Posts tagged decay

Something is wrong on the internet

Medium, James Bridle, internet, capitalsim, new dark aga, automation, means of production, decay, horror, violence, kids, youtube, exploitation, dentistry, clickbait, peppa pig, 2017

Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.

Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.

This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It is hard to keep faith with the network when it produces horrors such as these. While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. This is not what many of us want.


via https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

@20 (Ftrain.com)

Paul-Ford, technology, internet, new-media, capitalism, programming, computing, infotainment, Facebook, 2017, 1997, decay, decline

Our software is bullshit, our literary essays are too long, the good editors all quit or got fired, hardly anyone is experimenting with form in a way that wakes me up, the IDEs haven’t caught up with the 1970s, the R&D budgets are weak, the little zines are badly edited, the tweets are poor, the short stories make no sense, people still care too much about magazines, the Facebook posts are nightmares, LinkedIn has ruined capitalism, and the big tech companies that have arisen are exhausting, lumbering gold-thirsty kraken that swim around with sour looks on their face wondering why we won’t just give them all our gold and save the time. With every flap of their terrible fins they squash another good idea in the interest of consolidating pablum into a single database, the better to jam it down our mental baby duck feeding tubes in order to make even more of the cognitive paté that Silicon Valley is at pains to proclaim a delicacy. Social media is veal calves being served tasty veal. In the spirit of this thing I won’t be editing this paragraph.

via http://www.ftrain.com/20.html

Roland Miller’s Abandoned Wonderland: Deserted Facilities by NASA and the U.S. Government

Medium, photography, Roland Miller, NASA, space, decay, architecture

As humanity continues to excel in going beyond human abilities through technology, the victory comes with a price: American photographer Roland Miller travels to abandoned places once found useful by the space exploration organization NASA and the U.S. Army and collects their remnants as memories.

via https://medium.com/@lomography/roland-millers-abandoned-wonderland-deserted-facilities-by-nasa-and-the-u-s-government-aef7d6d56ea1

Workers climb a ladder in to the rusting hulk of India’s first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant at a ship-breaking yard in Mumbai,…

INS Vikrant, aircraft carrier, ships, salvage, decay, India

Workers climb a ladder in to the rusting hulk of India’s first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant at a ship-breaking yard in Mumbai, India. The iconic naval vessel, that was purchased from Britain in 1957, played a key role during the India-Pakistan war of 1971 and was decommissioned in 1997. Picture: AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade

Survivors

oldest living things, Rachel Sussman, photography, life, death, decay, growth

Of the thirty ancient living things that Sussman has photographed, two have since died. “One was a thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘underground forest’ outside a botanical garden in Pretoria,” she said. “Apparently, they changed the traffic pattern and just bulldozed right over it. The other was a thirty-five-hundred-year-old tree just outside Orlando, Florida—actually, the original tourist attraction before Disney. Meth heads snuck into it to do meth, and they accidentally burned it down.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/survivors–9?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter

Let’s admit it: Britain is now a developing country

UK, empire, decay, collapsonomics, development, OECD, WEF

How can any nation that came up with the BBC and the NHS be considered in the same breath as India or China? Let me refer you to one of the first lines of The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, in which a wise old man warns International Monetary Fund officials and foreign dignatories: “India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/britain-now-developing-country-foodbanks-growth

Short Film: Six Apartments

film, decay, six apartments, Reynold Reynolds, 2011

Life is in decay in Reynold Reynolds‘ beautifully shot short film Six Apartments. Six strangers, unaware of each other’s existence, live their lives in isolation, passing their time on Earth listening to the radio, watching TV, scrubbing their feet, feeding their pet snake, etc. All the while they do not notice that their world is slowly decomposing all around them. Depending on your stomach for that kind of thing, some of the decay can be quite grotesque. But, the stunning camera moves and shot compositions are completely wonderful to behold.

http://www.undergroundfilmjournal.com/short-film-six-apartments/

The Internet Didn’t Kill the Middle Class; Laxity and Apathy Did

collapsonomics, emptywheel, decay, manufacturing, employment, labour, capital

It wasn’t the rise of digitization that killed the middle class. It was the insufficiency of protests among U.S. brain power, including publicly-funded academics, failing to advocate for labor and home-grown innovation; their ignorance about the nature of blue collar jobs and the creative output they help realize compounded the problem. Manufacturing has increasingly reduced man hours in tandem with productivity-increasing technological improvements. It wasn’t the internet that killed these jobs, though technology reduced some of them. The inability to plan for the necessary shift of jobs to other fields revealed the lack of comprehensive, forward-thinking manufacturing and labor policies.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/05/16/the-internet-didnt-kill-the-middle-class-laxity-and-apathy-did/