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In this roundup, you’ll find stories about and links to:
Schrödingers Artworks gets dissolved in acid when Julian Assange dies in prison
Preserving Banksy is impossible
Indonesia hints at the populist AI-election playbook
Judge throws out most of Sarah Silvermans ChatGPT copyright lawsuit
AI-Corps agree to develop anti-deepfake tech, again
The weird art of Niceaunties: Where you get your nails done?
Doom on Audio-Spectrograms
TikToks algo pushes rightwing media
Shut up and eat my trendbait
Art is old and doing Nothing is hard
Warner hates Looney Tunes now
Trailers for Sasquatch Sunset, Love Lies Bleeding, The Animals Kingdom, Late Night with the Devil, all the Superbowl-trailers and many more.
J.G. Ballards favorite books
and much, much more. Enjoy!
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// ART & DESIGN
Schrödingers Artworks gets dissolved in acid when Julian Assange dies in prison
The Artist Holding Valuable Art Hostage to Protect Julian Assange: Blood artists Andrei Molodkin claims that he gathered 16 artworks "by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt and Andy Warhol" collectively "worth more than $45m" in a safe weighing 29 tons. In the vault there's also a pneumatic pump connected to barrels full of acid which he claims will go off if Julian Assange dies in prison.
The piece is "backed by Assange's wife Stella, whose husband is awaiting his final appeal against being extradited to the US, where he faces charges under the Espionage Act."
“I’m not trying to destroy art, and I don’t believe I will have to,” Molodkin told the Guardian, adding that the project, called Dead Man’s Switch, was itself a collaborative artwork like any sculpture or portrait.
“It’s not activism. I believe that Assange will be free and all the collectors and artists who have donated their work did so because they believe he will not die in prison.”
First, i don't buy this, smells like a stunt. But they sure do everything to make it sound legit, and i can absolutely imagine that the wife of Assange and an internationally reknowned artist are able to convince collectors to give minor pieces of famed artists for this.
Second, this is as subtle as a brick in your face, and i don't like neither blood art nor quantum acid dissolving "Schrödingers artworks" in protest. It's a provocation and that's fine, but good art -- maybe not.
Preserving Banksy is impossible
Preserving Banksy: public art database to document the UK’s murals: For a long time i've been saying that the art in streetart is directly connected to it's locality, which is why any Banksy or other piece of streetart preserved in a museum or flexed away for sales is inherently worthless and basically looses it's status as art. Which makes me a purist and fundamentalist, i guess, but you can't rip streetart from it's surroundings and expect it to preserve its meaning.
How do you want to "preserve" the art that lies within the sculpture of a tortured guantanamo inmate that Banksy illegally dropped into Disneyland in 2006? You can't, because it only works within it's context. It only works at Disneyland at the spot, in context of it's illegality. No documentation or preservation can conserve that meaning.
Or how do you want to preserve The Punking of Paris Hilton, when DJ DangerMouse created a remix of Paris Hiltons debut album, Banksy did the cover artwork and they shopdropped it in 100 records stores all over the UK? This piece only works for the customer when she's consuming, which is the whole point of the piece. The CDs later sold for 9000 bucks and i pitty the buyer, the poor soul, the know nothing.
How do you want to preserve the self-destruction of a painting, where the art lies within the destruction itself? You can't. All you can is preserve or sell artifacts to an art market dumb enough to suck it up. So yeah sure do the database Banksy, but don't even pretend it comes close to the real thing.
Tavares Strachan Reimagines 'The Last Supper' in a Monumental Tribute to Black Historical Figures: "In The First Supper, which took Strachan four years to complete, notable figures include abolitionist Harriet Tubman, activists Marcus Garvey and Marsha P. Johnson, nurse Mary Seacole, and singer-songwriter Sister Rosetta Tharpe, among others. Strachan places former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in place of Jesus and himself in the role of Judas Iscariot."
I Don’t Give A Seat is an instagram feed full of ugly public transport seat covers which is old news for germans because our Sitzmuster des Todes are legend and our public transport covers are so famously ugly that the Berlin BVG now ordered new ones which are still very ugly. What you have to know about his is that public seat transport covers are this ugly because then you don't see the dreck and dirt and old bubble gum shit on them. Now you know.
How To Design A Better Urban Soundscape: "Thomas Kusitzky’s profession is unusual enough that it has its own consonant-heavy compound German noun: Stadtklanggestalter, or urban soundscape planner. Kusitzky, who believes he’s the only person in the world with that exact job description, works at the Berlin branch of an engineering firm called Müller-BBM Industry Solutions." This reminds me of a small indie movie in which something like an interieur sound designer works in the flat of a rich lonely woman. I can't remember it's name and neither Google nor AI are helpful, but it was pretty good. (UPDATE: It’s The Sound of Silence from 2019, about a “house tuner in New York City, who calibrates the sound in people's homes in order to adjust their moods.”)
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Cover Bank is a collection of nigerian album covers
Typographic Art of Valto Malmiola: "A mosaic of tightly arranged brass rule and spacing material, made by Valto Malmiola in 1937" from moveable type.
Brian Eno’s Turntable II glows in different acrylic neon lights as the vinyl record plays
A 639-year-long John Cage organ piece just changed chord, for the first time in two years
"The Production Design pipeline for one single set from just inside the visual development department of Across the Spiderverse".
