in, to vlog about the bee-code running on their tiny bee brains.

Bee brains lacked much processing power. Just enough hardware in there to run a high-level bee-dance language where the bees could clue each other in about tasty matter resources. Adrienne had mocked this system up on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Julio had coded it with open-source modules.

Then they’d created these 3Dprinted plastic “bee puppets.” Their fake plastic Maker bees were, like, awesomely effective at bee dancing. Their robot bees, set dancing by Arduino, were basically Trojan Bees. They had gotten root in the hive. They had powned the hive colony superorganism. Those bees would do whatever the hackers wanted.

“Their bee-swarm pitch is out of this world!” I told Crawferd. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen this idea before!”

The Maker kids ramped up to their triumphant climax. Being new to California, they’d noticed all the window-box marijuana plants. They’d hacked their bees to go out to forage for dope pollen.

They showed the camera their existence proof: a double fistful of honey-drenched Silicon Valley hashish.

Then little Adrienne and Julio modestly asked the public for twenty grand to go 3Dprint some beehives, so they could issue some royal-jelly marijuana prescriptions. A business-model screwup that was total facepalm. Of course their Kickstarter had exploded. Just gone ballistic. It had blown past twelve million USD in capital and was heading north at high speed.

“You have created a monster,” I told Crawferd. “I can see why you’re so upset now. This is not even funny. Where are those crazy kids? They’re gonna need to lawyer up.”

“They’re no longer with me,” muttered Crawferd. “That’s the bad part. That’s why I’m hiding in here.”

“So where’d they run off to?”

Read the rest:

https://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/bruce-sterling-from-beyond.html

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ramrodd · 5 years

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Watch the Longest Pause in the History of Trumpian Speech

COMMENTARY:

This is why he isn’t going to get a trade deal before 2020 unless he keeps his promise to Chairman Kim to get a GI haircut like Elvis. This is typical of the sort of flim-flam the “Art of the Deal” represents.. This is doing business with Duck Ass Don writ large. Chairman Kim is ready to give away the ranch in order to move forward towards a United Nations radified DPRK-ROK peace treaty and a collaboration with President Moon on a political re-configuration on the pensisual along the lines of the Articles of Confederation of the American States, like an old-fashioned Native America confab.

And the only thing standing in the way is the vanity of Donald Duck Ass. He wants to try to finesse the promise and get the deal through intimidation and unilateral childishness.

Here’s the thing: Sarah Palin was the best thing John McCain did. She was the GOP’s AOC 14 years before the fact, but Steve Bannon fucked with her mind the way he fucks with everybody’s mind that buy his jive shit. As a result, Sarah Paln has become comic relief as a third-tier GOP celebrity available when you can’t get Laura Ingraham and you need someone with bigger balls than Tucker Carlson or Rich Lowry.

This episode is why Mueller could verify there has been no collusion between Duck Ass Don and Putin, because, as a prospective business partner, the Kremlim has always seen him as a joke. The people he did business with in Moscow to stage the Miss Universe Pageant are not connected to Putin as a direct result of Peristroika, Glasnoss and Yeltsin’s de-Socialization 1992. The Oligarchs are a result of this de-Socialization reforms and there are different factions of these people which I couldn’t begin to sort out, but I do know that there is a strong criminal element generally recognized as the Russian Klepocracy and these people are the Russians who hacked the intellectual property from the Clinton campaign Duck Ass Don employed to game the Electoral College. That part was all ME! in terms of responsibility, authority, implementation, motive, intent and design. But he could not have done it with the Big Data he was using. His immersion in ratings told him something was there, but Clinton’s analytics presented a stark gestalt and here we are today.

As a private businessman, Trump’s assertion that there is nothing wrong with listening is absolutely essential to a healthy commerical milieu. America business is all collusion, all the time, It takes collusion to make a market in anything. Go back to either Marx’s or Ray Dalio’s version of transaction theory, and collusion is an apparent structure of the dynamic. Ayn Rand repeats this as a mantra about 6 times in Atlas Shrugged, As a private businessperson, he is really talking about business as usual. In Schnidler’s List, the Jewsh businessmen meet in a Catholic church so they can do the sort of networking merchantile capitalism requires. That’s why Am-Way flourishes: they are constantly going to Am-Way networking opportunities.ou

Here’s the thing: if you are doing international, you are an intelligence cluster to all the governments you pass through, even if you aren’t consciously and/or purposefully, gathering intelligence. And the kind of things you just hear in the VIP louges of airports slops over very quickly into conspiracy as the occasion arises. When I was doing business with the Soviets, I debriefed the CIA, including, William Colby, a number of times. The FBI didn’t show much interest: at the time, there wasn’t much crime coming out of the Soviet Bloc. There was a lot going on, but it was very subterranian at that time.

That’s changed and it appears that POTUS didn’t get the memo.

Everything Donald Duck Ass does is just perfectly typical of the Harvard-trained Fortune 500 CEO-level executive. They may not be as lame about the FBI as Trump, but nobody calls the FBi except as a last resort.

That all changes when you start getting paid by the federal govenment for constitutional services. This is something that has been lost on Mitch McConnell and the House Freedom Caucus, but that’s something we can fix at the ballot box in 2020.

Just for the record, the tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf are false-flag operations. The only people who want a war with Iran are John Bolton, Jared Kushner and Bibi Netanyahu https://tinyurl.com/y633x5ae. Steve Bannon’s finger prints are all over this turmoil and the “Under the Umbrella” movement in Hong Kong. And, just for the record, President Xi is wise to reject any trade deal put together by Lighthizer and Navarro, who are stooges for Steve Bannon’s ambition to dismantle the administrative state.

I’m just saying.

#transformingamericafirst

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anthonybialy · 5 years

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Left the Right

Watching two unpleasant sides slap fight should be entertaining. We want to root for handprints. But the best sorts of rumbles feature a clear virtuous gang. Observers would ideally want to join in to help force out hoodlums. Both wannabe toughs harass local merchants.

