There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance, to keep the temptations of narcissism in check. But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising a civilizing control over what some see as chaos. The Sumerians started it. The Romans perfected it. The Anglosphere inherited it. The world is now mired in it. The war between good and evil is in reality an imposition of stupidity and simplicity over wisdom and complexity.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the WorldbyTyson Yunkaporta[via alive on all channels]
The climate crisis is not, in fact, a mystery or a riddle we haven’t yet solved due to insufficiently robust data sets. We know what it would take, but it’s not a quick fix – it’s a paradigm shift. Waiting for machines to spit out a more palatable and/or profitable answer is not a cure for this crisis, it’s one more symptom of it.
ever since reading addiction by design and vicious games i’m insane about the machine gambling industry. one of the most evil soul-crushing parts of this world
there’s a passage in
vicious gameswhere cassidy interviews betting shop owners and literally every single one of them tells her that once they started introducing betting machines (slot machines, video poker, etc.) customers getting violent went from being a rare possibility to being a regular occurence that had to be considered ‘part of the business’
and the pathologization / disease model of gambling addiction is so fucking evil too. these industries are spending millions of dollars to create open air spike traps and invite people to take long walks on the slippery path around the spike traps and when people fall in and get impaled by spikes they say “it’s very sad that these people had personalities that were so prone to getting spiked and are now suffering from spikes-impaling-them-disease. we have utmost sympathy and encourage everyone to walk responsibly around our giant open-air spike pits”
I read Addiction by Design during one of the UK lockdowns.
One of the things I found interesting is that the authors only mention the design of 'progressive chance mechanics’ once - in relation to slot machines.
Meanwhile just a few years later we have games like Geshin Impact, that are basically highly designed casino worlds/virtual spaces that are entirely in service to highly addictive Gacha mechanics. (Geshin impact made $393 million within two months of the release of the mobile client).
I am agreeing here with @txttletale 1000% but would like to expand out the scope of the scorn to virtual environments. This also includes other techno-social-systems like candycrush, kingsofwar, clash of clans etc too. EA need investigating.
The EU has clamped down on loot boxes sure, but that’s a single mechanic. The 'design’ of code spaces needs to be regulated in the same way casinos are(not).
My day job is literally
world running and consulting on virtual worlds/hybrid code spaces. Everyone is always surprised at how strongly I feel about this.
Olfactive Stéréophonique - Exclusive scent is an experimental and revolutionary fragrance diffuser collaboration that uses speaker design theory and scent to evoke the meditative effects of ritualistic practice and enhance a listening space.
The new limited-edition piece was designed by Devon Turnbull, founder of artisanal speaker and accessories brand OJAS, and Ben Gorham, Byredo’s founder and creative director. It’s the ideal way of delivering smell in a direct and controlled manner, whether in a listening room or anywhere a smell needs to be utilized.
The process is simple: sit comfortably with a high-fidelity sound system and select disks that set the tone for that moment or take you on a voyage that you’ll return from transformed. It’s a multi-sensory experience, one where all of the elements should be considered and where setting and scent is critical.
10 capsules included.
This object is a fragrance diffuser, not a speaker. It doesn’t produce/amplify sound and does not have any sound system.
What’s interesting about this new digenean parasite is that the larvae cooperate using two different forms. The DNA confirmed that both the sailors and tiny passengers inside the hemisphere belong to the same species. These passengers, it seems, act as the infectious agents, waiting to infiltrate the gills or intestines of a fish that swallows them. The sailors, meanwhile, do the hard work of moving the blob through the water—but in sacrifice their own opportunities to reproduce.
This phenomenon, in which one member of a species forgoes its own chance to reproduce so that another can, is called kin selection. And this, says Robert Poulin, a parasitologist at the University of Otago who was not involved, is “a really cool case of kin selection pushed to the extreme.”
Scientists have studied the phenomenon in other kinds of trematode parasites while they are living inside their hosts. The “remarkable” new study shows that this division of labor happens in free-living larval forms as well, says Ryan Hechinger, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “This finding highlights that trematodes are unique among all animal life.”
Somebody’s taken Childish Gambino’s music video This is America(original, YouTube) and used some AI face-swapper software called FaceFusion to sub in Nicolas Cage. You don’t need to watch the whole thing – just the moment at 2m40s where Cage/Gambino turns his face sideways and the face swap glitches out, back, out again and sits on Gambino for a beat, then back to Cage looks unnatural, settings in, then lights up and walks off.