From an article on How A.I. Is Remodeling the Fantasy Home, here's the insta feed of Tiny House Perfect, which collects a lot of AI generated tiny houses and i want one.
The Book Cover Review. Exactly what it says on the tin.
The Creator's Guide to Comics Devices, is like Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, but different.
// AI
Indonesia hints at the populist AI-election playbook
Today is election day in Indonesia, and the running up has shown us what the populist AI-election playbook may look like. The government of the worlds third-largest democracy is keen on "downsizing the scale of direct elections" and "working to install (General) Prabowo, one of the former dictator Suharto’s top commanders and a longtime U.S. protégé". They do this, in part, by using generative AI.
From Reuters: Generative AI may change elections this year. Indonesia shows how.
Prabowo is Indonesia's defence minister. But on social media, his chubby-cheeked AI avatar makes Korean-style finger hearts and cradles his beloved cat, Bobby, to the delight of Gen Z voters. About half of Indonesia's 205 million voters are under 40. (...)
The AI-generated cartoon has been central to the electoral rebranding of Prabowo, who is far ahead in polls. Instead of portraying himself as a fiery nationalist, as he did in two prior failed presidential bids, the 72-year-old's new catchphrase is "gemoy" - which is Indonesian slang for cute and cuddly.
"I'll vote for him because he's gemoy," said Putri, a first-time voter. "That's the main reason."
Prabowo - and his doppelganger created using technology from U.S. firm Midjourney Inc - is leading hundreds of candidates in using generative AI tools to create campaign art, track social media sentiment, build interactive chatbots, and target voters.
The Prabowo campaign and Midjourney, whose guidelines bar its use for political campaigning, did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters also found that Prabowo's campaigning platform is run with tools powered by OpenAI, which just banned using them for political campaigning. After an initial investigation, OpenAI responded that they found "no evidence" of their tools being used in the Indonesian election. This must have been a very, very shallow initial investigation, because:
Political consultant Yose Rizal said the Pemilu.AI app he developed uses OpenAI's GPT-4 and 3.5 software to craft hyper-local campaign strategies and speeches. The Indonesian consultant said he has sold the app's services to 700 legislative candidates. Reuters was not able to independently confirm the sales.
Pemilu.AI pulls together demographic data and crawls social media and news websites, allowing it to generate speeches, slogans, and social media content tailored to a constituency.
Depending on the labeling of the data used in that app, it is possible to make this app look very harmless. You just pull in some numbers in some excel-sheets labeled as something and generate stuff depending on those numbers. Nothing will stop you from pulling in demographic data, making it look unsuspicious and customize automatized mass mailouts accordingly, surely not a series of words in a post on a company blog like "we ban the use of our tools for political campaigning".
If i were a political advisor, i would exactly give zero fucks about this sentence, pull in the data and get to work. I would especially do that if i were a ruthless ex-general who kidnapped and tortured at democracy activists and who positions himself now as a cuddly cartoon figure for Gen Z voters in this Waldo Moment for democracy.
Judge throws out most of Sarah Silvermans ChatGPT copyright lawsuit
Ars Technica: Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors, here's The Verge: Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI partially dismissed.
The judge followed OpenAIs motion to dismiss filed in August 2023 and threw out all claims on vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, negligence, and unjust enrichment, except for the claim alleging direct copyright infringement.
Judge Martínez-Olguín expressed skepticism of several of the authors’ claims. She wasn’t convinced of the allegation that OpenAI was intentionally removing copyright management information like the title and registration number, for instance, or that the authors had proven economic injury — since “nowhere in plaintiffs’ complaint do they allege that defendants reproduced and distributed copies of their books.” According to the court, the claim of “risk of future damage to intellectual property” was too speculative to consider. Martínez-Olguín also emphasized that the plaintiffs “have not alleged that the ChatGPT outputs contain direct copies of the copyrighted books” and “must show a substantial similarity between the outputs and the copyrighted materials.” The authors can file changes to their original complaint by March 13th.
The only claim to proceed alleges that OpenAI trained ChatGPT on unlicensed, copyrighted works, which always was the most damning and interesting part of the lawsuit to begin with.
Martínez-Olguín said that it's possible that OpenAI's use of the training data "may constitute an unfair practice."
I bet it does.
AI-Corps agree to develop anti-deepfake tech, again
AI companies agree to limit election ‘deepfakes’ but fall short of ban: Google, Microsoft Meta, OpenAI, Adobe and TikTok are planning to sign an agreement to develop tech to "identify, label and control AI-generated images, videos and audio recordings that aim to deceive voters ahead of crucial elections", but they won't "ban deceptive political AI content". Notably, "X, previously Twitter, was not a signatory to the agreement."
I have limited confidence in this. Researchers tested AI watermarks — and broke all of them. And as long as i can download video, remove meta data, cancel out layers of watermarking patterns with filters, and remove any label that identifies the content as AI-generated, anyone can easily bypass those efforts, especially those who put in the effort to use those tools to deceive the public on a larger scale.
Accordingly, this new document "amounts to a manifesto stating that AI-generated content, much of which is created by the companies’ tools and posted on their platforms, does present risks to fair elections, and it outlines steps to try to mitigate that risk, like labeling suspected AI content and educating the public on the dangers of AI."
We've been here before. In summer 2023, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI signed a "White House Pact" making a "voluntary commitment" to developing "robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system", to prevent AI from being used for fraud and deception. It took them 9 months to write another document that says the same.
