#best way i can explain it is in 4chan format

[i-bring-crack]

AH HA HA HAAAAA I LOVE ITTTT imma much on ittttt

but no seriously I was looking around for potential ships to Ba'al, and not just the abrahamic version of his but the one that included the Ba'al cycle or the cannanite myth and yassssss found moreeeeee. Its such an interesting dynamic especially considering the early tribes of Yahweh and his followers, or how Yahweh must have absorbed some of Ba'al s elements as a storm deity, or the gradual change from polytheistic into monotheistic and ba'al being one of those, if not the most affected by the change, suddenly being seen as a demon by Yahweh's followers and a false deity.

They are divorced my lord 😔

in order: lana del ray / madeline miller / Zephyrus and Hycaninthus / mine / arcanegoldart / jay vespertine / game of thrones / john green

[isaacthedruid]

Please allow me to tell you about one of my favourite cartoons through this informal essay I did for school a couple of months back. 

Gravity Falls and How it Did The Unimaginable

**SPOILERS... KINDA**

The 2010s saw the creation of some of the most iconic animated tv shows ever made, the likes of Adventure Time (2010), Steven Universe (2013), Over the Garden Wall (2014) and The Legend of Korra (2012). To explain why this era’s shows are so admirable is honestly rather difficult. Yet, there are many factors that can be taken into consideration when looking for an answer.

The past decade was very successful in perfecting their craft and utilizing the animated format to their favour, creating some of the wackiest and fascinating cartoons ever made. With the advancements made in both 2D and 3D animation for film, this bled into the world of TV as well.

To mention that 2010s cartoons have stunning visuals would be an understatement. Everything about the animation was beautiful; the strong colour palettes, the clean and imaginative character designs, the colourful and immersive backgrounds and especially the mesmerizing worlds that can be found within episodes that are half an hour.

This era’s cartoons also led to a massive shift in storytelling, writing longer-running stories that spread out across seasons while also swapping out episodic adventures for serialization. This heavily aided in the popularization of these shows, due to the rise of internet fandoms and dropping the taboo that cartoons were only for kids. Many shows acknowledged their older viewers by leaving clues and even puzzles to be solved by the theorists who have a large appearance on social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr. As the shows progressed, their fandoms created many theories for what they believed might happen within their favourite series. The top three shows from this era all utilized these changes, being at the forefront of the shift and helping guide the creative vision of 2010s cartoons.

Often regarded as many people’s favourite cartoon, Gravity Falls presented one of the best mysteries of the decade with two seasons and only 40 episodes. Inspired by Twin Peaks and The X-Files, it’s considered as the kids’ version of these two iconic shows as this cartoon acts as many people’s first introduction to horror through bright colours and fun characters.

This series follows the adventures of Dipper and Mabel Pines, twins, who are sent to spend their summer with their great-uncle or Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls, Oregon. This town is full of oddities like supernatural creatures, insane and eccentric inhabitants, and many puzzles. The Pines twins must adjust to the weirdness while uncovering the mysteries and protecting their new town.

While living in Gravity Falls, the twins are forced to work in the Mystery Shack, a tourist trap created by their Grunkle Stan that overcharges unlucky tourists, teaching about fake monsters despite there being real creatures all over town. On his first day in Oregon, Dipper accidentally came across a mysterious journal written by an unknown author that explains all the oddities to be found in this strange town. This book acts like an encyclopedic of the Weird for Dipper, an inquisitive 12-year-old kid who seeks answers.

Dipper is an extremely intelligent kid, his brain being far more developed than his body. He’s rather awkward and self-conscious as he often stumbles over his words or gets embarrassed trying to talk to girls. Despite this, the boy is an adventurer at heart who just wants to grow up and skip his upcoming teenage years.

While Mabel is quite the opposite in many ways, she is loud and has an in-your-face personality. Mabel is bouncy and fun, she is so excited to start high school. She is easily excitable and for the larger part of the series, she is in her boy-crazy phase. Mabel is a girly-girl as she likes all things; glitter, unicorns, rainbows, partying and crafting. Yet, she doesn’t often compare well with many of the other girls in town, they see her as weird and “too much”.

(In all fairness through, it is not too kind to either of the characters as their personalities are more complex than just awkward nerd and artsy girl-girly.)

Dipper and Mabel’s personalities are very different but somehow, they—along with their Gravity Falls family—manage to solve mysteries and save the town, multiple times.

Gravity Falls is an honestly genius series that completely changed the way cartoons were made. Originally when writing a series, you’d create a base of your story; characters, the universe and a basic plot. Yet, when creator, Alex Hirsch (who was in his early/mid-20)s and his small team first began constructing their show, they planned out everything they could possibly think of for the first season. Additionally, outlining some answers for their biggest mysteries that would be answered at the end of the series.

