Kinetic Type and Conflict-Bias
Goodlinks 2023-10-16: Bill Watterson speaks / Wordpress.com goes Fediverse / Adobes AI-Tools / Online Interaction creates conflict-bias / Mushroom Milk / Clone Porn / Tooth Fingers and much more
KINETIC VERBS, some cool 3D-typo experiments by Aleandro Romandini.
I linked to Bill Wattersons The Mysteries when it was announced and now he and colaborator John Kascht produced a video to accompany the launch of the "illustrated fable for adults". Watterson hasn't done a comicbook since the end of Calvin & Hobbes in 1995 and only published a handful of new cartoons ever since, about one of which, the remix-collaboration with Stephan Pastis on Pearl & Swine, i blogged about back then. Watterson is famously reclusive with only a few interviews popping up every five years or so. I had a very heavy C&H-phase at age 20 or so where i read every collected volume in a matter of two weeks, and then I read them again, and then again, and i fell more in love with the strips everytime i went back -- that's how good it is. It's awesome to see the author of my beloved Calvin & Hobbes back in the game, and the video is great precisely because it captures the chaotic mess that is the creative process.
Fonts In Use is the best resource to find out about the use of certain fonts in vintage books, posters, flyers and whatnot. Recently, they added more than 20 new interlocking letterforms to their database and this gem on the cover of a book about speaking to the ghost of Elvis.
Graph Paper Catalogue, 1958: Present & Correct is a London shop for vintage stationary and their whole website is one whole drool for me. I’m especially into this graph paper catalogue because i have a weird knack for units of measurement.
One Revolution Per Minute by Erik Wernquist "is a short film (he) made to explore my fascination with artificial gravity in space. It takes place aboard the SSPO Esperanta - a planetary orbiter that spins around itself at a rate of one revolution per minute (1 RPM). With a radius of 450 meters, the spin generates artificial gravity with an effect of approximately 0.5 g along its main deck." Jason Kottke "calculated that the outer ring of the space station is moving at 105.4 mph (169.95 km/h) with respect to the center." Which sounds pretty fast, until you realize that our planet is spinning ten times that fast at 1600km/h per hour or 460 meters per second.
AI-Journalism vs Journalistic Codes
This piece at Nieman Lab about why Press freedom means controlling the language of AI is saying with different words what i was getting at in Populist Media Manipulation in times of Synthetic Journalism and Kiss Your Reality Goodbye:
GenAI looks likely to become entrenched across the news industry, deepening even further the press’s dependence on tech companies, their data infrastructures, and often inscrutable machine learning models. News organizations may soon outsource to tech companies not only the power and responsibility to disseminate and curate news, but to create it in the first place.
This power goes to the core of journalism’s public service, namely its capacity and obligation to artfully, eloquently, and intentionally use language to create and debate the ground truths that anchor shared social realities. As countless journalism scholars have shown, and expert practitioners know, the words journalism uses matter like no other words because, at their best, journalism’s words emerge out of public service, unimpeachable reporting, self-reflexive news judgment, eloquent storytelling, rigorous editing, and timely publication. News is not 'content', readers are not 'users', stories are not 'syntheses'.
A truly free press controls its language from start to finish. It knows where its words come from, how to choose and defend them, and the power that comes from using them on the public’s behalf.
AI in the big flat Now
In Will AI kill our creativity? Cameron Shackell writes:
increasing use of AI could make us think too much alike, leading to a decrease in cognitive diversity and an increase in cultural tightness. In this scenario, societies would become more rigid in the norms they enforce, and less tolerant of deviations from the status quo. At a population level this would be a creativity killer.
The threat isn’t just AI-generated movies, TV, books and art. In the future, the homes we live in, the cars we drive (or won’t have to drive) and our shared public spaces will all be shaped by AI. We may see our thinking become homogenised under the pressure of increasingly similar environments and experiences.
This already is happening and well documented, with the latest piece coming from the NYT: Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill.
Shared global digital spaces create a aesthetic sameness in logos, interieur design, music and movies, a phenomenon i termed "The Big Flat Now" in this age of average.
You can break this down to the fact that the endless feeds from all over the world flatten time and introduce a new atemporality, with literally "everything, everywhere, all at once". In such an environment without a beginning and no end, there is no story to tell, no narrative to follow, and it flattens the aesthetic experience of the world. Given that AI is a technology of averages in principle, it will only further this development.
Bellingcat looks at How 4chan is Abusing Bing’s New Image Model. It's no surprise at all that the filth of the web are abusing image synthesis to spread racist imagery and the problem here is not a lack of moderation (which can and should be improved), but that sewers like 4chan exist in the first place. There's oldschool web activists high on the openweb-dogma who will defend this sort of thing by saying that "trolls gonna troll", but i find this sort of shrugging numbness appalling as it's throwing in the towel with platforms which produce radicalized psychopaths by design, and i will not do that. I know that libertarian minded edgelords grow pimples on their foreheads for me even thinking that, but I've seen enough of internet culture to grow a zero tolerance for trolling-platforms like the chans. They should be banned and censored, as we do by law with all things promoting violance and hate, and we should stop romanticizing the filthy dreck from which internet culture unfortunately emerged.