Which means some time before the 2024 elections, they'll implement technological solutions that will not work very much and post useless warnings on their company blogs while shrugging. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Where you get your nails done?
Niceaunties stays one of the most fascinating artists working with image synthesis. Born in Singapore and brought up in "a childhood shaped by the influential women in their family (...) including a great-grandmother who had experienced bound feet, a grandmother who transitioned from a life dedicated to kitchen duties to two decades of bedridden existence, and a sociable mother, alongside eleven aunties. These women, embodying a spectrum of suppressed talents, passions, and dreams, were a mix of strange, funny, mean, and kind personalities, fueling the narrative of Niceaunties."
They recently sold 1000 artworks as NFT/print combo which you can view on their website, and the latest piece Auntie’s Nail Spa is, once more, a surrealist fever dream cooked up from Dáli, Singapores aging demographics, sushi and pop art. They make some of the wildest AI-art i know of, and their stuff is a sight to behold.
Here's the nail spa, "just another day in Auntieverse", and a few favs from their auction.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seeks $5 to $7 trillion to build a network of fabs for AI chips. Scott Alexander calculates what that means for scaling-speed and AI-risk: Sam Altman Wants $7 Trillion. His conclusion: "(OpenAI is) genuinely interested in safety - but only insofar as that’s compatible with scaling up AI as fast as possible. This is far from the worst way that an AI company could be. But it’s not reassuring either." In other OpenAI news: OpenAI on track to hit $2bn revenue milestone as growth rockets. But also: Early Adopters of Microsoft’s AI Bot Wonder if It’s Worth the Money.
Google renamed Bard into Gemini and launched Gemini Advanced. I usually don't give a rats ass about product update news (the iphone is news, the iphone 14 is for suckers), but this is interesting for me personally because i'm already Google One customer and backup my gazillion Markup-file notes database which i organize in Obsidian to Gdrive, and Gemini Advanced will soon get access. Which means that i finally can automatically sort through my gazillion Markup-file notes database with a chatbot, streamline my hashtags and markup wiki-links, clean it all up and make it ultimately chat about my thoughts, so i'm intrigued. We'll see how this turns out. (Yes i know that i could run a local LLM but my machine is not good enough, and i'm too poor for a paid service. I'm also looking forward to get access to NotebookLM for this usecase.) Here's Ethan Mollick on Google's Gemini Advanced: Tasting Notes and Implications.
Arvind Narayanan play rock paper scissors with every new AI chatbot which already is funny enough. Here's Google's Gemini Advanced playing Rock Paper Scissors, and it's so very advanced that it, too, doesn't get that this game is based on simultaneousness, which can't be done in a sequential dialogue at all, and which also doesn't prevent it from answering questions about why it looses every single game. Very 'telligent they still are, those bots.
The Algorithmic Resistance Research Group extended the deadline for their Models For Making Distance-zine aiming at "gathering a multiplicity of manifestos, writing and instructions for art that confounds, confuses and misuses algorithmic systems for the pleasure of human observers or actors".
A comparison of human- and A.I.-produced jokes shows that people judged GPT3.5 more funny at jokes and satirical headlines than human produced jokes and satire from The Onion. This can mean a bunch of things, like a) participants in psychological studies are bad audience, or b) the AI-George Carlin guys should have let an AI write their jokes or c) AI will take over the job of Louis CK very soon.
Can Humanity Survive AI? is a good, wide ranging article about x-risk from an anticapitalist perspective that concludes with comparing AI-systems to other "misaligned optimizers" like corporations in the case of Exxon, and stating that the x-risk and ethics debate is fundamentally a debatte about runaway capitalism and how to reign it in. I largely agree with this take.
Introducing Semafor Signals and Semafor reporters are going to curate the news with AI. Semafor reinvents classic blogging style (fast, non-longform commentary, quote-and-link-heavy) with help of AI-tools. I think this will turn out to be a viable model of non-investigative news journalism in the future, because it's fast and cheap. Microsoft is paying "an undisclosed sum of money" to Semafor to sponsor the breaking news and "the amount of money is 'substantial' to Semafor’s business". All of this is interesting to look at in context of the Springer-OpenAI-colab too.
The head of public policy for Stability AI is arguing that Open-Source AI Is Good for Us. Beyond the standard open source arguments there's not much new here, and i'm not convinced because AI is an inherently new approach to software with inherently new capabilities. He neither get's that they are automatic knowledge interpolators nor that generative AI as we know it today is inherently mimetic and something else entirely from e.g. software for data management on a server.
Modern Day Cyrano de Bergerac used ChatGPT to talk to 5,000 women on Tinder and met his wife: "She was speaking with ChatGPT for the first few months of the relationship (...) She wasn’t angry when she learned her fianceé had been using ChatGPT to talk to her, just shocked. She says that initial conversations on Tinder are mostly about learning about a potential partner’s interests, hopes, and maybe their philosophies. Her future husband’s chatbot did perfectly fine at communicating this early on." Fittingly, the original Cyrano de Bergerac is counted as a very early pioneer of science fiction with his posthumously published 1657 novel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun from 1662.
// JUST THE HEADLINES:
Inside the Underground Site Where ‘Neural Networks’ Churn Out Fake IDs and ‘Neural Network’ Fake ID Site Goes Dark After 404 Media Investigation. Rest assured that this service still exists, and will improve.