Despite being rated TV-Y7, this series really pushed the boundaries of kids’ television. From the teeth being ripped out of a deer’s mouth by a demon, rearranging the functions of every hole on a man’s face to an aggressive pop-rock sock puppet show that ended in a dramatic slow-motion scene of the puppets burning. Gravity Falls wasn’t afraid to get a little weird or creepy. Or create some genuine nightmare fuel. 

From the beginning, Gravity Falls had built a mystery into its series, hiding secrets and clues all throughout the show. Most notably were the backwards-recorded message and cryptograms, using roughly nine different kinds, even creating two of their own.

The inclusion of cyphers and mysteries for fans to solve is possibly the reason why this series was so successful. As one of the first shows to do something like this, Gravity Falls used social media and internet fandoms to its advantage.

As mentioned earlier, cartoon fans have quite a presence on social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. They create theories and share fun ideas about their favourite shows. Viewers of Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe were all included in their share of theory fun.

Sometimes, fan theories end up being correct but when you’re Gravity Falls creator, Alex Hirsch, you don’t just watch from the sidelines as your viewers figure out the biggest mystery of your show. No, you create a hoax to get your viewers off your trail and that is what he did. Around 2013, only halfway through the first season of the show, viewers had started to follow the clues, theorizing who was the author is Dipper’s mysterious journal.

Unfortunately for the Gravity Falls production crew, the viewers were right— for the sake of readers who have never seen the show, I will not mention who the author was as it would be the biggest spoiler.

In 2013, a supposed leaked image of a tv showing a younger version of the show’s crazy old man character, Old Man McGucket, writing in the infamous journal was uploaded anonymously (by Alex Hirsch) to 4Chan.

Despite the image only being on up for a few hours, it spread like wildfire. Much to the team’s success, theorists stopped searching for the answer to “who is the author” and just accepted the image of McGucket as the truth.

To further push the fake-out, three words were posted to Alex’s Twitter, “fuming right now.”

The tweet was deleted a few minutes later and fans genuinely believed that someone from the Gravity Falls team had leaked the most important part of the story.

While doing research, I came across a Reddit post from April 10th, 2013, the day after ‘leak,’ Alex’s tweet was uploaded. In this post, user, TheoDW uploaded an image of Alex’s tweet with the caption, “It seems that Hirsch got mad at last night’s leak. He already deleted this tweet.”

Seeing the reactions of these Redditors in 2013 is kind of weird and crazy to look at. “He has every right to be upset. Someone internally released a plot revealing screen shot of series breaking spoiler information,” a deleted Reddit account commented.

“This is Alex Hirsch’s biggest success by far, he spent a huge amount of time carefully planning out the series, and then in a moment someone releases a major spoiler. It would make anyone upset,” the user, Time_Loop commented.

“Seriously, this is a nightmare for a storyteller, and shows a breach of trust. I feel so bad for him–honestly, I hope whoever did the leak gets caught and appropriate action is taken. You don’t f–k with someone’s story like this. It’s unprofessional.” the user, lonelybeloved angrily commented.

In 2014, this ‘leak’ was finally disproven when viewers were given an episode on McGucket’s backstory and an amazing tweet from Alex Hirsch. 

Alex had post an image of himself playfully pointing at a monitor with the supposed leaked picture with the caption, “1) Make hoax  2) Upload to 4Chan  3) Post angry tweet about "leak" 4) Delete tweet 5) Let internet do rest”

It is so interesting to look at these comments know that all of this was orchestrated by Alex.

I wish I had been old enough at the time to follow theories and fandom stuff like I do now with current cartoons but really looking at this from an outside perspective, this was insane!

The real author wasn’t revealed until 2015 and when viewers first got the answer to this biggest show on their screens, they must have freaked out!

Following the finale in 2016, a single frame of a stone version of Bill Cipher, the show’s villain, flashed in after the credits had finished.

Alex Hirsch and his team actually created a real-life statue of their villain for their viewers to find and on July 20th, 2016, the Cipher Hunt began.

By following clues, the Hunters found themselves all over the world; Russia, Japan and then travelling throughout the United States for the final 12 clues. When the hunt took them to Los Angeles, actor, Jason Ritter (voice of Dipper Pines, also a massive fan of the series) and Alex Hirsch’s twin sister, Ariel Hirsch (the inspiration for Mabel) joined in the fun helping the search.

Finally, the hunt ended on August 2nd when someone tweeted out an image of the found statue in Oregon, the same state in which the fictional town of Gravity Falls exists. The Cipher Hunt had ended but finding the statue wasn’t Alex’s goal for the scavenger hunt, it was about the journey and bringing together the viewers, more than having them actually find the statue.