These particularly joyous political times feature two cabals of conservatives arguing about who’s obeying Reagan's ghost. The answer is neither, which should provide them relief. But each seems to take comfort in bickering about how they're wrong. Both may as well claim to have been the subject of an Adele song.

Neither band cares about punching government down to its proper size, which means we're only one short. Don't bother telling participants, as they won't be able to hear you over the taunting. Their lame shots should be way more entertaining: you'd think people who aspire to nothing more than hating the other cave's residents could come up with better taunts.

The warring gangs disagree about everything but what actually matters in these delightful times of anger over nothing. The Seinfeld of political disputes features all of the opposition to learning with none of George's madcap schemes to avoid work.

Voters enjoy two fantastic distinct choices. Those who know we have a Constitution and support adhering to it enjoy a wide range of both parties trying to destroy their beliefs. There's refreshing news for anyone noticing the fake boasting tough guy who's commandeered the side once sort-of known for pretending to care about limiting government has dispensed entirely with that pretense.

You may either align with Democrats or with a longtime Democrat who's worked hard to prove he's still loyal to something. I wish it could be something other than keeping mandates in place.

Professional quasi-Republican critics of this obnoxious boor of a president are the only people more unpleasant than him. Did they mean to establish a scale?

The least elite elites somehow taint the phrase Never Trump, which should be tougher than cutting government. But the most unpleasant snobs neglected to realize arrogance is no better if in the form of sucking up to Democratic candidates instead of slapping your name in gold on every surface. Oh, and someone in the quasi-Republican resistance should've remembered they were supposed to offer a conservative alternative.

Instead, many alleged conservatives indignant about the incumbent's deviations not only vow to support whichever dull Democratic fool who hasn't learned by 2020 that socialism kills economies and humans but seem enthusiastic about vowing to take over the economy and your life. That's not what we meant by being principled.

Government expands like Trump's professional bankruptcies. You can spot those who totally aren't just partisan hacks by how they cheer for China's potential tariff reductions that bring us closer to the trade we had before all the unnecessary pain of a macho trade war led by a general who thinks humiliating foes is commerce's goal. It's certainly not to create useful products.

We must establish just how we're going to let the state choose for us. Being divided over personality shows just how unserious politics has become in case you thought it couldn't get more so. There couldn't have been a worse alternative to challenge orthodoxy, unless you feel boasting about toughness means not having to do anything tough. Bullies are always compensating for cowardice.

It's totally in the spirit of limited Washington to trust power as long as it's held by the preferred handsome strongman. This benevolent strongman will treat you differently from all the others. Why wouldn't you trust someone who's not a politician except for how he's president?

The only thing missing from the debate over who’s really conservative is conservatism. The Bulwark clique is a bit too eager to vote for whoever the nominee is. Guess which party.

Meanwhile, the president's liberal-bashing militia shrieks at those wearing different logos to distract from how often they agree with their mortal enemy. Guys, you all want to grow government at a rate faster than the Millennium Falcon. Are style points really worth such division?

Both combative preservers of the American experiment are cool with expanding our appalling administrative state. In fact, you'd think purported Ayn Rand devotees were fighting to show they're better at wasting your money. Those wearing red hats without irony taunt about the alternative, as voting for the closest thing to socialism is how the Democratic tribe thinks they'll beat their top villain. Massive debt is cool as long as it’s spurred into existence under a Republican.

It's not like these troglodytic sides each believe in nothing. Of course, the only principle is hating the other side. At least pure enmity is in tune with the state of everything. The black hole of nastiness means the Trump-adulating side prevailed, as both factions preen about principle while actually adhering to none of what they claim.

Politics have never been more usual. That outsider sure loves signing anything that increases wasting your money by law on your behalf. There's a notable lack of resistance on policy when personality is at the forefront. Oh, right: the government sucks at things.

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theattainer · 5 years

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This Question Will Change Your (Reading) Life

http://theattainer.com/this-question-will-change-your-reading-life/

This Question Will Change Your (Reading) Life

When I was a teenager, I began a habit that would change the course of my entire life. I don’t mean to overstate it — it was simple, just a question I would ask the people I met — but without it, I’m not sure who I would have turned out to be.

Every time I would meet a successful or important person I admired, I would ask them: What’s a book that changed your life?* And then I would read that book. (In college, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Drew, who was the one who turned me on to Stoicism.)

Who I asked the question to first, or how I came to the habit, I can’t recall, but the results stayed with me. I can reel off the titles of the books that came out of it like they are tattooed on my body:

48 Laws of Power

Meditations

Autobiography of Malcolm X

History of the Peloponnesian War

What Makes Sammy Run?

Man’s Search for Meaning

The question that produced these books as answers was not borne of idle curiosity. It was my way of cutting through a personal conundrum, which was this:

I loved books and was very hungry for the good stuff — what Tyler Cowen has called “quake books.” The ones that shake you. That knock everything over and turn it upside down. But I also understood that there are so many books out there, and only so much time. It was overwhelming.

Which books should I read? Should I read books about physics or books about history or books about self-improvement? And even if I knew the genre I preferred, which authors should I read and why? Should I read new books or old books? The books getting rave reviews or the classics or the ones on the featured table in the front of the store?

I didn’t know. So this question was my hack.

If a book changed someone’s life — whatever the topic or style — it was probably worth the investment. If it changed them, I thought, it might at least help me.

What resulted was a kind of ad-hoc reading list of transformational books and surprise rabbit holes that I would have never expected. Because the books that change people cut across the entire spectrum of intellectual pursuits: philosophy, psychology, literature, poetry, and self-help. The discrete topics of those books, individually, are as varied as the individuals who answered this question.

You could fill up an entire life of reading with just these books and that would be enough.

Literature is the accumulation of painful lessons humans have learned by trial and error.

Eventually, I applied this little trick beyond just people that I met. Whenever I read interviews of interesting people and they mentioned a book that was particularly influential or important to their development, I would buy it.