A new preprint of Psyarxiv on Overtrust in AI Recommendations to Kill finds a "strong propensity to overtrust unreliable AI in life-or-death decisions made under uncertainty." With the Pentagon and asshats like Peter Thiel pushing for AI in the military, this study paints a terrifying picture of soldiers outsourcing their moral decision to pull the trigger on a machine judgement to kill.
An "AI algorithm correctly predicted 70% of earthquakes a week before they happened during a seven-month trial in China", which is not that astounding given they are pretty good at detecting patterns, and increasing tectonic tension seems like a detectable pattern to me.
AI on Track to Gobble Up as Much Energy as a Country, Study Finds, here's the paper: The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence.
"The Hadoken (波動拳, Hadōken, Surge Fist or Wave Motion Fist) is a special attack": AI is "rapidly outperforming champion Street Fighter players."
When Your AI Girlfriend Says She Loves You: "'Everything is about convenience now', he suggested at one point. 'We just try to tailor our own existence, you know?' Like adjusting the climate control in your car."
A good video breaking down all the new AI-integrations in Adobes Creative Suite, i'm especially impressed by their model for vector graphics. I said it before and i say it again: Adobe might eat Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and Dall-E for lunch in the long run, when it comes to image synthesis and generative AI for creative tools.
Wordpress.com goes Fediverse
WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub, here's the official announcement: Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com.
While Wordpress.com is not the same as Wordpress, the open source CMS driving more than half of the internet, it is its commercial arm, and building the Fediverse into it is a milestone for independend publishing on the web that can't be overvalued.
When i played with ActivityPub and IndieWeb a few years ago, the tech was still clunky and i didn't really get it to run. The more people get involved here, the more streamlined the tech will get. Many people don't use Mastodon or other Fediverse networks for convenience reasons, for instance, you have to copy paste user-nicks to follow people on other servers. But plugins like FediAct streamline this process and i can one-click follow any Mastodon user from every server. This stuff will only improve the more people use it, you can even run Mastodon on an Apple II.
The power of the Fediverse is that, in contrast to protocolls like email and RSS, the Fediverse is built for internet-wide interaction across services and instances which promises to break the walls of proprietary networks like TwiX or Facebook, reintroducing interoperability to the social web as it once was envisioned by it's founders.
Here's my Mastodon: @rawx@sigmoid.social).
Online Interaction creates conflict-bias
In a new paper about how Online Interaction Turns the Congeniality Bias Into an Uncongeniality Bias, researchers found that
once social-media users were given an opportunity to interact with others, the preference for like-minded content was eliminated. Rather, users preferentially selected counterattitudinal content for their replies to express their disagreement with others. The tendency to attack dissenting views increased when the overall discussion climate was in favor of a user’s view.
The authors think this goes against what they call "the congeniality narrative", meaning filterbubbles and echochambers. But those are distinct while interdependend phenomena.
Filterbubbles are not tightly closed networks, but they are built from semipermeable walls where only selected informationbits enter for digestion by our tribe, and more often than not these informationbits come from the other side demonstrating just how dumb and evil they are. We amplify them by ridicule of the other in an echochamber, further strengthening the walls of our filterbubble.
The result is the uncongeniality bias the researchers talk about in that paper: As soon we get the opportunity to interact, we prefer to react to views dissenting from our own. Then we can screenshot the dumb exchange for a laugh with our peers.
This is the inherent outrage machine built into the internet, and it has not much to do with algorithms or capitalism, i'm afraid. But that's not a sexy thing to say in web activist circles because the only one you can point your finger at is ourselves, so this is largely ignored. Bummer.
Telegram-to-Twitter Pipeline Fuels Israel-Hamas War Misinformation and The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation and Hamas Seeds Violent Videos of Israel Attack on X and Telegram and Musk’s X allows misinformation about Hamas’ war on Israel to proliferate, all of which results in two things: Twitter Cracks Down on Nudity Instead of Israel-Hamas Misinformation and EU opens investigation into X over alleged disinformation. In other words, Elons clowncar is in for a ride. Also: The new podcast Elon Musk Unmasked looks at "the origins of an oligarch".
Meanwhile on Bluesky: “The invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.” - George Orwell
Meanwhile on Facebook: Meta says it’s cracking down on violent content following Hamas attacks.
Deck.Blue is Tweetdeck for Bluesky. Here's my account: https://bsky.app/profile/rawx.bsky.social. If you need an invitation, hook me up.