The timing is perfect.
It seems to me like this is a visual trope we’re going to see more and more? It’s the paranoia and glitching in
A Scanner Darkly (2006), the visual glitch when your trust in subjective reality is shaken loose. I’m looking forward to this being a commonplace shorthand for doubt; a quick glitch in a romcom when somebody is acting out of character, say.
ANYWAY:
It reminds me that AI face swaps are not (in 2023) much good at ears.
The Bendix G-15 from 1956, the world’s first “personal computer.” One of these cabinets weighed a literal 1000 lbs. and cost half a million dollars in today’s money. Or you could rent it for the equivalent of $17,000 a month.
It was numeric only, you had to “talk” to it via a typewriter, and when you turned it off it ‘forgot’ everything. It used 'drum memory,’ which used the same rust-covered-spinning-magnetic-thing technology all hard drives would continue to use until flash memory became a thing. But in the Bendix it looked something like this (one from a slightly earlier computer):
This computer is so old no one seems to have figured out what 'bits’ it is. All I know is that drum thing “holds 2,160 words of twenty-nine bits.” It can also do basic math problems in 270 microseconds. …Which sounds fast, but that means it can do 2+2=4 in 27 thousandths of a second. Which is probably exactly how long it took your stupid brain to do that. For slightly more complex math, hiring a human mathematician at this time would be both cheaper and easier than dealing with this computer.
This is a “vacuum tube / diode analog architecture” computer, and it already had some kind of OS that meant you didn’t have to know machine code? But that slowed it down even more…?
I have absolutely no idea how analog computers worked, or how anyone used one. There are tape decks on this thing, and it is plugged into a typewriter. Like I get the digital 1 and 0 thing, but I have no concept how you make light bulbs and blobs of germanium do that electronically.
But someone did, and this eventually led to you streaming Now That’s What I Call Music! No. 86 on a Samsung phone.
So obviously all of this was a good idea…
Hell yeah,
BENDIX G-15!
The Bendix G-15 is indeed a digital computer, despite the vacuum tube construction. The tubes are being driven within a digital domain, high or low – no intentional in-between.
It is worth noting that there a significant number of diodes on board, which save significant weight, power consumption, and size. Here are
mostof the card modules on board that contain the vast majority of the logic. There are other diodes and vacuum tubes inside the chassis for other specific tasks.
The unit here in my pictures belongs to the System Source Computer Museum, which is currently being repaired by Usagi Electric. I visited him recently and took these photos.
See that large non-descript silver box? That’s the memory drum. It’s sealed in there for protection, the motor is behind it.
Here’s the main interface: the typewriter. You don’t interact with it the way you might think of with a teletype. Rather, certain keys correspond to different functions and different bit combinations. To my knowledge, only the alphanumeric-equipped units will let you type characters. The numeric-only units don’t even used most of the keys. Most programs are loaded on by 5-level paper tape, encoded in something other than Baudot.
This is the transhumanist horror story I want to read
Came back wrong but it’s. The format this consciousness was first backed up is no longer compatible so some untranslatable characters will now read like extended ascii symbols
Welcome to the future: “Concurso Centro Cívico de Ámsterdam, The Netherlands.” 1969. Design by Flora Manteola, Ignacio Petchersky, Javier Sánchez Gómez, Josefa Santos, Justo Solsona, Rafael Viñoly.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday.
They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them.
Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.
You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
What it meant to be a woman in many African pre-colonial societies was not rigid. “Among the Langi of northern Uganda,” writes Sylvia Tamale, dean of the faculty of Law at Makerere University Uganda, “the mudoko dako, or effeminate males, were treated as women and could marry men.” There were also the Chibados or Quimbanda of Angola, male diviners whom, some scholars have argued, were believed to carry female spirits through anal sex.
[…]
This practice of same-sex marriage was documented in more than 40 precolonial African societies: a woman could marry one or more women if she could secure the bridewealth necessary or was expected to uphold and augment kinship ties. The idea that a female could be a husband perplexed Europeans, and often lead to fantastical conclusions.
Wanted to share an article about pre-colonial African gender identities! The article is really great!
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.
Franz Kafka, “Letters to Milena”
It’s so hard to speak and say things that cannot be said. It’s so silent.
‘stockholm syndrome’ being invented by a police negotiator to explain away why a hostage said police actions were making her and the other hostages feel unsafe is like. yeah
The Koch Brothers’ decades long-game strategy to plummet America into under-funded chaos while they maximize their wealth has been remarkably successful.