I didn’t need to be told in person. I didn’t even need to be the one asking the question. (The New York Times By The Book column is a good place to start)

I read an interview where Neil Strauss mentioned John Fante’s Ask the Dust, so I bought it, read it, and fell in love with it… and in reading about John Fante, I learned that he’d been influenced by Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun, so I read both of them. Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton were changed by Plutarch’s Lives (and so were about a million other people across history), so of course, I read it. I heard that Phil Jackson recommended his players read Corelli’s Mandolin, and that Pete Carroll recommends The Inner Game of Tennis. Lots of successful people have reading lists that they either post on their blogs or that their biographers have compiled after their deaths. I made my way through those, too, book by book.

This strategy has led me to some busts, of course. Elon Musk supposedly loves Twelve Against the Gods, but I didn’t quite get what the fuss was about (the used copy I bought cost $139). Entrepreneurs I admired swore by Ayn Rand so I read Atlas Shrugged, but even in my early twenties, I thought it was a bit ridiculous. Tim Ferriss loves Zorba the Greek, but it didn’t do it for me. But even in these books, I got something out of them. I got more out of them than I would have from most of the forgettable titles the New York Times was slating for review or whatever was tearing up the bestseller lists at the moment.

Socrates supposedly said that we should employ our time improving ourselves by other men’s writings, and that in doing so we can “come by easily what others have labored hard for.” Yes. That’s the point of literature — it is the accumulation of the painful lessons humans have learned by trial and error. For 5,000 years we’ve been recording this knowledge in books. The more hard knocks we can avoid by reading them, the better. (This quote, attributed to Mark Twain, says it well: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”)

Not only have we been creating books for thousands of years, but humans — particularly the smart and successful ones — have been reading them for just as long. We’ve been reading on cuneiform tablets, on scrolls, on books created out of stretched animal skins, and now on mass-produced paperbacks and via Audible. Over those centuries, there has been an incredible filtering mechanism working for us, finding and highlighting the books that contain the most wisdom.

That’s why I started asking people for the books that changed their lives. We should seek out the literature that has shaped the people we admire and respect — we can cut down even on the discovery costs of looking for those books. They’ve given us a shortcut to the treasure map.

Everybody seems to want a mentor. Meanwhile, they’re passing up the opportunity to learn directly from the people who taught the people you aspire to be. When someone like John McCain spends his whole life raving about For Whom The Bell Tolls, why would you not check it out? Clearly, it got him through some shit. Peter Thiel credits Rene Girard and Things Hidden Since the Foundation Of the World with shaping his worldview. Clearly, it’s made him some money — you’re not going to pick that up? Angela Merkel — Forbes’ number one most powerful women for 12 of the last 13 years — lists Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite reads. Add them to the list!

We’re trying to filter the good stuff to the top — to upvote it — to make it even more readily available than it was in our own lives.

Every person you admire has influences. They didn’t come out of the womb the way they are now, and it wasn’t only lived experience that contributed to what they know or how they think. Right now, I am reading How The Classics Made Shakespeare… which is literally a book about all the books that taught the greatest playwright who ever lived.

Why not try to find these books? You’re just going to figure it all out on your own? You’re going to just pass on this opportunity for connection? (I’ll tell you, there is nothing people like hearing more than thoughtful questions about their favorite book or author.)

C’mon.

Send an email. Raise your hand and ask a question. Stop by office hours. Dig through old interviews.

Then…

Go to the library. Pull up Amazon and buy the cheapest used copy you can find. “Borrow it” from a friend.

Whatever it takes.

And after these books change you, as wells as other books you discover on your own, you have one important job: You have to pay it forward.

Because that’s what we’re trying to do here — we’re trying to help others learn from the wisdom of other’s experiences. We’re trying to filter the good stuff to the top — to upvote it — to make it even more readily available than it was in our own lives.

That’s why I keep my own list now, of books to base your life on. It’s why I run my reading list newsletter each month. And it’s why I’ll almost always stop, no matter how tired I am or how many emails I have in my inbox, to respond when people ask: What books changed your life? What do you think I should read?

Because it’s the most important question in the world.

* There are other versions of the question you can ask:

“What book do you wish you read earlier in life?”

“What book shaped your career as a _______ more than any other?”

“Is there a book out there that really changed your mind?”

“I’m dealing with ___________ right now; what authors would you recommend on that topic?”

What do you think?

#All #Books

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bitcoinegoldrush · 7 years

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The Satoshi Revolution – Chapter 5: Privacy, Anonymity, and Pseudonymity (Part 1)

Featured

The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations. Section 2 : The Moral Imperative of Privacy Chapter 5: Implementing Crypto Privacy by Wendy McElroy

Privacy, Anonymity, and Pseudonymity (Chapter 5, Part 1)

It is often said that there is a tradeoff between privacy and security…. Security is defined as the state of being free from danger or threat. One threat is assault. How is one made free from assault by being assaulted at an airport?…. How is one made free from the threat of being harassed or charged with a crime by the State by the State’s knowing every move you make, every statement you make, and every financial transaction you make? I say that your security is going DOWN, not up. The State can fend off terrorists by the ordinary methods of policing if it had a mind to. It doesn’t. It prefers to expand into a totalitarian monster. — Mike Rozeff

Privacy will determine the future of cryptocurrencies. Will they continue to enhance individual freedom, or will they become a government tool of social control?

Privacy is a human need, which is why the battle over its control is so intense. Constant surveillance makes it difficult or impossible for individuals to forge intimate family and romantic bonds, to create, to vote their conscience, to sexually explore, to discover who they are politically and religiously, to experiment with drugs, or to dissent without danger. Personal privacy is also the greatest barrier to government power, which rests on government knowledge.

“Only criminals need to fear government surveillance” is a common response to the defense of privacy. But every peaceful person is a criminal with something to hide. Why? They have exceeded the speed limit, taken an illegal drug, smuggled cheap booze or cigarettes across a border, made “unauthorized” additions to a house, fibbed to a customs official, understated their income on a tax form, or violated one of the tens of thousands of other laws that criminalize harmless behavior. Government makes criminals of us all. As Ayn Rand explained, “The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” Thus, all individuals are under control.