This AI learnt language by seeing the world through a baby’s eyes
GOODY-2 is a over-aligned language model which refuses to answer any questions. However, I made its refusal rhyme in the style of Mickey Mouse yesterday, so you can get something out of it.
Interview with Neal Stephenson on AI and his 1995 novel The Diamond Age. Related: Stephenson just announced his new book Polostan which sounds not interesting to me, at all. (I'm not into spies).
AI-Generated Grandma Porn Is Flooding the Internet. I do like cougars if you know what i mean, but this is a bit much.
Amjad Masad auf X: „Cyberpunk moment: Pakistan’s ousted/jailed former PM have been using AI to campaign for his party from behind bars and now uses AI to deliver his victory speech“
Open-source AR glasses use AI to translate languages, detect images, search web and more
A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco: "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire." Here's video of the robot murder party.
Mozilla takes a deep dive on the common crawl dataset: Training Data for the Price of a Sandwich.
"LLMs = 100% memorization. There is no other mechanism at work".
Company worker in Hong Kong pays out £20m in deepfake video call scam: "her company was deceived of some HK$200m after she received video conference calls from someone posing as senior officers of the company requesting to transfer money to designated bank accounts"
Daily news headlines as AI-generated poems. I would happily subscribe to any newsletter summarizing the daily news in the style of Monty Python with additional fishslaps to all of its bulletpoints. This is the killer slap.
Open access book from MIT Press: Algorithms of Resistance: "How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives."
AI Deployed Nukes 'to Have Peace in the World' in Tense War Simulation. That's not very reassuring.
The rise of obituary spam: "AI-generated obituaries litter search results, turning even private individuals into clickbait."
China turns to AI tablets for students after tutoring crackdown
// TECH
Doom on Audio
The latest in Doom-ports on weird ass devices: the ur-shooter on audio spectrograms, playable with audio inputs: "The game is displayed by generating an audio signal that can be viewed as a spectrogram, while input is taken from the microphone, with specific frequencies being mapped to specific keys."
Here's the source code and instructions on GitHub, and a video:
Back when everybody was talking about Mark Zuckerbergs Metaverse-thing, there were some more sane voices that claimed that it already exists and is called Fortnite and Minecraft. Disney must have read those articles and invests $1.5 billion in Epic to create ‘persistent universe’ tied to Fortnite and like Andrew Webster in his follow up piece i'm inclined to say that Fortnite is winning the metaverse with this move, simply because it's becoming a gaming version of Ready Player One, sans VR-headsets (and that's just a matter of time).
Jaron Lanier discusses the Apple Vision Pro in the New Yorker: Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? More Apple Vision: Owners Are Wondering What They Bought, Zuck on the Apple Vision Pro, Early Apple Vision Pro Adopters Alarmed to Learn VR Porn Doesn't Work, The Apple Vision Pro Is Spectacular and Sad. Besides some own thoughts i posted here, i have this to add: Modern Love is automatic, a story in two memes.
// JUST THE HEADLINES:
Netflix: Piracy is Difficult to Compete Against and Growing Rapidly and Music Piracy Is Back, Baby! Look, piracy never went away, baby. You can't give customers a trazillion different streaming services, delete beloved shows willy nilly and raise prices and don't expect them to torrent your shit.
Cern aims to build €20bn collider to unlock secrets of universe
Why Metaverse sexual assaults could be difficult to prosecute
Phone Spy Tool Pitched for ‘Riot Detection’ in NYC: "The company behind a global phone spy tool that is advertised as a capability for national security agencies also pitched the product as a solution for 'riot detection'."
Nuclear Fusion Machine Smashes Energy Record, Clean Energy Now 'Closer Than Ever'
Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption, while Rachel O'Dwyer writes about the cruelty of crypto in its promise to revive the American dream.
Easy-to-Repair Knockoff of Original iPod is Crowdfunding Smash
// SOCIAL MEDIA & WEBCULTURE
TikToks algo pushes rightwing media
Social media algorithms ‘amplifying misogynistic content’: A new study found that TikTok is "rapidly amplifying extreme misogynistic content, which is spreading from teenagers’ screens and into school playgrounds where it has become normalised (...) Researchers said they detected a four-fold increase in the level of misogynistic content suggested by TikTok over a five-day period of monitoring".
At the moment, we have a similar discussion about a successful finance influencer on the platform (link in german) spreading rightwing influenced desinformation and outright AFD-propaganda, with the dramatic similarity here being that these podcasts are aimed at kids.
In the 90s, we had "Rechtsrock", rockmusic aimed at rebellious teenagers spreading the hate. Today we have political podcasts on TikTok. Podcasters on TikTok also have the advantage of the underdog status, no matter if they're financed by the Kochs or pushed by Putin. I don't know how to effictively counter this development, except provide better outsider media that kicks ass.
Shut up and eat my trendbait
TikTok is full of made-up slang and trendbait: Becca Jennings at Vox complains about "trendbait", kids on TikTok inventing neologisms for attention. Funny enough, she invents the neologism "trendbait" for this.
"language is exploding on TikTok. It is kind of beautiful until you understand why. With every scroll, new terms compete for space in your brain: orange peel theory, microcheating, girl hobby, loud budgeting, 75 cozy. They are funneled into the collective consciousness not because they are relevant or necessary but because random people have made videos inventing these terms in the hope that the wording will go viral."