Their father Fred Koch co-founded the John Birch Society. Charles Koch himself ran a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita until he inherited his father’s wealth. Their family’s extremist philosophy has remained consistent for over sixty years.
“Elon Musk’s company SpaceX is a U.S. defense contractor, with billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. That makes his intervention to thwart Ukrainian military operations a U.S. national security concern, not only because America supports Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia’s invasion, but also because it suggests the U.S. military may have left itself open to similar disruptions. Excerpts from biographer Walter Isaacson’s book, Elon Musk, show Musk denying Ukraine Starlink internet access off the coast of Crimea in Sept. 2022, causing Ukrainian sea drones to stop functioning. A private citizen thwarting an in-progress military operation like this is unprecedented. […] Congress should exercise its oversight powers and look into both SpaceX’s actions in Ukraine and the extent of American dependence on Musk’s company. At minimum, it’s an information security risk. Isaacson says Musk texted him about the Ukrainian sea drones headed to Crimea as he was trying to decide what to do. No one should be telling journalists about secret military operations as they’re happening. Elon Musk especially shouldn’t be in position to, given his direct contact with foreign officials, and his apparent affinity for online trolls, including contributors to Russian state media outlet RT. He’s free to associate with whomever he wants, and to express his opinions about the war (even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has vast means to spread his thoughts widely). But a defense contractor controlled by one volatile personality, who is at best ignorant of international power politics and susceptible to Russian propaganda, and does not respect that national security decisions are up to governments rather than him personally, is not someone the United States should consider a reliable business partner.”
This is the world now, logged on, plugged in, all the time.
—John Conner (from the movie, Terminator Genisys)
Less than 17 Minutes…This image includes all of the satellites captured by my camera during less than 17 minutes of shooting.
I originally planned to include all of the satellites from a 3-hour timelapse, but after painstakingly masking satellites into images for about 6 hours, I had gotten through less than 17 minutes’ worth of images.
Each image in the timelapse series was 2.5 seconds, iso 5000, f/1.4, and I was shooting with a 3 second interval. I processed 326 frames from the series, totaling 878 seconds or 16.3 minutes.
This image is supposed to be a bit shocking, if not downright terrifying. The impact of our species goes far beyond the surface of our planet or its inner atmosphere. We have filled the space surrounding our planet with an army of machines. While these machines generally serve to provide services believed to improve life on our planet, they are also constantly monitoring us. In addition, we are becoming increasingly dependent on them to maintain the world we know.
There are clear risks associated with our dependence on technology, but beyond that, we are losing our connection with our planet, our home, Earth. For most of us, we are somehow connected to the internet almost all the time. We use GPS and other satellite networks repeatedly throughout each day. At times it seems that our cell phones and other devices are part of our physical beings, an extra appendage if you will.
I wanted this image to bring on a feeling of dystopia, with the old building representing a time before now, and the vast network of satellites representing our future as dependents on technology. But I also wanted to include a glimmer of hope for a better future, symbolized by the small flowers growing in the foreground.
“The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that.”
-John Conner (from the movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
In my latest
Locus Magazine column, “Plausible Sentence Generators,” I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, “bullshit”:
Here’s what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.
But when I got home, the airline’s reps told me the would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn’t care that their representative had promised they’d make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I’m no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.
The problem was that I didn’t know anything about filing a small claim. I’ve been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.
So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a “final demand” letter to the airline’s business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty
stern legal letter.
Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I
have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I’ve spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I’ve seen a
lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.
I’ve been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I’ve been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX’s private terminal.
So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly
terrifying.
I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, “Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat.” The chatbot obliged.
While the giant bill was fake, it represented a very real accomplishment. The group raised more than $17,000, which purchased more than $1.6 million in medical debt owed by Philadelphians, according to their nonprofit partner RIP Medical Debt.
This is a great way to undermine the system that we are trapped in
The fact that this can be done at all shows how utterly bullshit the entire system is. There was literally no reason for that medical debt to exist in the first place.
Let’s say you owe a private hospital ten thousand dollars, but you have very few assets, so they’re pretty sure they’re never getting any of that back. There’s ninety nine other people who also each owe the hospital ten thousand dollars. (It doesn’t have to be a hospital; any debt can be sold this way.) The hospital has shit to do and the low chances of you paying them mean it’s an unnecessary drain on their time and resources to hound you all for it. But they can get *some* money, by selling your debt to a third party.