The assault on privacy also harms society as a whole. Consider freedom of speech. I remember being in a restaurant when a relative went on a post-9/11 rant about how the U.S. was beginning to feel like Cuba, from which he escaped. His wife tried to silence him, declaring in an adamant whisper, “You can’t say those things in public.” She was nervous as she glanced around to see who could have heard. Surveillance and informants make people reluctant to express opinions that could be used against them in a legal or political manner. Property can be seized, families destroyed, and prison ensue. Why would anyone speak out if his children could lose a parent as a result?

The killing of free speech is one of many political repercussions of destroying privacy. Privacy is a key characteristic that distinguishes a totalitarian, Kafka-esque society from a free one. Can you shut your front door and be safe from invasion? Everyone agrees that criminals should not break through your locks and treat your body and possessions as their own. Why are government agents entitled to do the same thing? They are nothing more than the for-hire workers of an employer whose authority comes because enough people give the employer a thumbs up to invade and steal. They are criminals sanctioned by consensus.

Until recently, many incursions on privacy have been prevented for no other reason than they were difficult to enforce. And, then, technology arrived. Even with its notorious incompetence, government is now able to surveil as never before, and many people have grown afraid or complacent, as the mass frisking at airports proves.

The government assault on privacy benefits from a Big Lie: namely, privacy is now impossible because government surveillance is omnipotent, omniscient. Resistance is futile. Privacy is so last century. Balderdash. First of all, technology has always empowered the individual more than it has the government. Second, there is a world of difference between “difficult” and “impossible.” Privacy is certainly more difficult in the 21st century, which only means it takes work. Individuals need to assert actively what they once could take for granted in order to end the ongoing rape of their data.

What Should You Do?

No one answer exists. How to handle personal information is up to the lifestyle and goals of each individual.

Before answering, however, some distinctions are useful: privacy versus anonymity, for example. Privacy is the ability to keep personal data or activities to yourself; you close the door while using the washroom, for example; the activity is not shameful but neither is it for the world to see. Anonymity is when your activities are transparent to the world but the fact that you are the one acting is not. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, elaborated, “The typical example would be if you want to blow the whistle on abuse of power or other forms of crime in your organization without risking career and social standing in that group, which is why we typically have strong laws that protect sources of the free press. You could also post such data anonymously online through a VPN, the TOR anonymizing network, or both. This is the analog equivalent of the anonymous tip-off letter, which has been seen as a staple diet in our checks and balances.”

Another distinction: there are two types of data — private and public. If data is private – for example, if it is kept behind closed doors or within a limited circle of personal transmissions–then it can remain private. If data is publicly displayed, however, the practical ability to control it is lost. If I discuss my sex life on a public bus, for example, I have no business denouncing a blabby eavesdropper who passes on my experiences. Unfortunately, a great deal of personal data becomes public through no fault of the person it describes. Government vigorously mines information on everyone from birth, and well-meaning parents register children for everything from medical care to government entitlements.

Happily, cryptocurrency transfers are the data under discussion; they combine the best aspects of private and public data. They are protected by encryption and anonymity or pseudonymity, while remaining transparent. This is a new expression of data that needs to be protected in new ways, both from government and from malicious hackers.

The most effective tactics may well be technological, but this article does not address them. The tactics change constantly and quickly in response to government or hacking threats. And, frankly, although some tactics are simple, like spreading assets over a number of wallets, understanding other tactics requires a technological sophistication that I do not possess.

Instead, the article points to variations on privacy strategies that have been used for decades, if not for centuries. Pick and choose, but it may be best to use them all because the regulatory wolves are circling. Here is a sampling:

Obfuscate or “hide in plain sight.” One way for a person to preserve privacy is to be so inconspicuous or subtle that he is almost unnoticeable. Blend in, or become invisible. Sometimes obfuscation involves participating in so much noise that an eavesdropper cannot distinguish your signal from any other. An example might be sending only modest payments across the blockchain so the transactions join with hundreds of thousands of similar others, all of which are of scant interest because of the small amounts. Other times, obfuscation means masking activity through mixers or tumblers that further anonymize transactions. The anonymization carries a risk, however. It can constitute a red flag to eavesdroppers.

Avoid Centralized Exchanges and Other Data Sharing Centers. If a person wants government to have his financial data, then he should just mail it in an envelope to the government. Of course, signing up with an exchange, like Coinbase, saves a stamp. Centralized exchanges are now an arm of the government. Moreover, they carry their own risks, including bankruptcy or other reasons for withholding funds. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for using exchanges; they permit futures trading and other Wall Street niceties, for example. But decentralized exchanges are preferable; exchanges outside the U.S. or other crypto-hostile nations are preferable, as are ones that do claim jurisdiction over private keys. Even then, wealth should be moved in and out as quickly as possible, without allowing the third party to control it for longer than necessary.

Find Discreet Ways to Cash Out. The crypto veteran Kai Sedgwick wrote,

“Bitcoin transactions are semi-anonymous: every transaction on the blockchain is broadcast publicly and visible for all eternity, but the owner of each wallet is unknown. Tying addresses to real-world identities is now relatively easy for the powers-that-be, because everyone has to cash out somewhere, and that usually involves linking bitcoin addresses to bank accounts.” Don’t. As much as possible, deal with people one-on-one. Seek venues that exchange crypto for gift cards to stores you regularly use, such as grocery stores. Be inventive in avoiding the banks and centralized exchanges; they are the “trusted third parties” that Bitcoin was designed to obsolete.

Use a Privacy Currency. Dozens and dozens of private currencies exist, with several being solid. Although most of them use different techniques to preserve privacy, anonymity is a theme. The founder of Zcash explained the philosophy behind that particular privacy currency. “We believe that privacy strengthens social ties and social institutions, protects societies against their enemies, and helps societies to be more peaceful and more prosperous…. A robust tradition of privacy is a common feature in rich and peaceful societies, and a lack of privacy is often found in struggling and failing societies.”