Creating its own hoax, an international scavenger hunt and quite a bit of nightmare fuel, Gravity Falls was a show truly unlike any other.

The 2010s saw some of the strongest cartoons ever made, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe acting as the leaders for multiple different changes in the medium; storytelling, worldbuilding, interaction with viewers, utilizing social media, representation and further pushing music into the cartoon world. From what was created this past decade and what has already been released in 2020, I’m so excited to see what comes next.

I have another one of these which is on Steven Universe’s representation and music if you would like to see that too!! 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiracy fantasy

When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish — they’re also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.

If your mom is shouting about “Hollywood pedos,” it’s natural that you’ll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.

To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than “irrational people have irrational beliefs.” This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.

The messages it spells out don’t describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles

Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don’t capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.

http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players’ lives. They’re a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.

ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It’s a powerful way to galvanize collective action.

As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it’s the organizing principal behind Anonymous.

Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine

In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).

On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics — Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou — analyze “conspiracy fantasies” (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism’s anxieties.

As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people’s behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that’s often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.

Conspiracists aren’t just “irrational” nor are they just “racist.” They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.

A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron — the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity — dismissed the Hackney Riots as “criminality pure and simple,” and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But without that discussion, there’s no explanation. Even if you believe that “criminality” is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?

Likewise the “conspiracists are just racists” or “they’re just deranged.” Without looking at the material world, there’s no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.

We can’t talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players’ super-cool theories.

A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It’s a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna’s Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing “Q,” an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)

https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/

The plot of “Q” involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that “Q” is set during the Protestant Reformation.

In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.

The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write “La Q di Qomplotto” (“The Q in Qonspiracy”), a book that defines and analyzes “conspiracy fantasies.”

https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Ming 1’s interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criterial for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn’t go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).

I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism — the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail — they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.

Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.

Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.

He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy’s Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they’d faked the whole thing.

The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who’d been framed for imaginary Satanic “crimes.” Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.

The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ manuever in “The Magic of Reality,” his excellent children’s book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality

The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism’s anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.

Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies — the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work — that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.

I really like this approach because of its empathy — its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.

It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never AT their subjects.

https://ohnopodcast.com/

But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of “Q” to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.

The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden’s recent inaugural blog-post, “Conspiracy: Theory and Practice,” which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls “fantasies”).

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world’s most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.

Snowden’s perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse — the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.

These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about “online radicalization.”

As I wrote in my 2020 book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the “online radicalization” narrative requires that you accept Big Tech’s unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Claims to be able to control our minds — whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts — always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).

But there’s a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.

By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.

And by corrupting our political process, it creates “kernels of truth” for conspiratorial beliefs.

As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.

[fipindustries]

my trip to the left

(warning, a lot of this is very cringy, as anyone talking about their past politics is)

those who have been following this blog for long enough (and by long enough i mean since 2012) mayhaps know this. i was much more to the right back then than i am today. to the point im seriously wondering how come i didnt turn into a full alt-righter. 

i talked about this in the past but really it doesnt quite paint a picture of how close i got to becoming the kind of person that worships ben shapiro, or sargon of akkad. how i almost took “the red pill” as it were.

i was strongly anti-sjw, i sympathized with gamer gate, i browsed 4chan and 8chan almost daily, i watched youtubers like the amazing atheist and the internet aristocrat, i was skeptical of feminism, i thought gender queer people were being ridiculous. i thought the humanities such as sociology and psychatry were not real sciences. more to the point i identified as a white man, i was a virgin well into my 20′s. i was basically an antisocial NEET who had gone through a lot of bullying as a teenager and i depised anita sarkeesian.

look, none of these thing are necessarily bad on their own, of course. but in the aggregate they do check all the stereotypical boxes do they not? the only thing i had going for me was that i was that i more or less fit into the standards of beauty.

so, how come i am where i am today?

well the more direct answer is that primarily i did have a sense of self worth and self esteem, product of a loving and supportive family and of my hobbies as an artist and a writer. i didn’t grew with this strong sense of resentment towards the world, perhaps by virtue of the media i consumed, perhaps by virute of being raised in very leftists enviroments (my mom was studying as a language and comunication teacher when i was a kid and she would take me to her college in lieu of hiring a nanny) and being exposed to more conservative enviroments just enough to see how lame and unplesant they can be (my dad’s family was very strongly catholic and i never got along very well with them).

also the fact that i live in latin america instead of USA, and thus being exposed to a different culture did help a lot. on top of that the fact that (and i am probably blowing smoke out of my ass at this point, you guys let me know). most of what i know about american culture is based on movies really, but they always paint highschool and college as a very atomized “every man for himself” enviroment. in latin america there is a different attitude towards peers. my classmates in highschool and my roomates in college were all very prosocial and loved to include me in their activities. i wouldnt always participate, but every now and then i would join and go out with them, and hag out with other people, people who thoguht differently than me. people with different perspectives. people who would get me out of my own head every now and then.