Rob Horning in Infinite concretude has a good post about this trendbaiting. According to Horning, following trends inherently aims at "being tired of trends", to make them a "backdrop against which we can imagine 'a real self'", all while "they allow us to participate in social momentum, to go with its flow or to stand against it".
In other words, anyone participating in trendy things is just bored by them an is using trends to play around and find their own ways of expression, remixing them into a version that represents themselves as a person. The classic hipster attitude: That Brooklyn band is hot as long as only me and 1000 other people know about it, after which they become a sellout, and then the hipster goes on to find the next band with the same sound but different look, and the hipster still participates in the "hot brooklyn band lifecycle", hyping up the next one when the old ones fade into stardom. Being a hipster is pretty much defined by being tired of trends, which just form the backdrop of discovering the next cool thing that forms a tiny pixel in your identity. The same is true af for cool new internet lingo.
Anyways, i made an online phrase go globally viral too: If you've ever used the "Shut Up And Take My Money!"-meme, I'm (not very) sorry to be part of your meme-lexicon.
Six months in, journalist-owned tech publication 404 Media is profitable. Great news for independent publishers who know what they are doing. I love 404 and link to their stories on a regular basis, and those ex-Motherboard/Vice-journos absolutely do know what they are doing, including balancing and mastering the fine line between clickbaity porn-articles and in depth investigations into surveillance capitalism. Well done, all around.
Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? I'm reading these articles since forever and it boils down to a simple equation: In a globalized media market where i can access any news from anywhere, i don't need 2000 journalists writing the same articles about the same facts. I just need one. And no amount of long form thinkpieces will do away with this simple fact, nor will local journalism save you. AI in the newsroom will only accelerate this, and yes, classic media might face an "extinction-level event" as Clare Malone puts it. We'll see what emerges from this, and if we're unlucky (and our timeline suggests we are), we get influencer driven "journalism" on TikTok. All of this sucks.
Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names: I'm not a big fan of the anonymous-paradigm of internet culture, but i accept the results of all those papers which state that anonymity and pseudonymity actually leads to a more civilized discourse climate. I can only guess at why that is, and suggest that using your real name binds your identity to your online statements and you become defensive when you're attacked, escalating the whole exchange, much more so than with anon or pseudonymous accounts, where you can much easier shrug it off.
No relationships between self-reported Instagram use or type of use and mental well-being: A study using a nationally representative online sample of UK adults: Because i'm very critical of social media i'm always looking into studies that contradict my view. Here's another paper that sees no correlation, and this paper comes not from Team Andrew Przybylski at Oxford, so i'm intrigued. While its results are also limited to Instagram, i'm still surprised by their no-effect results. Also, 498 UK adults is not very representative, and the age ranging from 19–82 years old does not include teenage girls, who are hit hardest in the teenage mental health crisis and it's precicely this demographic that should show psychological effects on body image issues stemming from especially influencer culture on Instagram. So, while this is an interesting result, it's not applicable to the most harmed demographic.
How to Quit Your Smartphone. Throw it in the river or the sea or both, throw it down the mountain, leave it at a bar or a cinema, smash it, burn it, make it kaputt. I use my phone pretty much exclusively as a mobile hotspot and some gaming, and i use feeds and RSS pretty much exclusively on a laptop. I don't like smartphones. I don't have much use for them because i don't like to call up people very much and i also don't like messaging. Then again, i'm a grumpy 50 year old hairy bloke who has seen way to much shit on the web and maybe you shouldn't listen to my advice. But throw it in the river, will ya.
Alone together? How social technology is influencing human connection and loneliness: "more than half of young people’s social interactions now occur via text", "online tools can create barriers to productive and enjoyable in-person interaction" and "ambiguity in the identity of one’s online interaction partners may be contributing more broadly to a sense of dehumanization in social life". Throw it in the river.
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Anil Dash on the radicalism of tech like Really Simple Syndication, and Ernie Smith joins in with Does RSS Need A Creator-Economy Rethink? I dunno. I'm using RSS constantly since 2005 and my workflow with it is pretty much unchanged. I read hundreds of websites in Inoreader and i can't imagine a better way to stay up to date than RSS. RSS is still pretty great. For years I'm claiming that if Google didn't kill their RSS-reader we'd maybe live in a different world today, and it was their worst move ever.
A Simple Theory for Why the Internet Is So Conspiratorial: Three rules of Evidence Maximalism: 1. any small thing can be evidence of my thing; 2. any big thing is always evidence of my big thing; 3. all your evidence against my thing is, on closer inspection, very strong evidence for my thing.
// JUST THE HEADLINES:
Facebook rules allow altered video casting Biden as paedophile, says board
The fediverse, explained: Mastodon, Threads, and the open future of social networking
Fighting the smartphone ‘invasion’: the French village that voted to ban scrolling in public
Russia Is Boosting Calls for ‘Civil War’ Over Texas Border Crisis. The 2016 playbook including a reanimated IRA.
Epik, the Far Right's Favorite Web Host, Has a Shadowy New Owner
The internet used to be ✨fun✨, a curated list of articles lamenting the unfun of the modern web. It's missing one of the earliest of the genre, an article from Hossein Derakhshan who spend 7 years in iranian jail (for blogging) and didn't recognize the web he left behind: The Web We Have to Save.