Let’s say the sell each ten thousand dollar debt for ten dollars (I’m making all these numbers up for simplicity). So a third party gives the hospital one thousand dollars, and now all hundred of you owe that third party ten thousand instead! You’re in the clear with the hospital, you owe it to these guys now! And their job is to hound and harrass you for the money you owe. If one of you pays up more than a thousand dollars, you’ve covered their initial investment. These guys are gambling on the likelihood that enough of you can pay your debts that you make it worth the time they spend tracking you and harrassing you.
Or, instead of trying to get the money out of you, they can just… decide you don’t owe them. Why not? They own the debt. They can fork out a thousand bucks, buy a million in debt, and forgive it. That’s what these guys did. (This is also a favourite move of John Oliver; if you ever see headlines about John Oliver forgiving debt, this is what he’s doing). A small payment can take a massive weight off the shoulders of a lot of struggling people.
Again, I made up the numbers to simplify the math. But this is how the process works.
Mountains in the Himalayas, which span India, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan, hardly have any weather stations, which often leads to a lack of accurate data on precipitation levels. There are a few stations located in the lower elevations of the mountains but they do not show whether the precipitation recorded is rain or snowfall. However, a weather station installed at the base camp of Mount Everest showed that 75% of the 245.5mm precipitation on the mountain between 1 June and 10 August this year had fallen as rain. The remaining was snow or a combination of rain and snow. This is a huge jump from the 32% of rain recorded between June and September in 2022, 43% in 2021 and 41% in 2020.
Navin Singh Khadka, ‘Himachal Pradesh floods: More rain, less snow are turning Himalayas dangerous’, BBC
What is it? It’s an advisory body to be comprised of Indigenous people, chosen by Indigenous people, to give perspective and input on Indigenous matters.
Why put it in the constitution?Because if we didn’t the Coalition would abolish it like they did with most of the other many many Indigenous advisory bodies in the past. The instability of being unsure if a body will only exist for 3 years or less doesn’t help it grow, develop, or become effective.
Can it veto bills?No.Absurd nonsense.Not every bill will even be relevant to the Voice and it’s not constitutionally able to introduce, vote on, debate, or veto, a bill in any way. It’s an advisory body. Such a claim violates literally the first clause of the constitution, followed by a dozen more, and is the most ridiculous and willful disregard for the very fundamental basics of Parliamentary democracy and the constitution. This isn’t even remotely debatable. This is flat earth theory of constitutional law.
Again! Flat earth theory of constitutional law. What the actual fuck is this nonsense???
Will it lead to endless High Court cases?How? Seriously - how? 1) The Voice was designed specifically to avoid that 2) High Court cases are costly and risky 3) What basis would the Voice have for a High Court case anyway? It’s just an advisory body, it doesn’t have any obligations written into it, and the internal workings of Parliament are immune to the jurisdiction of the High Court so any law Parliament makes, so long as it is within the constitutional powers for Parliament to do so, is entirely up to Parliament to decide - and if it decides to ignore the Voice then that’s just bad governance. That’s NOT grounds for a High Court case. That’s absurd. The Voice won’t just take the Parliament to the High Court if it doesn’t get its way because that’d just be throwing limited resources down the drain for no reason. If the government ignores the Voice we should vote for a new government.
The possibility of a court case relies on there being a piece of legislation that specifically requires a particular Minister (like the Minister for Indigenous Affairs for example) to consult the Voice before making a specific administrative decision over a government department. That’s normal though. That happens occasionally and why should we fear the idea of Ministers having to OBEY THE LAW? If Parliament creates this legislative requirement for a Minister to consult Indigenous people then… good. They should. What’s the issue here? This part isn’t even relevant to it being in the constitution - a Voice created by legislation could have the same restrictions and legal requirements on Ministers because
that’s optional and dependent on the laws Parliament makes. This isn’t scary - whatever court cases do happen are a GOOD THING.
Why don’t we have the legislation to see how it works yet?You’ve never read legislation in advance of an election because that’s not the order it goes in. The constitution isn’t about complex details, it’s about establishing the basic foundations to build up from - and so all the details we need about the Voice were released several months ago.The wording of the amendment says its an advisory body and that’s it.