so those were the conditions that shaped the kind of person i am, but what was the road that led me to the beliefs i hold? this is all nice and good to make me pause whenever i would hear something about “the jewish question”, but the internet is very good at channeling dissafected youths through dark pathways. i was on the daily two clicks away from ending up in stormfront, or breitbart, or listening to milo yannopolous, and very skeptical of the left in general back in 2014.

well, gamer gate happened. get ready because this is a really silly ride.

as i said, i was very supportive of gamer gate. sure, ethics in videogame journalism, i was all for it. gone home was a terrible game, zoey quinn was a monster, and sarkessian was telling me i was bad because i liked videogames. that was the full extent of my thoguht process back then.

one thing i still more or less agree with from back then is that i think the left did a poor job by drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and immeditly giving up in reaching towards people who might be in the middle. the undecided and the agnostic. from where i was standing the gamer gate faction had no trouble embracing and bringing forth anyone. i still remember the fiasco with vivian james and the fine young capitalists. i still remember #notyourshield. these things speak of a giant failure in building coalitions. the whole affair was a giant mess.

of course being a supporter of GG meant looking past a LOT of ugly stuff. the harrasment, the toxicity, the misoginy, etc. the excuse i used back then was that these were just a loud minority. crazy people who didnt speak for the movement. i refused to allow the loudest, ugliest aspects of a movement tarnish the lofty ideals that the movement stood for. and that is when the shoe dropped.

well, wasn’t that what i was doing with the left? see, i had no problem ignoring the rabid masses in twitter and actively seek out the smartest, calmest, most coherent advocates i could find when it came to support my side, but if i was to be intellectually consistent, shouldnt i give the same chance to the other side and make the honest effort to hear them out?

this is a heuristic i still apply whenever i can, whenever you have a dissagreement with an ideology, give it a fair shot, dont stop at the rabble and idiots that shout slogans in twitter but actually look for what the best and the brightests in that ideology have to say.

so that is what i did. of course, me being me, and this being 2015 i started with the nostalgia chick. back then it was when she was starting to distance herself from channel awesome and her content was starting to get much more political. she had this series of videos where she would explain feminism through the lens of the transformer movies.

and her videos were actually good.

more or less at the same time i was reading a little story called HPMOR, which led me to less wrong, which led me to slate star codex, which led me to the rat-adjacent side of tumblr. a place famously filled with trans catgirls each with her own manifesto on gender theory. what the rat adjacent community tought me above everything else is that you could defend leftists ideas while still remaining a rational, impassioned, analitical agent.

and then that was it. from lindsey ellis i soon would find contrapoints and from contrapoints i came across vaush and then i got myself into breadtube learning about socialism while taking my hormone supplement to feminize my body. 

that is where i find myself today. who knows where i’ll be a couple of years from now. in retrospect i am a bit disquieted by how much i reduced everything into tribalism and how my politics where primarily influenced by aesthetics and respectability rather than real arguments, but i do find some pride in the fact that i was aware of this and so i went out of my way to find arguments presented in a format i was willing to listen from the outgroup instead of sitting passively and taking in whatever arguments came my way from the ingroup.

[galaxa-13]

Person here who's barely been on tumblr for a year, asking what the fuck home stuck is and what it did and why it invokes a strange alien fear in me even though I don't know what it is

‘Hoooooooo boy am I glad you asked me. Not because I think I’ll give the best answer, but because I just love talking about Homestuck and how it applies to the internet (and fandom) at large.

O.K., so, first off the simplest explanation of Homestuck is:Homestuck is a webcomic found at mspainadventures.com made by one Andrew Hussie.

Simplest explanation of what it did:Garner a huge fanbase and changed how a lot of people viewed/interacted with fandom.

Simplest explanation of why you’re filled with fear:The fandom has been asleep for a long while, you may have heard whispers of the infamous “homestucks”, suddenly they are everywhere again and those who were around during it’s heyday are worried of things to come (including those that were a part of it).

Now I’m just going to ramble at length. First I’m going to go on about the fandom and then I’ll move on to describing the comic itself. LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK.

So as I mentioned earlier the fandom, known as homestucks, is quite infamous. Due to it’s sheer size there were a lot of issues. Some of it being that since there were just so many of us it was hard to go anywhere without running into one. This wasn’t just on the internet either, conventions became so packed with Homestuck cosplayers that convention rules literally changed because of them. Some convention locations no longer allow body paint because too many Homestuck cosplayers didn’t properly (or straight out didn’t) seal their paint and left smudges all over the venue (and people). Photo shoots also became more structured. Before conventions didn’t really get involved with them, people attending set them up and ran them themselves, but there were just too many people dressed as Homestuck characters. They blocked pathways, crowded areas, convention staff needed to start regulating photo shoots even if they were still ran by attendees themselves.