Zip It on Public Forums. Public forums, like Facebook or Twitter, are monitored and mined by government and corporations. They are collection points for data, even if a person tries to post anonymously. If social media is necessary for professional reasons, then use it to the bare minimum. Never post anything on social media that you wouldn’t put on the front page of the New York Times, and that includes crypto forums.

Be Careful in Writing Down Information. Do not write down your private keys, for example, without having a secure, undisclosed place to store them.

Conclusion

The government is coming for crypto, which means it is coming for users. Its front line attack will be an attempt to eliminate privacy; it realizes privacy is the backbone of cryptocurrency as a freedom tool, even when users do not. Now it the time for heightened vigilance. To paraphrase the comedienne Lily Tomlin, “No matter how paranoid I get, it is never enough to keep up.”

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit bitcoin.com and include a link back to the original links to all previous chapters

Wendy McElroy has agreed to ”live-publish” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of posts planned to conclude after about 18 months. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”. Read it here first.

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The post The Satoshi Revolution – Chapter 5: Privacy, Anonymity, and Pseudonymity (Part 1) appeared first on Bitcoin E-Gold Rush.

#Bitcoin #Bitcoin news

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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How Potentially Great Movies Got Derailed By Offscreen BS

Hollywood has proved that it’s willing to turn literally anything into a movie, from children’s toys, to Reddit posts, to E.L. James novels. So, if you ever notice a film-worthy property that has remained conspicuously un-adapted, you can bet your ass that it’s not for lack of trying. In fact, some of the stories behind these non-adaptations would make pretty good movies of their own (mostly comedies, with some hints of psychological horror).

Gore Verbinski’s R-Rated BioShock Movie Is Dead Due To Watchmen

Video game adaptations tend to be utter garbage for one simple reason: It’s hard to turn a plot like “portly Italian steps on hundreds of turtles” into a coherent screenplay. If there’s one game that could break the curse, though, it’s BioShock. Why? Because it already has a more cogent story than most movies.

2K Games Not to mention, way more diving suit-wearing mutants with giant drills on one hand.

The game’s critically acclaimed storyline (centered on a utopic underwater city created by a combination of Walt Disney and Ayn Rand) is ripe for the taking — and there’s one director willing to do it. Gore Verbinski of Pirates Of The Caribbean fame is a big fan of BioShock‘s “cinematic potential” and “strong narrative,” and we’ve already talked about why he would actually be perfect for this adaptation (assuming he doesn’t succumb to the Burton Syndrome and casts Johnny Depp for every part).

Verbinski was all set to shoot a BioShock movie in 2009, and fittingly for someone named “Gore,” he wasn’t planning to shy away from the game’s violence and general fucked-up-ness. In his own words, he “just really, really wanted to make it a movie where, four days later, you’re still shivering and going, ‘Jesus Christ!'” The movie’s concept art confirms that, at the very least, this thing would have been visually amazing:

2K Games

But then, only eight weeks before shooting started, Universal Studios pulled the plug. What happened? Apparently, Watchmen did.

Verbinski wanted between $160 and $200 million to properly recreate the underwater city of Rapture, but after Zack Snyder’s dour superhero slo-mo-fest underperformed, Universal got nervous about financing such an expensive R-rated film. Verbinski wouldn’t budge on the rating or the budget, so that was it. The studio tried to keep going with another director, but the same problems came up again. Eventually, BioShock‘s creators decided they didn’t need a stinking movie anyways.

We’d love to end this entry telling you that the recent string of R-rated genre hits proved those cowardly producers wrong, but it’s not that simple: Deadpool cost only $58 million, Logan reportedly $97 million, and Mad Max: Fury Road didn’t exactly make it rain (by Hollywood standards). Shooting an underwater city probably won’t be affordable until we’re actually living in one, so cross your fingers for more climate change, gaming fans!

We’ll Never See Guillermo Del Toro’s At The Mountains Of Madness Because Of Freaking Prometheus

Like his creation Cthulhu, horror author H.P. Lovecraft has managed to indirectly wedge his face-tentacles into everything you love. He’s inspired such disparate works as Dungeons And Dragons, Evil Dead, and even Conan The Barbarian — and yet, very few of his works have been directly adapted into movies. For instance, there’s never been a film adaptation of his classic novella At The Mountains Of Madness, the lovely story of a bunch of scientists who stumble upon forgotten horrors during an Antarctic expedition, and end up getting slaughtered or losing their minds.

Guillermo Del Toro, no stranger to giant monsters from other dimensions, has been trying to adapt Mountains for decades, but the project has been cursed by the unthinkable evils that rule the universe: Hollywood executives. Del Toro had a script ready as early as 1998, and at various points the project managed to attract serious interest from Warner Bros., Universal, and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Pictures. In 2010, Del Toro even convinced James Cameron to join as producer and had Tom Cruise in advanced talks to star (yes, we might have finally found out what Cruise looks like as an insane person).

The studios always ended up wussing out over the budget and dark tone, but Del Toro kept plugging away, convinced that this was something audiences had never seen before. That is, until he heard about a little movie called Prometheus. You know, the one about a bunch of scientists who stumble upon forgotten horrors during a galactic expedition, and end up getting slaughtered or crushed by slow-moving space donuts.

The similarities don’t end there: Both Prometheus and Mountains involve the scientists discovering an ancient alien race responsible for creating humanity, as well some ugly-ass monsters hell-bent on destroying said humanity. Del Toro didn’t want to cover the same ground as that film, so he announced that his project was on hold or dead. In 2013, he said he would give it one more try … and that’s the last anyone’s heard of it. Oh, well, at least there’s always the new Hellbo– Whoops.

Hamilton Won’t Be A Movie For Decades Because The Creator Just Said So

Chances are that you’ve never seen Hamilton yourself (tickets go from $175 to $2000 and are still constantly sold out), but you sure as hell have heard about it. It’s a freaking cultural phenomenon. The Founding Father-themed hip-hop musical won 11 of its record-breaking 16 Tony Awards nominations, largely for its ability to achieve the impossible: making people pay “could have bought fairly high-quality cocaine” money to see something pertaining to Alexander “National Debt Ain’t Nothing But A Thing” Hamilton.