We don’t have more details because that’s the kind of thing that gets developed over time - there’s plenty of legislation that’s different to how it was 20 years ago, and different 40 years ago before that, because the point of Parliament is to develop this over time. But it all has to stick to the fundamental rules of the constitution. Putting it in the constitution provides you more guarantees about its future limit, function, and scope, than just legislation because it’s guaranteed to not change without a future referendum.
The claim “we don’t have the details” is nonsense. Want the details of the Voice in 5 years time? Tell me who is in government and their policies in 5 years time. This is the same level of absurd request.
Will it lead to us all paying reparations?Parliament has the power to make that happen already. We’re not paying reparations because the government doesn’t want to. The Voice can’t force the government to pay reparations. This is a hypothetical scenario being pushed by the Right to scare people over their money and exploit people’s ignorance. The government won’t even pay people on welfare to be above the poverty line - why do we think they’re going to pay reparations?
Will it prevent a treaty from happening?No. It could be useful for negotiating and writing a treaty. What is in a treaty is up to that particular treaty so no further details can be commented on that - but the Voice isn’t a replacement for it. It’s not analogous and it doesn’t prevent it. If anything it makes the outcome of a treaty happening MORE likely.
But what about (insert hypothetical thing here)?The Voice is an advisory body designed to help Indigenous people provide perspective and input on matters that affect them. If anything you hear involves claims of forcing the government to do X or Y or whatever then it’s misinformation. It can have influence - but it doesn’t make decisions. The Parliament makes decisions and it’s accountable to the public so if it makes a bad decision then protest/vote differently. The hope is that if the Parliament actually fucking listens to Indigenous people it’ll get better outcomes for Indigenous people.
So it’s kind of telling that conservatives are so heavily campaigning against something that
doesn’t even have legal decision making power.Conservatives aren’t even obligated to care about the advice the Voice gives and they STILL think that’s too much agency for Indigenous peoples!
Really the problem for conservatives and the Coalition if the Voice is successful is that this provides another way for the government to held accountable, to have its actions scrutinised, to inform the public of what the government is/isn’t doing and provide everyone with detailed information about how things COULD be better but the government refuses to act.
The scary thing about the Voice isn’t power - it’s accountability. It’s transparency. Conservatives don’t fear the courts, or vetoes, or whatever fictional scenario they create - they fear that the next time an Indigenous person says “this is unjust and we want action” that there’ll be too many eyes watching that it’s harder to say “I don’t care.” Conservative governments survive because they’re good at hiding the full extent of how awful they are - and the Voice is trying to lift the corner of the rug to show us what vile shit they’ve swept under there.
Vote Yes.
Plain and simple.
Vote Yes to make it harder for governments to ignore what’s right.
Bailong Elevator
, also known as the
Hundred Dragons Elevator, is a glass elevator located in the Wulingyuan area of Zhangjiajie, China. It is considered to be the world’s tallest outdoor elevator, standing at a height of 1,070 feet.
There’s a special style in Chinese landscape painting called 青绿山水 (Qinglu Shanshui) which uses mineral dyes to complete the artwork. Those artworks have major green and blue colors. During Song Dynasty, artists and scholars added is 泥金 (made of glue and powdered gold or other metals) to the dyeing materials. These landscape paintings are 金碧山水 (Jinbi Shanshui).
The tools through which the spectacle relates to you and manages your expectations are in the process of changing. Whereas for the past twenty years the predominant method through which this has taken place has been through the heterogeneous set of tools and methods derived from the network society at the moment this is in the process of changing again. This text outlines some of the new methods developing as a consequence of the new hybrid mediums, most obviously the new social media forms.
Up to the minute information on everything from train times, cinema schedules to available books, apps have become a ubiquitous feature of smart-phones and tabular computers (Ipads). To their users they are mostly just useful and entertaining tools. However whilst they provide users with information they are also data collection software devices. This has placed apps at the beginning of the science of data gathering for the business use of consumer data. In the collection of reusable consumer data nothing is to insignificant not to be collected.
The collection of surveillance data associated with these types of technology (for example image, sound, GPS data) is in its infancy. Smart-phones, social networks and the other elements of digital everyday life are generating new data sets that are beginning to reconstruct the digital and non-digital economy. Embedding you ever more deeply in the spectacle.
This surveillance data is an aspect of the trend towards the normalization of the technological lexicon which we can summarize as ‘big data’ This requires that rather than summarizing small subsets of the data being collected as part of the enormous flood of data being collected, they can analyse all of it. This developing ability to analyse the enormous mass of surveillance information is beginning to develop new business and control ideas and will as time passes change the relationship between the business, the institutions and their customers.