With the size there was also the problem of negative behavior being in more abundance. It’s not that people who like Homestuck are more likely to make bad decisions or be nasty people, there were just more people in general so more of a sample size of events to take note of. Like the afore mentioned body paint. There was also buckets and bike horns. The buckets were a problem because some thought it would be funny to just yell the word or repeat it over and over, which was quite annoying. There was also an incident of people spitting into a bucket and then giving said bucket to Hussie. The horns were noisy, as you can imagine.

There was a lot of porn drawn of Homestuck characters (often known as “homesmut”). Some people are turned off by this since most of the characters in the comic are underage. The argument about porn being drawn of these character is a discussion I’d rather not be having since it is something argued about at quite a length and has often led to really nasty things like doxxing and smear campaigns. The age of the characters wasn’t the only thing people were weirded out by. Tentacles also became a very popular thing within the homesmut community. Gore porn was also pretty common (compared to other fandoms, in my experience), though it wasn’t nearly as big as the “tentabulge”.

Homestucks were ravenously creating fandom content back at its peak. AUs of all kinds were created, just think of a word and add “stuck” on the end and there’s probably a fic for that. Petstuck, Regancystuck, Humanstuck (lots of characters in the comic aren’t human), Zeldastuck, StarTrekStuck, you name it. Homestuck was the AU community. Then there was the cosplay. First, many of the characters had simple designs so it was ridiculously easy to cosplay them, then there was the hoards of characters from which to choose, then there were all the AU variants, and then there were the upd8 cosplays.

Whenever a new page or set of pages was added to the site it was known as an upd8 (or for a really injoke, a papaya) and if a new character or outfit was revealed in such an update then it was a mad race to see who could be the one to cosplay it first. Sometimes you’d find pictures of people in completed cosplays (including styled wigs) within the hour. This even happened at conventions.

Homestucks were everywhere, and they were loud. Many people began to resent them simply for being a thing. Even people who liked the webcomic itself could be cited as fearing/hating the Homestuck fanbase. It became accepted that no one likes homestucks. Then something happened. Homestuck embraced how they were hated. Now I’m not saying they were trying to stick it to the man or anything, homestucks were able to look at all the things they were hated for and go, “yeah, that’s all pretty trash, but I’m still having fun”. It became a thing where you’d see a post bashing Homestuck or the community and you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a homestuck who wrote it themself or not. “Homestuck trash” is a popular phrase. We’re trash and we’re proud of it. No one hates Homestuck more than homestucks. No one hates homestucks more than homestucks. Yet we’re still one big family.

A couple of years ago 4chan ran a campaign. They were going to inavde tumblr and make all the tumblrites cry and run to their SJW princess mommies. They flooded tags of popular fandoms with horrific images and bashing of their fandoms. People were scared to leave their dashes. Then, 4chan tried to go after the homestucks.

They bashed the comic. They found the most disgusting porn and death art of the characters. Homestucks took one look at that and shrugged. “Yeah, seems about right.” 4chan lost its mind. Why couldn’t they bother this fandom? Nothing they did seemed to work. Other fandoms began to rally behind Homestuck. Maybe they had bashed it themselves before, or they had simply stayed away from it, but now homestucks were the heroes, the wall against this cruelty. Homestucks laughed at 4chan’s pitiful attempts. Eventually 4chan had to throw in the towel, their troll campaign had failed, they just couldn’t outmatch the homestucks.

Along with the horror stories about the fandom in general there was now this. Homestuck couldn’t be taken down by 4chan. The most vile trolls on the internet had no power over them. That in itself was a terrifying thing.

Yet homestucks began to be regarded highly. Partly it was from this event where they were able to stand up to the bullies, partly because the fandom had matured over the years. Many people had grown up. They weren’t the immature children they once were. They set up charity funds, such as the Can Town Project, an organization that donates canned foods to the hungry.

Of course we can’t talk about Homestuck without talking about its creator, Andrew Hussie. Hussie is a strange man, to say the least. He’s been doing webcomics and other online endeavors for years before even starting Homestuck. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff (SBAHJ), a comic written and drawn to be as terrible as possible while making fun of the “two guys on a couch play video games” style of comic; Problem Sleuth, a noir detective comic full of whacky shenanigans and done like text-based adventure games of old; Whistles: The Starlight Calliope, an unfinished comic about a clown in a dark circus (I really couldn’t begin to properly describe this story without talking about it by itself, but this is about Homestuck and already will be way too long); fancy Santa reviews, sadly I have been unable to find a copy of such reviews; Wizardology graffiti, he simply defaced a copy of a Wizardology book to hilarious effect as a gift to his friend; Olive Garden money, humorous blog posts about how he set out to spend $150 at Olive Garden; I could go on with his zany creations and adventures, but I won’t.