Since Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda is all about making American history more accessible to the masses, a movie adaptation would make perfect sense, right? So thinks everyone, except Lin-Manuel Miranda. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Miranda stated that if a film adaptation happens, it probably wouldn’t be for at least 20 years. Partially, he wants to make sure people come see it in theaters now (even though 99 percent of us will never have the chance) … but he also claims that the only good play-to-film adaptations are “all 20 years after the fact,” giving examples like Cabaret or Chicago.

The thing is, Cabaret was only made eight years after the play. West Side Story, The Sound Of Music, Oliver!, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Guys And Dolls, Hairspray — all had acclaimed movies within five to eight years of the musical. The Grease movie was released only seven years later, and people love that retroactively creepy crap. Does Miranda think it was actually made in the ’50s because of the wardrobes?

At most, those suffering from Hamilust will have to settle for watching a filmed performance of the play, but there are two problems with that: 1) Miranda says he hasn’t decided what to do with the only recording of the original cast, joking (we think?) that he’d throw it in a vault, and 2) no one in the history of humanity has enjoyed a fixed-camera movie of a play. You might as well sneak into one of the inevitable rip-off productions that high school drama clubs will be putting on for years to come.

Steve Carell’s Real-Life Comedy About North Korea, Pyongyang, Was Shelved Because Of The Interview

North Korea has been responsible for a lot of terrible things over the years, but there was one time when they actually tried to save us from a lurking danger we ourselves didn’t fully understand: Seth Rogen’s The Interview. In what we naively thought would be the most bonkers international incident of this decade, Kim Jong-un’s regime took offense at something in the movie (presumably the part about Rogen and James Franco assassinating him, but maybe they’re just tired of stoner jokes) and allegedly hacked Sony Pictures in retaliation.

As a result, most screenings of the movie were cancelled and the film was banished to the wasteland of home video.

However, this Chinese food-fart of a movie wasn’t the most tragic casualty of the Sony hack clusterfuck: that would be Steve Carell’s Pyongyang, which was a story that actually deserved to be told.

Based on a 2004 autobiographical comic book, Pyongyang details author Guy Delisle’s experiences in the North Korean capital, where he worked as the liaison between a French animation company and a local studio. That studio’s signature creation, by the way, is an adorable propaganda series starring a squirrel and a hedgehog, imaginatively titled Squirrel And Hedgehog.

Because of his particular role, Delisle was given unprecedented access to parts of the country usually hidden from outsiders. His book is a retelling of all the bizarre things he saw and experienced in that crazy-ass regime — a concept that apparently made Gore Verbinski’s ears perk up when he heard about it. In 2013, New Regency announced Verbinski would direct a “dark comedy” based on the Delisle’s experiences, and eventually added Steve Carell as the lead. It would have been an intriguing combination of awkward situations …

… and the obligatory “creative liberties” Hollywood would have taken to make the story more like a spy thriller. Either way, expect a lot of Carell screaming in panic.

Unfortunately, thanks to Rogen shoving his dick jokes into the nuclear hornet’s nest, the movie was dead before it could really take off. New Regency didn’t think they could risk a controversial movie of their own, while Verbinski welcomed the possibility of World War III, stating, “I find it ironic that fear is eliminating the possibility to tell stories that depict our ability to overcome fear.” To which the studio probably responded: “Yeah, but nukes and shit. Right?”

The Catcher In The Rye Will Never Get A Movie Because Of A Terrible Version Of Another J.D. Salinger Story

J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye has long been considered by hipsters (and assassins) to be the greatest book against phonies ever written. Holden Caulfield’s story of self-discovery mirrors that of many a pissed-off, surly, uniquely rebellious teenager — so, all of them, basically. That probably explains why entire generations of actors, from Marlon Brando to Leonardo DiCaprio, have tried to get the movie done with themselves in the lead.

The problem is that, like his boy Caulfield, Salinger was on a bit of a crusade against the phonies of the world — and to him, no one was phonier than Hollywood (not sure how he got that impression).

Salinger didn’t always feel that way. Early in his career, he sold the rights to his short story Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut, a commentary on materialism in the post-WWII era. According to his assistant, Salinger “thought they would make a good movie,” which wasn’t an unreasonable assumption considering that the script would be written by the screenwriters of Casablanca, Julius and Philip Epstein.

So what did the Epsteins do? They changed the name to My Foolish Heart, ditched all the social commentary, and turned the story into a sappy romantic tale.

Even though the film was a commercial hit, Salinger hated it so much that he refused to allow any more adaptations of his work. Including Catcher In The Rye. Of course, there might be another reason why he turned down all those offers from famous actors: According to his one-time girlfriend, Salinger thought only he himself could play Caulfield. It’s probably a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

Anyway, if you excitedly thought that Salinger’s death might finally bring about a Catcher adaptation, then you’re 1) a shitty person, and 2) wrong. The people who manage his trust were fully aware of his aversion to licensing out any of his works, and will continue his crusade for generations to come. On the upside, think of all the murders from illiterate would-be killers we’re avoiding this way.

Jordan Breeding is a part-time writer, a full-time lover, and an all the time guitarist. Check out his band at Skywardband.com or on Spotify here.

Behind every awful movie is the idea for a good one. Old man Indiana Jones discovers aliens: Good in theory, bad in practice. Batman fights Superman: So simple, but so bad. Are there good versions of these movies hidden within the stinking turds that saw the light of day? Jack O’Brien hosts Soren Bowie, Daniel O’Brien, and Katie Willert of After Hours on our next live podcast to find an answer, as they discuss their ideal versions of flops, reboots, and remakes. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased here!