Erin Kissanes final installment of Meta in Myanmar, Part IV: Only Connect, in which she writes a minutiae account of Facebooks engagement in Burma which resulted in genocide.
Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore: "The pressure to conform is stronger. It’s no surprise, in this environment, that fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers."
The Chained Reader: While i don't agree with every detail in this piece, it absolutely shines when it relates the history of intimate silent reading with the form of reading we experience in digital environments:
"Increasingly, from the point of view of large social media platforms, human users are mechanical turks, sorting and identifying the equivalent of bridges and traffic lights. By privileging and rewarding our performance of these activities, the machines are teaching us a new way of reading—linear sorting, i.e., putting things in baskets.
Instead of seeking to extract meaning from context in order to expand the space of one’s own inner life, which is something that humans do, social media users look to outwardly conform by extracting hot-button terms and sort them into baskets marked 'good' and 'bad', while being rewarded for responding correctly to the cues they are given—i.e., the platforms are training their users to read like machines. (...)
For readers and writers who take pleasure in their engagement with each other through the text, these developments represent the reversal of six centuries of increasing imaginative freedom and expanding opportunities for empathy with people who might seem on the surface to be radically unlike ourselves."
Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible: Twitter never was a traffic hose and that's never been a secret. What NPR misses here is that Twitter was the go to place for the journalist class to gossip and banter.
Interestingly, "exposure to unreliable content is higher among the better informed" and "the driver behind exposure to misinformation is overall political interest, which results in more expansive and diverse news consumption." This is congruent with findings about the limited impact of desinformation.
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The EU kicked off the initial phase of a Europe-wide tax on carbon in imported goods, "making sure that the carbon in high-emission products is priced at the same rate, no matter where those products are produced." Good.
DOJ sues eBay for ‘rolling coal’ devices; fines could hit $2 billion. Good, and this is insane: "Rolling coal is the practice of installing a tampering device to pump more diesel into a vehicle’s engine than it can handle, leading it to spew out sooty black clouds of exhaust that pollute the air. The practice is sometimes used as a form of anti-environmental protest. Coal rollers, or the drivers who engage in the action, may intentionally target Teslas, Priuses or other electric or hybrid vehicles."
‘People are happier in a walkable neighborhood’: the US community that banned cars. I don't like living in the inner city of Berlin and one reason is that it's full of noisy cars which stink. I know we have a big movement here to get rid of cars in Berlin Mitte at least, but it's hampered by conservative jerks sucking up to the motor industry.
Human rights experts warn against European crackdown on climate protesters: "In Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK, authorities have responded to climate protests with mass arrests, the passing of draconian new laws, the imposing of severe sentences for non-violent protests and the labelling of activists as hooligans, saboteurs or eco-terrorists."
Previously, i linked to this report on How Think Tanks Laid the Groundwork to Criminalize Protest and wrote about Why radical climate protest is upholding the law.
When your meat-insisting republican uncle high on coal doesn't listen to science, maybe he will listen to this: Beer faces unbitter future due to climate change. I can imagine that climate change fucking with beer is something conservative donkheads might listen to.
Millions of children are displaced due to extreme weather events. Climate change will make it worse: "Storms, floods, fires and other extreme weather events led to more than 43 million displacements involving children between 2016 and 2021, according to a United Nations report."
Over 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves reduced in volume over 25 years, scientists say.
The fossil fuel economy is doing... not so good, realistically: Disasters cause $3.8 trillion in crop losses over 30 years.
Using Dairy DNA, Startup Is Making Milk From Mushrooms. Mushroom milk is definitely high on my list of things i would gobble down in the blink of an eye.
Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Scientific American summarizes a recent conference on panpsychism organized by Philip Goff. The debate between Goff and Sean Carroll is up on Youtube here.
Why we cheat: "We are all prone to being moral shysters. Be especially dubious of those who strongly signal that they are not."
Related: The Capone hypothesis: Do antagonistic individuals view themselves as more good than evil? They do: People high on the Dark Tetrad, the psychological traits of psychopathy, sadism, machiavellianism and narcisism "still rated themselves as possessing substantially more good than evil character".
The Perception Census is closing shop on October 31st, a "ground-breaking scientific study exploring the unique ways we each experience the world around us".
I had much fun participating in it and wrote about my inner experience of the world in A Quiet Mind: On the lack of inner speech. If you want to test your senses and perception with fun illusions and mind-trickery, now is the time.
Related: In My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things, Marco Giancotti writes about his aphantasia, the lack of a visual thinking. I'm a visual thinker with a very vivid inner visual experience and can't even begin to imagine how it must be like for this to be completely absent, to think only and only in language or concepts. He can't "imagine sights, smells, or sounds", which, whoa.
