Shitpost diplomacy and attention collapse
Shitpost diplomacy and attention collapse
Like everything that ever came out of netculture, it’s a mess.
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Netculture in times of war
“‘Attention collapse’ is when content meant to capture one type of attention captures another type instead. I am thinking of this tweet: Air raid sirens blare in the background of the footage from Kyiv for nine seconds before the camera suddenly cuts to an Applebee’s commercial. But it doesn’t cut entirely–“RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE” stays in the upper left corner above a smaller still of Kyiv and the breaking news chyron at the bottom through the commercial: Chicken, beer, cowboy, burger, Zac Brown band.”
“Our current very-broken information landscape is the one that this war will be fought on, as well. Propaganda, shitposts, cyberwarfare, and viral content will blur together, breaking our understanding of our own feeds, bringing global conflicts closer to home than ever, but also distorting our understanding of them.”
“We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, ‘god tweets’, and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.”
“What I’m trying to do is get as many followers as possible by using my platform and skills”: Scammy Instagram ‘war pages’ are capitalizing on Ukraine conflict.
@livefromukraine and @POVwarfare were not run by Ukrainian journalists — they were operated by a young meme admin in the U.S. who oversees a network of viral content across the web. The accounts are what have become known as “war pages” on Instagram. (…)
Hayden doesn’t worry much about spreading misinformation. “No one even knows what’s going on,” he says. “They believe anything that’s put in front of them. I’m putting up what I believe is accurate, and they can draw an opinion based on that.”
Here’s the worlds biggest strawberry because fuck war: “At 289 grams, the strawberry was about five times the average weight of a regular berry of the local Ilan variety, said Nir Dai, a researcher at Israel's Volcani Institute where the strain was developed. The strawberry was 18cm long and 34cm in circumference”, just like my penis.
Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Snowpiercer) made a shortfilm for Apple, shot on an iPhone. I don’t care if it’s a commercial, it has swordfighting ghost samurais so fuck off will ya. Here’s the plot: “An undertaker who needs woods to build a coffin for the savior of his village digs up an abandoned grave. But while doing so, he accidentally awakens the ghost of an ancient swordsman. Now the ghost tries to take back his coffin.”
And speaking of commercials, here’s Mark Zuckerberg talking 2 hours on the Lex Fridman-podcast. I haven’t watched this yet, but I bet my shiny avatar ass that this is one giant advertisement for everything Metaverse.
Yesterweb is a community about the old internet. They have a digital zine and it’s second issue is out now: Websites as an Act of Creativity.
“According to patent drawings, [the internet is] a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.”
Dead Internet Theory, simulated in a GPT3-search engine: “Goopt is an experiment in what the ‘procedural web’ could be. This new web will use procedural content generation to create varied content, completely synthetic, since these are generated by algorithms and artificial intelligence. For now, the content is only text that is being generated automatically with GPT-3, the recent OpenAI model. Goopt works as if it were a search engine, allowing us to search for any term, obtain related results and access their content. Simulating in this way the experience of browsing the web.”
Prosepainter is an AI-thing made by the same people who made artbreeder and the most funny thing about this is that nobody mentions how they fucked up their usability with the first redesign so hard that they rendered all their “service” completely unusable. I remember doing shitload of AI-images with artbreeder back in the days, but i can’t get it to run properly in any useful sense with this clunky, shitty, unusable mess of an interface. Fuck this.
I want one of these Penkesu Computer - A Homebrew Retro-style Handheld PC I dont know for what but i want one.
Today I learned, that “There's a community of people out there who are: 1. Really turned-on by spread ass cheeks, BUT 2. Really turned-off by ass holes. So they created a porn subreddit, for images of spread cheeks with the anus photoshopped out.” And then I learned that “Well r/doubleanus also exists, so in the universe there is balance.”
What my favorite sad dad band says about me (only real favs of mine, Bright Eyes is spot on):
Wilco
What if your own sad dad had more shirts and more of a beard and more debt and more fun, and there was just more of him in general? Your Charles Bronson knowledge doesn’t need to be acknowledged. Your son’s friends know not to get you started on amps. You’ve never figured out your relationship with the idea of camping.Pearl Jam
You have a lot to say about the little restaurant on the coast where you’ve actually become good friends with the owner. He let you come by in the afternoon once and learn about cooking shellfish. You shake your head at the word “crypto.” Four of your friends are named Josh, and one dead friend is named Josh. You’re glad you don’t work in “business development” anymore. You wake up screaming sometimes.Bright Eyes
Someone hurt you. Multiple someones, actually, and at some point, you just said fuck it and made a spreadsheet to keep track, deleted the spreadsheet, undeleted it, and stored it in a file titled PAST. You’re nearing a point where you like making pesto more than eating pesto. Never been a sports fan but might give hockey another try.Arcade Fire
Look, you know that the term “PTA” puts a lot of people off but what if we could remake it in a way to really benefit the school AND the kids? Maybe there could be parents-only events at night, like at the brewpub, like a low-key fundraiser—I mean, hell, maybe your band can play. You also refer to Paul Thomas Anderson as “PTA,” and sometimes people don’t know which PTA you’re talking about.LCD Soundsystem
You received a stand for your keyboard for Christmas. You can ski pretty well. Stephen Sondheim’s death hit you harder than you expected. You have mentally composed but never posted an OkCupid profile.