Hussie is a troll. He does things just to mess with people. He has a dark sense of humor and he isn’t above crass humor either. All that and he can weave fantastic tales you could never dream of. He is fairly private and is known to do odd things, which has led the fandom to calling him a real life cryptid. The Hussie experience isn’t really something that can be properly explained, so I’ll just leave you with this gif of the man himself.

Hiveswap is to be a video game tie-in to Homestuck. It was put up on Kickstarter known only as the Homestuck Adventure Game. 700k was asked for. It raised nearly 2.5 million. Hiveswap is currently why the fandom’s seen a resurgence. It’s being released episodically and the first episode was released September 14, 2017 and the second episode is to release Spring, 2018. In the meantime the studio has been releasing previews and extra bits of lore, which has been making the fandom go wild.

*DEEP BREATH*

Homestuck, at its simplest, is about a group of teens playing a video game. It follows the format of the other previous webcomics hosted on mspaintadventures (all written and drawn by Hussie, of course) of looking like it was drawn on MS Paint and acting like a text-based adventure game. Readers would submit actions and Hussie would draw the results, continuing the story. Over time this method proved unwieldy and Hussie did away with the command box, but the comic still acted like it was in such a format. Even without direct reader input Hussie still managed to incorporate a lot of input from the fans. Injokes mostly, but sometimes things fans had done would come back as major plot points.

In the beginning the art style was simple, using sprites and limited colors. One of the more well known things about Homestuck is its characters’ lack of arms in this style. As the comic progresses different art styles are used as well as different artists. Many people have bashed the comic for its simple visuals, but even aside from some of the more complicated visuals used later even the “simple” ones can be breath taking. Here’s some examples of the art.

Yes, these are all images from the same comic. As you can see gifs are used quite a lot in this comic. There are also sound pages, animations, and interactive games. Homestuck uses the fact that it’s on the internet to the fullest degree. It has inspired many other webcomics to experiment in similar manners.

Homestuck goes beyond that, however. Homestuck would not exist without the internet. In a way, Homestuck is about the internet. All the characters communicate over the internet to each other for a majority of the story. Internet subgroups and cultures are referenced, satirized, and incorporated. Real life websites are used and you can find characters’ personal accounts yourself in the real world such a one character’s DeviantArt account.

O.K., back to the story itself. I said it was about some teens playing a game, but obviously it’s more complicated than that. First off the game destroys Earth and sends our first four protagonists (yes, you heard that right, the first four, Homestuck has a lot of characters and a lot of them are protagonists) into a realm known as The Medium which is where the game itself (known as SBURB) will be played.

Part of the draw of Homestuck is SBURB itself. We know a lot of the mechanics involved in the game and if it weren’t for the destruction of our planet loads of people would pay good money to be able to play it. Unfortunately, for some, the story doesn’t really focus on the game, despite spending quite a lot of time in the confines of it. If you’ve ever heard of god tiers, classpects (Class and Aspects), Propsit, or Derse these are all SBURB things that the fandom loves to pour over. This stuff is like Hogwarts houses, you get sorted into them.

Throughout the story you get introduced to a new band of characters that troll our original four. Turns out these guys are all aliens who had previously played the game (their version known as SGRUB). Their race are literally called Trolls and they are another commonly known thing about Homestuck. These are the grey-skinned, black-haired, horned people. Their race has a rainbow of different blood colors they can be born with, which is another thing for readers to sort themselves into (are you a greenblood or an orangeblood?). They also have quite a fascinating romance system known as the quadrants (guess how many different types of love they have) and a society based on violence and no adults on homeworld. If SBURB doesn’t scratch your lore itch then Alternia and the trolls will probably do it for you.

The comic also has time travel and alternate universes. No, not AUs like what fandoms make, actual alternate universes where there are multiples of a single character that led different lives. Homestuck coined the phrase “double mobious reach around” to explain some of its convoluted nature. There are literal graphs and spreadsheets people have made to help keep themselves on track with what is going on in the story.

I could go on to explain the actual plot of Homestuck in more detail buuuuut this is already a grotesquely long answer to your message aaaand I don’t really want to spoil it too much if there’s even a chance you feel like giving it a read for yourself (other than what I’ve already told you and what you will see on the internet in general). Instead I’ll mention one event that happened in comic that affected the real life internet.