His description of his conceptual thinking style, then again, closely resembles my metaphor of "surfing concept clouds": "the physical 'bullet-list concepts' don’t just float haphazardly in nothingness, but are embodied in coherent three-dimensional structures that I can manipulate in my mind".
The new Showtime series The Curse starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder looks fantastic and "explores how an alleged curse disturbs the relationship of a newly married couple as they try to conceive a child while co-starring in their new home-improvement show."
Hammer has a new take on the Jekyll and Hyde-mythos. In Doctor Jekyll the impeccable Suzy Eddie Izzard plays a female version of the doomed doctor, giving the whole psychological horrordrama a trans edge, which could work pretty well.
Jekyll & Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson was written when Psychoanalysis was new and Freud made a splash with his theories about the subconscious, and this story about splitting human personality into good and evil parts that lurk in everyone was a reaction to that. Giving this a 21st century spin making people living with gender dysphoria the main character of this story seems like a very fitting update to this psychological subtext. (To be fair, it doesn't look too good, but i'll watch it anyways as a fan of Izzard, Jekyll and Hammer.)
The first Scott Pilgrim-trailer for the Edgar Wright produced anime on Netflix looks like this does justice to the source material. I'm not that into anime these days, but i'll give this a shot.
A new series continues the adventures of Godzilla in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple+. For me, a must watch.
More trailers worth watching: The Iron Claw, Blue Eye Samurai, Bodies.
A24 Expands Strategy From Arthouse Gems to More Commercial Films: "According to a top agent with knowledge of the company, over the summer A24 acquisition executive Noah Sacco made the talent agency rounds in search of 'action and big IP projects.' The studio, the agent told TheWrap, is 'deemphasizing the traditional character/auteur driven dramas'. (...) An individual close to A24 said that the studio is not leaning away from auteur driven dramas but rather is 'doing more', which includes looking at wide releases and 'widening the aperture'." Fingers crossed they do this right.
Shudder just greenlit the next V/H/S Film and it will be scifi-themed. I loved the last entry in the V/H/S-anthology franchise a lot and i can't wait for the next.
Guillermo Del Toro does Frankenstein and just cast Christoph Waltz in a undisclosed role. Can't wait, Del Toro is exactly the right guy to do the source material justice.
Last Kill was a lie: Miramax Lands TV Rights To ‘Halloween’ Franchise.
TIL that Clone Porn is a thing. I mean sure three Lexi Belles are better than one, right? Also, this image of greenscreen porn-actress. I wonder if one might develop a fetish for greenscreen-behind-the-scenes-porn in which you get turned on by people doing it in green suits.
At the Public Domain Review, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860). They also have A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) and A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1788), you sugarstick Whipster.
Humans are more terrifying than lions: "95% of species ran more from humans than lions (significantly in giraffes, leopards, hyenas, zebras, kudu, warthog, and impala) or abandoned waterholes faster (significantly in rhinoceroses and elephants). Our results greatly strengthen the growing experimental evidence that wildlife worldwide fear the human 'super predator' far more than other predators".
You can buy human teeth jewelry which is awesomely creepy and while these tooth fingers are not made from real human teeth, they are even more creepily awesome. Look at them! Tooth Fingers!
Who Really Invented the Alphabet?: The first alphabets were not invented by bureaucrats or professional scribes, but by creatives of all kind as a "casual and playful mode of knowledge".
Cats are evolutionary perfect, which also explains why they are arrogant asshats. Sincerely, a dog person. (Actually, I like cats, but dogs are cooler.)
'People Were Eating Them': Long Ago Cannibalism Was Normal, Study Says. The human species is built on art and imagination, writing and cultural evolution, philosophy and the practice of cannibalism. Munch away folks!
NASA’s Bennu Asteroid Sample Contains Carbon, Water and Webb Observations of CO2 on Jupiter’s Moon Europa: As i said earlier, i bet we will find intelligent extraterrestrial life -- intelligent as in "at least slime mold"-intelligent -- within my lifetime on Jupiter moon Europa. It would be a surprise if the universe was not full of life, which does not automatically translate to exaggerated evolutionary paths leading to cultural evolutionary takeoffs by externalizing memory functions into stuff like writing, printing presses, the internet, AI and what's to come, a thing that might be very, very rare. But life itself? Plenty. Plenty.
The Whole Earth Index has highres scans of the Whole Earth Catalog, which influenced a whole subcultural generation in the Bay Area and was deemed a precursor to the internet and especially blogging. If you like sites like Boing Boing, this is a goldmine.
From a 2008 post by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired-magazine: ct2: The Whole Earth Blogalog
For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the ’60s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. Bookstores were usually small and bad; libraries, worse. The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life, it gave you the reasoning and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it. This was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog.
Here’s a few example pages of the retrofuturistic, weird and insane stuff you’ll find there:
dass es diese Rolling coal Dinger überhaupt gibt man. wtf