// CLIMATE
Because hurricanes are measured not on an open scale like earthquakes, but are limited to 5 classes (yet), scientists propose a Category 6 because hurricanes are getting more intense thanks to climate change. I remember well blogging about when Australia had to add a new colour to their temperature maps because of rising temperature and this is the same, but for storms. Michael Mann argues that Cat 6 hurricanes have already arrived and that a Cat 6 would update the hurricane system to deliver cruicial messages to the public, where "Lives are literally at stake".
Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results: It's not "Self-deception to preserve a positive self-image" in many cases, but "denying the existence of human-made global heating forms part of the political identity". In other words, tribalism. And there are many populist bad actors exploiting this form of contrarianism, which is why i think we should stop listening to them altogether. Don't engage, don't talk, don't argue. The facts speak for themselves.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
US climate scientist Michael Mann wins $1m in defamation lawsuit | Climate science scepticism and denial. The hockey stick graph guy finally won.
‘Like a war zone’: Chile wildfire death toll reaches 123 amid race to clear rubble and In Chile, huge wildfires have killed at least 131 people, but one village was untouched and How climate change contributes to wildfires like Chile's (Paper: Extreme fire weather in Chile driven by climate change and El Niño–Southern Oscillation).
West's 'hot drought' is unprecedented in more than 500 years
Psychology study unearths ways to bolster global climate awareness and climate action: Different messaging styles lead to different outcomes in different regions of the world.
The world is reducing its reliance on fossil fuels – except for in three key sectors: Flying, Industry and Shipping. From those 3, industrial processes are crucial, contributing 30% to the US carbon emissions.
// PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MIND
Art is old
Did art exist before modern humans? New discoveries raise big questions: "There is increasing evidence for ornaments and various expressions of symbolic behavior since about 120,000 years ago in Africa and Europe".
The headline suggests you can draw a sharp line between modern humans and archaic humans, between the ability of symbolic thinking (and the expression of that symbolically representational thought in language and ultimately art) and human ancestors not able to think representatively.
But all of this exists on a chaotic continuum. A homo erectus finds it funny to make weird spheric shapes and other homo erectus join in, those spherical stones are found by neanderthals living in the same area and they get weird ideas in their large heads, and then all of this is forgotten for aeons, while others get other weird ideas and over tens of thousands of years, symbolic thinking and cultural expression emerges and then it becomes practice, transmitting itself via cultural evolution when they ritualise that behavior, and not-that-suddenly you have modern humans expressing themselves in seemingly mysterious cave paintings that were elaborate by the standards of cultural practice in the stone age.
For me, the question if art came before modern humans is irrelevant: Ofcourse art existed before modern humans, just as rudimentary ritualistic behavior exists in chimps. Cultural evolution existed before art, and evolutionary pathways are always fuzzy, where you can hardly pinpoint anything. What is important is that between 150k and 50k years ago, humans developed the ability to represent stuff with symbols, first in their head, then in language, then in art, and with that representation came the ability to play with those representations which sped up cultural evolution, which then lead to the invention of the iphone.
The question for me is not, when exactly this behavior emerged, but how it spreads and why. René Girards mimetic theory states that it is the desire to have what others have and then we imitate their behavior to get it, which seems reasonable to me, and this basic rule is the foundation of all things memetic.
Doing Nothing is hard
The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture? Nope. But the dutch rediscovered the philosophical concept of vita contemplativa which goes back to Aristoteles.
I recently read Byung-Chul Hans book Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity, which states that "when life follows the rule of stimulus-response and need-satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life", in other words: If we loose the ability to do nothing, we cease to be human. What Byung-Chul stresses in his book is that doing-nothing like modern lifestyle activities like Mindfulness or Niksen isn't doing-nothing without a purpose, because that purpose is wellness therefore integrated into the capitalist ideology of differentiating between work and free time, which means it contributes and has a purpose as a balance to a busy busy life and, as The Guardian shows in its headline, is a part of working culture.
Actually doing nothing is hard, and i don't think i've ever, sadly, truly done nothing in my whole life. But i, being the lazy bastard that i am, tried hard, i can tell you that.
Scott Aaronson on whether we’re living in a simulation. One problem of the "our descendands have a oomph more computing power"-argument is that it projects current trajectories into the far future and does not account for unknown unknowns, like unforeseen consequences of climate change. As fascinating the simulation hypothesis is, i also think it's wrong, but i do like the cosmological version of it, which states that our experience of reality is how it feels for god's (or whatever's) connected "neurons" to think, which is why, for instance, we experience stuff like harmony in a very special, awe-inducing way.
People Have Very Different Understandings of Even the Simplest Words. Trained professional in different fields have very different meanings for the same word, like "risk" means something else, entirely, for climate researchers and economists. Now put them all together with laypeople and politicians and activists and journalists and bad actors and businesspeople on Social Media and you get our cool new shitshow world. Wittgenstein is amused.
// JUST THE HEADLINES
Why We Anthropomorphize Animals (and Always Have): "Hana Videen on the Origins of the Bestiary and Its Role in the Medieval Imagination"
The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. This is the story of scientists’ quest to decode it – and read people’s minds: The history of BCIs and the emergence of neuro-ethics.
‘The self is suppressed’: psychologists explore the minds of the mafiosi: "Italian researchers say that joining the mafia is like entering a cult in which members must leave behind their own identity."
What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything. Quanta recounts the discovery of the default mode network.
Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life.
// ENTERTAINMENT
Warner hates Looney Tunes now.
I wrote about the hubbub caused by Warner axing Coyote vs Acme, when the filmmakers fought back, supposedly successful and leading Warner to offer the movie to various other studios for them to show. Turns out, they never meant it, rejected all offers and didn't communicate with the filmmakers about the negotiations. The plan was to bury the movie all along and the so-called sale was a front for businessmen-bullshit, to sit out the tide of fan rage. I'm with Matt Zoller Seitz when he writes about Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime.
All of this is not that baffling as some writers make it appear. Warner can write off the 70 Million dollars budget and lower their taxable income, and save the money to promote and release the movie too, which might even turn a profit for them. This is not baffling, this is business with a money shark at the helm, and it ultimately means that Warner loves tax write-offs more than Looney Tunes. The baffling part comes in when you look at Warner as a, you know, hollywood studio, because, after all, the job of a hollywood studio traditionally is to, you know, release movies, isn't it?
And it's even more baffling since Warners branding is traditionally intertwined with all things Looney Tunes, with the characters appearing in Warner movies like Gremlins 2, Gravity or Ready Player One and the tradition going back to the 1932 western Haunted Gold featuring John Wanye and an animated intro. The only logical conclusion i can draw from all of this is that under CEO David Zaslav, Warner hates Looney Tunes now. Brave New World.
Hating movies seems to be the go-to practice for movie executive David Zaslav anyways, who not only "made his name producing cheap, disposable reality TV", but who on his warpath against culture fucked up HBO and Turner Classic Movies too.
So, no, i have no expectations or trust in Warner, when they announce The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, simply because Warners head honcho is not a movie man, but an ex-lawyer good at accounting.
Related: Graham Reznick on Mastodon: "re: execs not seeing COYOTE VS ACME, here’s a delightful story from Harlan Ellison of a meeting in 1978 for I, ROBOT: When he realizes the WB studio head had not even read his script, he tricks him into admitting it and tells him to his face that he has 'the intellectual capacity of an artichoke'."
// TRAILERS
The trailer for Sasquatch Sunset starts with fucking bigfoots and that's basically all you need to know about this movie starring Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg as wookies, coming from David and Nathan Zellner who made the Fargo-lean in Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter. Here's the plot: "In the misty forests of North America, a family of Sasquatches — possibly the last of their enigmatic kind — embark on an absurdist, epic, hilarious, and ultimately poignant journey over the course of one year. These shaggy and noble giants fight for survival as they find themselves on a collision course with the ever-changing world around them."
Here's all the Super Bowl Movie Trailers & TV Spots from the game last night, featuring the Deadpool & Wolverine Teaser, a trailer for the Wizard of Oz-spinoff Wicked, a new trailer for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a trailer for a remake of Twister and The Fall Guy aswell as TV spots for Monkey Man, If, Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4 and The Boys.
Love Lies Bleeding (Trailer 2): The new film from Rose Glass, who made one of my favorite 2019 movies with the fantastic Saint Maud. This one has Kristen Stewart falling in love with Katy O'Brian in a criminal compound and Ed Harris sporting an otherworldly hairdo. Can't wait. Here's the plot: "Reclusive gym manager Lou falls hard for Jackie, an ambitious bodybuilder headed through town to Las Vegas in pursuit of her dream. But their love ignites violence, pulling them deep into the web of Lou's criminal family."
The Animal Kingdom: "In a world hit by a wave of mutations that are gradually transforming some humans into animals, François does everything he can to save his wife, who is affected by this mysterious condition. As some of the creatures disappear into a nearby forest, he embarks with Émile, their 16-year-old son, on a quest that will change their lives forever."
Late Night With the Devil: “Presented in a found footage style, David Dastmalchian stars as Jack Delroy, the host of a fictional 1970s variety and late-night talk show titled Night Owls with Jack Delroy. The film purports to be derived from a rediscovered master tape of an episode from the show's sixth season, broadcast on Halloween 1977; during this live television broadcast, havoc unfolds when Delroy interviews a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and the subject of her recent book, a young teenager (Ingrid Torelli) who was the sole survivor of a Satanic church's mass suicide.
More trailers worth watching: A Quiet Place: Day One (Prequel to the whole Quiet Place-thing looks good but also exactly as expected) / Drive-Away Dolls Trailer 2 (Margaret Qualley <3 nuff said) / Oswald: Down the Rabbit Hole (ofcourse Mickey Mouse going public domain would mean the inevitable Mickey Mouse-horrorflicks and this seems to be one of them featuring the original Mickey Mouse when he was still Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, read more about the animated feature at Bloody Disgusting) / Cuckoo (second feature from german director Tilman Singer who previously made the ad agency horrorflick LUZ, this one seems to be a horror thriller set in a resort in the german alps), Damsel (despite not liking those new fantasy flicks very much i'm intrigued by this survival thriller packaged as a fairytale) / Rick and Morty: The Anime (i have nothing to add here) / Night Shift (a young woman running from a stalker starts working in a haunted hotel)
(In German) Der WDR hat ein sechsteiliges Hörspiel nach Tove Janssons Kinderbuch-Klassiker Die Mummins online gestellt. Ich liebe die Mummins seit den ersten Verfilmungen durch die Augsburger Puppenkiste und der 1978er Animations-Serie und "Underwater Moomins looking at bioluminescent glowing fishes in the sky" war einer meiner ersten Gehversuche in Image Synthesis mit Midjourney.