Why is this surveillance you might ask …? remember Steve Jobs having to apologize in 2011 because Apple handled the location of Ipad and Iphone owners so badly and the congressional hearings in Washington that resulted ?
The obvious ways in which this surveillance data will be used is to be combined across the social network data and to generate new services and products for their customers – so that for example messages will tell you “that these people are near you and here is how you might know them” This seemingly harmless social network ploy will translate into new products and then into targeted advertising to generate new customers. The increasing amount of digital information and the increasingly sophisticated ways being developed to make use of it, across the entire array of institutions in our society begins to show us the ways in which companies are beginning to be drawn into this new world of data collection and analysis.
Two obvious ways forward exists – firstly they will develop ways of tailoring their products and services to match the preferences of their customers, secondly more directly tailored advertising designed to more accurately access their customers. Then of course the data is being sold by the collectors of the data to corporations who can use the data for new customer generation…
Even the most ardent supporters of this new spectacular use of the traces and data you generate and leave across the internet understand that it requires the generation of a new system of rights. Rights that create a balance between the conflicting needs of individuals, governments and the corporations who hold the data. Members of parliaments and government workers may be considered what these controls and restrictions should be, but still no such global agreement yet exists. Instead the signs are, if we are honest that the spectacle and its owners will be allowed to own the data that constitutes our histories and be positively encouraged to model our human imaginaries. No longer simply virally infecting our minds with the spectacle but instead having digital copies of our minds, close enough to know what and how to sell us customized products and services.
The analysis of the information is developing and with it the changes in the methods we use for decision making. The new methods being based on intensive data analysis and the testing of actions. Managers and controllers of institutions will have to learn to ask the right questions rather than guess.
The sources of the data will be from across the vast array of the spectacle, surveillance being the primary sources from the social and mass media, data networks and all others forms of generated content, from traffic sensors to medical monitors. Anywhere that people spend their lives online they will be monitored, content managed and new inputs into their minds and lives generated. Every moment, every action will be commodified….
The information has been unstructured until now, but now as the databases grow ever larger, the analysis methods grown more sophisticated and the representational models grow closer and closer to the people they model, well the information which you might think of as commercial signifiers are becoming more obvious. They will be fed back to the point of origin as spectacular instructions to consume more…
Part two of this draft will investigate this in further depth
i wondered what this note reads ;ile 12 years later…
“Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.”
— Wim Wenders
“It is, in fact, peculiarly difficult to take [entertainment films] seriously. The films themselves set up a deliberate resistance: they are so insistently not serious, so knowing about their own escapist fantasy/pure entertainment nature, and they consistently invite the audience’s complicity in this. To raise serious objections to them is to run the risk of looking a fool (they’re “just entertainment,” after all) or, worse, a spoilsport (they’re “such fun”). Pleasure is indeed an important issue.”
-Robin Wood, “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era”
Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from around the internet, and/or on a few standard image datasets. But there likely haven’t been any spotless giraffes in their training data, since the last one to be born was probably in 1972 in Tokyo. How do they do when faced with photos of the spotless giraffe?
Are these crummy image recognition models? Not unusually so. As far as I can tell with a brief poke around, MMICL and InstructBLIP are modern models (as of Aug 2023), fairly high up on the leaderboards of models answering questions about images. Their demonstration pages (and InstructBLIP’s paper) are full of examples of the models providing complete and sensible-looking answers about images.
Then why are they so bad at Giraffe With No Spots?
I can think of three main factors here:
AI does best on images it’s seen before. We know AI is good at memorizing stuff; it might even be that some of the images in the examples and benchmarks are in the training datasets these algorithms used. Giraffe With No Spots may be especially difficult not only because the giraffe is unusual, but because it’s new to the internet.
AI tends to sand away the unusual. It’s trained to answer with the most likely answer to your question, which is not necessarily the most correct answer.
The papers and demonstration sites are showcasing their best work.Whereas I am zeroing in on their worst work, because it’s entertaining and because it’s a cautionary tale about putting too much faith in AI image recognition.
[“Even Wendat statesmen couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do.
As Father Lallemant, whose correspondence provided an initial model for The Jesuit Relations, noted of the Wendat in 1644:
I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger …
Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.
‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’. Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.”]
david graeber and david wengrow, the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity, 2021
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