Also check out The 36 Greatest Shows and Movies Ever to Almost Happen and 5 Incredible Real Video Games (You’ll Never Get to Play).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 5 Movie Epilogues That Should Have Been Sequels, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

Read more: http://bit.ly/2ojuS1J

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shesaidwithirony · 8 years

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La Repubblica interview on Social Media in the Trump Era

Questions from Luciana Grosso (La Repubblica)

Luciana Grosso: What’s next? What is coming after the social network era? What will arrive after this social-mania, if it will ever end?

Geert Lovink: I do not mind to act like a futurologist but I have to disappoint you: we’ll be stuck in this social media age for some time to come. We Europeans failed to develop alternatives. There is no ‘market’ and we all let it happen: crippling monopolies are a fact, we’ve locked ourselves in and now we complain. Unless there’s going to be a global crisis or war, we will not able to free ourselves from the ‘tremendous’ addiction to these real-time apps. I have given up that individuals who make the courageous exodus will make a difference. Boredom or dispear won’t make a difference either; the physical, social and emotional dependency is already too big. We were naive to think that users would move on, as they did from Geocities to Blogger to Friendster to MySpace. Then it stopped at Facebook. Youngsters migrated to Whatsapp and Instagram, but these are owned by the same old Facebook Corp. and are currently being integrated into the same data empire. What’s left is the proposal of a public takeover of platforms (including the datacentre infrastructure). This a political proposal we need to further discuss and put on the table in this year of crucial elections.

For decades European elites deliberately looked away, convinced that the internet was a fad, a fashion that would fade away, and now they have been pushed to the sides. Brussels thought telcos such as Orange and Telefonica, and traditional technology players such as Philips and Siemens would develop alternatives. Nothing happened. Instead, we’re using hardware produced in China with services controlled in the United States. Lately Europeans have woken up and have installed austerity-driven neo-liberal ‘creative industries’ policies that try to foster start-up cultures. Ever since Evgene Morozov we know that techno-solutionism is not the answer. Developing an app is not a solution to overcome platform capitalism. For the social media drama it might already be too late, unless drastic measures are taken that implements anti-trust measures overnight.

LG: In the beginning, Internet was seen as a utopian place where the only rule was ‘no rules’: everyone was free to say and write and read whatever they wanted. Was this in fact the case at the time?

GL: There is no doubt that 1990s internet culture was more wild. But I am not nostalgic. There were far less users. The user base was homogeneous and the interfaces and operating systems didn’t work very well. These days we’re not often confronted anymore with crashing devices. Instead, dysfunctionality has moved to the level of society. The smoothness of today comes with a price. Jaron Lanier often points at the anarchic nature of individual homepages—a far cry from the standardized communication environments of Facebook and Twitter. Why learn Linux or XML anymore as an ordinary user? This overall loss of technical knowledge amongst users has lead to crisis in media literacy. The idea is that we do not need anymore instruction. All platforms are self-evident for a child—and this is what we actually see happening around us. This is also the case of moderation. That’s an art form: how to run a community, to overcome differences and structures debates (without policing them). One of the sources of the problem here is the lack of tools to develop communities. Social media are not built for that, on purpose. They are outward-looking with the aim to connect as much data with other data with the aim to sell the profiles to third parties for advertisement purposes. Everyone knows that social media is an alienating echo chamber and fosters narcissism as a necessary act in the struggle for self promotion. In the end, empowerment is not satisfying. We need a cold restart, from scratch, and build peer-to-peer networks that focus on collaboration and discussion, not just on ‘news’ that ‘shared’ and commented by ‘friends’. This has already been said time and again, but nothing happens. That’s how we got stuck. Many feel that way. That’s the disillusion of the internet, which is no longer a progressive tool nor a parallel reality but an abyss that takes us down further into a state of inequality, fear and hatred.

LG: How did that happen, a place celebrated for freedom becoming so dark, filled with lies, violence and fascism? Is this jungle what freedom looks like?

GL: I have not lost my belief in freedom and subversion. Let’s go back to Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom. There is so much fascinating literature that we can read together. Take Hannah Ahrendt, or Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. Promote such thinkers and contrast them with the libertarian dogma’s of Ayn Rand that is being promoted so much these days. Which freedom do we want? Many of us have second thoughts when it comes to radical openness. We can’t deal with the ‘open society’ and intuitively search for a ‘New Order’ as Michael Seemann, the Berlin ‘Kontrollverlust’ blogger and author of Digital Tailspin, calls it. What comes after radical transparency? Will we find a new equilibrium after the dust has settled? Do we withdrawal in a new cult of secrecy, as Byung Chul-Han in his Transparency Society proposes? Will we ever get used to the bright light of over-exposure, to put in terms of Jean Baudrillard? I would love to answer your question in an orthodox psycho-analytical way. Why do we want to punish ourselves after a period of excessive communication and radical freedom? How can we escape this vicious circle of orgy and remorse? Where is the psycho-historian Lloyd deMause, now that we need him? Who updates his epic book on Reagan’s America?

LG: Should we be afraid of fake news? Lies and the manipulation of the truth have always been around, ever since the times of Moses. Why is this suddenly a problem?

GL: As you say, fake news has always been core business, it’s was once called ‘manufacturing consent’ or ‘public relations’. As Morozov tweets: “Messing with the media, celebrities, facts, etc does not really get in the way of getting the job done – for Trump, it’s *the* job.” Our problem is the ‘authenticity bonus’ of direct communication. We do not see the social media managers that operate behind their dashboards (as Douglas Rushkoff teaches us). Why the fake news question did not come earlier has got to do with moment in which social media became mainstream. Until recent, the Net was still looked upon as something unknown and new, at best an additional toy. Experts talked about multi-media as if it was some sort of symphony, a media concert in search for harmony between all the different channels. But the liberal ‘multimodality’ view of ‘remediation’ has been blasted away by the directness and real-time of social media.

Now that the introductory period of ‘digitization’ has come to an end, we are exposed to an unprecedented form of acceleration. In the original idea of networked democracy it was assumed that the multiplicity of channels would lead to a greater diversity of voices. This did not materialize and it would be useful to reconstruct where precisely the process derailed. In classic internet fashion, things move fast, and that will also be the case with the fake news meme itself, which will be overruled by even more spectacular propaganda acts, pseudo-events–and historical tragedies.