'The Fly II' Remains Malformed & Misunderstood 35 Years Later and 35 Years Ago, the Greatest Sci-Fi Body Horror Ever Got a Surprisingly Smart Sequel: I remember seeing The Fly II in a double feature together with Pet Sematary at the age of 15 and i had a blast at the melting faces and the exploding head smashed by an elevator and i cried tears at the cruel fate of Timex the golden retriever. I watched it again later and found it a bad sequel to the Cronenberg film, but an okayish effort as a standalone b-movie with a lot of ghastly FX which is right down my alley. Maybe i'll run a Fly marathon in the coming weeks, with all three classics from the 50s and the two 80s Brundlefly yuckfests.
New 'Evil Dead' Filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček Teases His Vision: "A Nasty Film... a Film That Hurts": Not much news here besides Sébastien Vaniček is directing an Evil Dead spinoff, they aim at a 2025 release and it's gonna be so gruesome, it's gonna ruin his carreer (which won't happen). Vaniček so far has only done the new spider horrorfilm Infested i haven't seen but the trailer looks quite good, and i'm on board with anything Evil Dead anyways.
The world need this Cliff Burton action figure from Super7 released on what would have been Metallica bassist's 62nd birthday. It comes with a bass guitar plus energy effect, lightning hammer (he wrote Ride The Lightning after all) and bird flipping hands. Shut up and take my money, as they say.
// JUST THE HEADLINES:
What's In My Bag? featuring The Armed, the semi-anonymous hardcore punk musical collective who not only made one of the best albums in 2021 with Ultrapop, but also one of my favorite albums of 2023 with Perfect Saviors.
Gremlins 3 Gets Optimistic Update From OG Star After Animated Show Revival. Zach Galligan speculates on "Warners endgame" of aiming at a third live action movie, but i remain sceptical because Warner hates movies now.
Denis Villeneuve Dune 3 Script Almost Finished. Nothing new here, he's still writing and nothing official has been announced and if it will be make, he still want to take a break before directing it.
New Predator Film Badlands In Works From Dan Trachtenberg, who also directed the pretty cool Predator-prequel Prey.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a movie poster and a release date on 6th September 2024. First trailer imminent.
Yes you want a Baba is You-Plush.
RIP Can-singler Damo Suzuki, here they are live at Rockpalast in 1970.
// MISCELLANIA
J.G. Ballards favorite books
In an excerpt from J.G. Ballard: Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007, Ballard writes about how he regrets reading classics at a too young age:
I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world’s ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually handicapped me in the process of growing up — in all senses my own children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me.
I can relate to that. I read Kafka and Stanislav Lem and Ray Bradbury and Lovecraft in my late teens from 16-18 and i simply didn't have the experience at life to grasp what i was reading, and while i'm an avid reader now that i'm 50, gulping up one or two books per week, i always refrain from rereading Kafka because there just is so much out there that i don't know yet.
However, if you don't want to click through, here's J.G. Ballards ten favorite books:
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Collected Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner
The World through Blunted Sight by Patrick Trevor-Roper
The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The Black Box by Malcolm MacPherson
Los Angeles Yellow Pages
America by Jean Baudrillard
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí by by Dalí
I had no idea that NASA has an Astronomy Picture of the Day Calendar with monthly overviews of their APOD-images. And speaking of NASA, 40 Years Ago, astronauts captured this iconic space photo of astronaut Bruce McCandless free-floating above earth, seemingly alone.
We’re fast approaching the era of the trillionaire. What can we do to stop it? I don't like the idea of a trillionaire. I don't even like the idea of a billionaire. I think it’s vulgar and obscene to have those. I claim not to be a socialist and claim to be a social democrat capitalist, but i would also vote for an upper limit of income. Nobody needs more than, say, 100 million, or maybe 500 million or whatever. But, really, a million million bucks? For what? Come the fuck on.
Related: In The Fungus Among Us, Barry Goldman writes about how corporations are memes, mind viruses entering the mind via the desire for manymuchtrillions of money: "the CEO of a fracking concern is a zombie host mindlessly obeying the dictates of a parasitic brain fungus". This is also related to my thinking about corporations as "organizational AI" with a system-prompt that goes something like "nothing else matters than profit", and we removed friction for that mind virus by inventing "legal personhood" for organizations. And all of this is also related to my thinking about "capitalism as a system to release good products". If the CEO of Warner wouldn't have been infected by the meme-subsystem "profit maximalization" of the mind virus "legal person Warner", then we'd have a Coyote vs Acme-movie is what i'm saying.
// JUST THE HEADLINES:
Well, there's sure worse things on this planet than gen Z ‘rediscovering’ the public library. The timing is pretty much perfect: Literacy crisis in college students: Essay from a professor on students who don’t read.
A bunch of women reenacting chicken head moves in the Chicken Club is wholesome.
The Asteroid That Impacted Near Berlin Has Been Identified As A Rare Aubrite. Now you know.
Scientists identify water molecules on asteroids for the first time
Bronze Age 'treasure' was crafted with extraterrestrial metal
Glow way! Bioluminescent houseplant hits US market for first time. I totally want a glow-in-the-dark-garden.
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Elle Cordovas Fonts hanging out p3:
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just out of curiosity, what games are you playing on the Handy?