There is one flash animation in the comic known as Cascade. The comic had been building up to it for a while and I would say it’s one of the first climaxes of the story (yes, there’s more than one in my opinion). Hussie took a break to work on creating it. I forgot to mention earlier that Hussie updated the comic on a daily basis for years, often multiple times in a day. The insane update schedule was part of the reason the fanbase grew so immense. With this break the fanbase became tense and ravenous.

Cascade dropped and people flooded the site. The flash refused to load because so many people were trying to access it at once. Hussie put the flash on Newgrounds as well, because he knew his website wouldn’t be able to handle the traffic. We crashed Newgrounds. Homestucks. Crashed. Newgrounds. The website designed to host flashes and had loads of people on it daily was crashed by one fandom just to see one flash. It didn’t stop there, though. Livestream crashed as people who were able to get access to the flash streamed it so others who couldn’t get mspa or newgrounds to load could watch it. Megaupload crashed as people ripped the file and tried to share it so others could watch it on their computers without a website. It’s known as the day Homestuck broke the internet. It was absolute chaos. There’s a great image that summarizes this chaos with a collage of #notes that were used at the time and ending with a tweet that Hussie had issued at the time which was “well that didn’t work”. I would link it, but I can’t for the life of me find it right now.

There’s so much more I could talk about, all the different characters, the various hiatuses, shipping, all the wonderful people I’ve been able to meet thanks to Homestuck, my love for this comic and the community surrounding it. If you’ve actually made it all the way through my word vomit then I commend you. Feel free to ask me about anything Homestuck related. As you can see, I do so love to talk about it. Thank you sincerely for asking me about it and giving me a chance to write this huge wall of text.

OH GOD I DIDN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT LYRICSTUCKS AND FANDOMSTUCK.

I’M POSTING THIS NOW BEFORE I THINK OF ANY OTHER THINGS I DIDN’T MENTION BECAUSE BY GOD I’M SURE THERE’S LOADS.

[prolapsarian]

‘Cat Person’ and Character-Analysis

My ill-advised tuppenceworth on 'Cat Person':

There was a peculiar history in the twentieth century in which, in psychoanalysis, the analysis of the ego turned towards an emphasis on quantitative factors (that is, towards an analysis of ego strength and ego weakness) at key moments. It happened in 1921 in 'Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', the sister book of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' now not amid war but instead subsequent social and economic ruin. It happened again in the writings of Reich, Fenichel, and Freud in the 1930s. Indeed, you can see a longer history of this sort of quantitative ego-analysis as significant to attempts understand the Nazi phenomenon reaching through to the late 1940s. And it appears once again in the 1970s. Needless to say, these are turns that have been made necessary - albeit through the darkest and most labyrinthine paths - by social and economic crisis. And more significantly they have come about as those economic crises have instantiated dominant social modes of the hatred of women, not so much by some abstract patriarchy but by new developments of homosociality, bound up in warriorship, male cliques and confraternities. And needless to say too that these developments have prospered in particular in circumstances of male mass-unemployment or the mass fear amongst men of unemployment. In short, this whole analytic nexus is bound up with women at work ("taking the jobs of men"), and how in periods of economic crisis masculinity can triumph through new extra-liberal communal modes of (anti-)social organisation founded on the hatred of women and violence against them, and from which women and their work is excluded. But from a psychoanalytic view, they are also stories about how these "new communal modes" are founded, in truth, on regression.

The great victory of stories like "Cat Person" - and perhaps the reason for its popularity - is that they inaugurate this question in the time of our own economic crisis - and in particular amongst a generation of men who, over the last decade, have graduated university into a collapsing economy. And although this story might speak in more lulling tones than, say, Jelinek did in the 1970s, the violent backdrop is even more extreme: one of Elliott Rodger-style massacres and the mushrooming of nasty 4chan-based chatter about a "beta uprising”, of “pick-up artistry” and the belief that being a “good guy” is the world’s best justification for being a pig in bed. That is, this story asks the crucial questions: “what are the burgeoning modes of the hatred of women amongst the male precariat? And how do they find their violent expressions?” In one particular way, the story’s diagnosis is extremely precise: in the moments in which it dwells on Robert’s fantasy of Margot’s return to a high school romance. Indeed, the present regressions in male mass culture (especially of the American variety) are founded on an almost constant return to schoolyard identifications, and the paired homoerotic sado-masochistic figures of jock and nerd. Just to add, as I will come to it in more detail, this doesn’t mean this should be responded to by a hatred of homoeroticism - which this regression will turn into; nor does it mean kids straightforwardly enjoy being bullied - and raped, symbolically or otherwise - at school; and nor is it to condemn as barbaric either childhood eroticism in general or sadomasochism. But these schoolyard identifications have been hardened by the discovery that they are already so strong that they present the perfect marketing opportunity to mass-cultural producers. This isn’t to deny that there is a long history in American film and television about the fantasy of the nerdy guy who - by dint of cunning - gets with some conventionally hot woman, who is invariably the butt of all the jokes because she is stupid, and therefore apparently deserves everything that this cunning metes out to her. That history runs from Woody Allen through to The Big Bang Theory. But this type of cultural production - by men, for men - is enormously more prevalent now than it has been at any time before, and it both produces and fulfils these regressive tendencies. They remain the most enormous source of profiteering.