LG: Is preventive censorship a solution?

GL: In past weeks we see that the ‘perception management’ industry is busy figuring out which ‘anti-missile missiles’ they should invent to calm down the media frenzy. A Minority Report technique to isolate evil behaviour might work on the individual level but is no longer effective once the political upheaval has already started. Facebook is entirely naive as they still believe in filtering of ‘fake news’ by temporary consultancy firms such as Correctiv or Snopes, as if this problem can be solved and will disappear in a few months. There are also fact-checking firms on specific topics such as Ukraine or climate change. The next step is the ‘democratization’ of the meme design workshops, ‘meme sprints’ where multi-disciplinary ‘agile’ teams of designers, coders and ’trolls’ gather to unleash ‘meme wars’–and then disappear: organized networks that take the ideas of Adbusters one step further but shy away from the long-term commitment of the work that is done out of The Agency, a presumed ’troll farm’ office building in St. Petersburg (see also this Guardian article). Not far from here is the NATO observatory in Riga that looks in Russian social media manipulations.

LG: Will our grandchildren read Facebook or The New York Times?

GL: The New York Times, which by then will be owned by Facebook. That would be the Dutch pragmatist answer. The correct one is of course neither of them. The kids will navigate through Uber Entertainment. You must have heard from Alfabet, the mother company of Google, an umbrella structure for mega corporations, which is also likely to happen to Facebook as well. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now owns The Washington Post. The new rubber barons are running the largest non-profits in the world (think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Others enter different industries such as space travel. What we need is a new iteration of cyberpunk literature that takes us on a tour through corporate cities owned by Snapchat, Tesla factories that mass manufacture killer robots and the Huawei hacking bunker, a smart internet observatory, masterminded by Chinese hipsters.

http://networkcultures.org/geert/2017/01/25/la-repubblica-interview-on-social-media-in-the-trump-era/

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raptorific · 12 years

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The bottom line: either you want to help your fellow man and give them a break by letting them pay their fair share while still being able to survive and seek happiness, or FUCK 'EM LET 'EM STARVE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST BRAAAAAGH! I feel like that's the fundamental difference in mindset.

Yeah, it's pretty much one of those two things.

Also, the concept of "social darwinism" doesn't work, because the thing that's hereditarily passed isn't skills or desirable traits, it's money, and if "social darwinism" does take its course, then there will be no poor people, which means rich people won't have anyone to pay to do their work for them, and they'll have to either actually do work themselves, or allow the economy to collapse. I hate to agree with Syndrome here, but if everybody's super, then no one is.

#ballershots #which is why Ayn Rand is a hack

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ramrodd · 5 years

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Source: Frustration in White House over ABC interview

COMMENTARY:

And the only thing standing in the way is the vanity of Donald Duck Ass. He wants to try to finesse the promise and get the deal through intimidation and unilateral childishness.

That’s changed and it appears that POTUS didn’t get the memo.

I’m just saying.

#transformingamericafirst

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ramrodd · 6 years

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What is your opinion about the recent events happened in the Kerch Strait regarding Russia and Ukraine?

I don't understand what is going on in the Kerch Strait, but I consider President Putin to be on the side of Angels and Sec. Clinton's Russia narrative to be fatally flawed.

COMMENTARY:

I don’t understand what is going on in Kerch Strait, in particular, nor how it reflects what has evolved since 2013, when I first became aware of the Ukrainian Independence movement as being something that has emerged from the Russian Dark Web and been nurtured by the same transnational cabal that produced the Brexit movement and the 2016 election hack and continues to attack the soft target rich environment of the American cyper-ecology produced by the infinitely narrow perspective of the conceits and misapprehensions of the Silicon Valley IT programer paradigm that has resulted in a blind side broad enough to accommodate the 4th Golden Horde comfortably, metaphorically speaking.

A Horde is defined as four abreast and 100,000 deep.

This transnational cabal has been loosely organized to undermine global constitutional authority and includes the friends of the enemies of President Putin in the GOP Deep State who have identified themselves in the NYTimes op-ed as the White House Resistance I associate with John Bolton, Soteve Bannon, Newt Gingrich and Roger Stone. For example, Mira Ricardel was working on John Bolton’s orders to sabotage the First Lady’s agenda, which is why she was removed by the First Lady. In addition, Paul Manafort’s task as Trump’s campaign manager was to install Mike Pence a pistol shot away from the Oval Office, like LBJ, for the friends of the enemies of President Putin. All the people who are lobbying for the replacement of John Kelly as Trump’s COS with Nick Ayers are engaged in this cabal, directly or indirectly.

In addition, the deterioration of the US-Russia diplomatic relations under Obama has been collateral damage from the agit-prop campaign of the crypto-Nazi political agenda that has convinced a significant proportion of Clinton voters that she was a terrible campaigner and elevated Trump’s prospects sufficiently (if inadvertently) to allow him to game the Electorial College and gain the Oval Office.

In short, whatever is going on in the Kerch Strait, President Putin is on the side of Angels, if only because he has the keys to the Russian nuclear arsenal. The Hillary Clinton Russian narrative reflects the success of the legacy of moral confusion generated by the crypto-Nazi agenda I associate with William F. Buckley, Ayn Rand and Tucker Carlson, as the Poster Boy for the commercial engine of the Fascist notions of FOX News.

The irony is that Michael Cohen’s recent guilty plea establishes Trump’s engagement in Putin’s Sovereign Democracy agenda he inherited from Nixon-Brezhnev “Detente” by way of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as late as June 2016 that separates him, Trump, from Manafort and the enemies of {Putin in Russia and the friends of the enemies of Putin in the GOP Deep State. But Trump seems to be oblivious to Manafort as the source of his exposure to Mueller’s tranche of RICO-Ready indictments.

#transformingamericafirst

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