I wrote this back in March on these phenomena, and my views haven’t changed so much, but it gives a more *political* view of how new forms of illiberal male violence play out in this scenario, and how the two figures find themselves bound together: “For people of my generation a lot of what is on offer in the way of websites, TV shows, music separates itself along the lines of "nerds vs jocks." Mass culture finds its market in taking sides in an enormous process of regression: marginal pre-pubescence is the scene of eternal fixation. What follows is some crude sociology: it is intriguing to see how this plays out as a collaboration between the two sides in the strains of contemporary misogyny - on the one side the Jockish Trump type, non-consensual hands everywhere, and on the other the Nerdish misogyny that has developed I guess through trends like "pick-up artistry", the hatred of women because they don't love you unconditionally. Maybe this collaboration between these two types, founded on a single type of psychic formation, marks out also the uneasy collaboration of Government and the Internet alt-right, an army of hateful hidden nerds, who think they are probably just using the likes of Trump and Bannon as avatars. But perhaps what is most striking here is the strength of self-righteousness founded on the feeling of oppression long ago, each side by the other. However much the internet warrior might have a nicely paid job and plenty of resources, he feels hard done by in a culture that seeks to perpetuate forever the violence of the school yard. He sees himself as a figure of vengeance, however little he might be oppressed. Mass culture becomes an arena in which the tensions and contradictions of something like a regressive anality are played out, in a world frozen into unambivalent sado-masochism. Be a man, be ego-weak, the TV bellows!”

Part of what has been most reported, and most interesting about Cat Person story has been the establishment of a sort of culture-war in the responses to it. What has been less spoken about, though, is how those responses have been conditioned by the complex of genitality within a mass-culture that thrives on pre-genital identification. What might in fact be the most provocative moments in this story for a lot of the men who have responded are the depictions of the failing penis: “At the end, when he was on top of her in missionary, he kept losing his erection, and every time he did he would say, aggressively, “You make my dick so hard,” as though lying about it could make it true.” What makes this so provocative is that the regressive forms of mass cultural play on the hyper-ambivalence developed in age towards one’s own pre-genital fixation within the culture. What is constantly produced and sold to and by a generation of men are sorts of cultural objects that both catch them in a homoerotic moment and then fantastically - and aggressively, violently - disavow it. This is to say, that today’s regressive male mass culture, despite being homosocial and indeed homoerotic, is at the same time very deeply homophobic. Yeah, that’s an old story from the 1930s too, but it also explains something of why a lot of people get very jumpy about it, especially when the women’s true fantasy is depicted as being with another guy who shares in laughing at the first’s failed genitality. It turns out, with that laughter, that she hates his anal fixation just as much as he does. Not that this is her fault either.

So who, in the end, is to blame? Maybe all of this sounds like a dodge too (or some verbose resistance) - no doubt it to an extent is, and the message of this little story is more straightforward: it tells men to reflect a bit, be more sensitive to how women are feeling; it adds to the perennial refrain that men need to “work on their shit.” And it does this well - I too found myself reflecting. But I worry that this also misses the mark in certain respects - and most extravagantly in its willingness to submit to the prevailing psychological doctrine that all matters of character can be exchanged for questions of behaviour. All of this, I think, raises the question of what we do about prevailing ego-weakness and its violences today. Traditionally in character-analysis the answers have been pretty poor: there is a hope - and one can read is quite clearly in late Freud - that this sort of illiberal male mass violence in crisis can be solved by the “return to work”. But here I can’t help but to think he is wrong. Yes, the experiment in the west of full-employment liberalism did, in effect, reduce the immediate power of male confraternities and armies over society, but it did this by allowing this violence to quietly return to the home, and by pushing women straight back into the unremitting violence of the home too. This is the history of the 1950s and 1960s, and it was not until the next crisis of employment that the pent up rage against it, by those women who had survived it, was able to be given some expression. Indeed, for all of its hopes of some kind of peacefulness, prevailing liberalism in periods of boom most usually simply institutes processes of social repression - privatising violence within the family - where psychological repression leaves off; while the forces of that violence remain intact. Meanwhile other solutions proffered have been “a new olympic games” (Ernst Simmel), new freer forms of communalist and more sexually free lifestyle (Reich), or simply “education” (for an Adorno immured in the post-war boom).

It seems to me that all of these answers are useless in one way or another - and that the culture does truly require a feminist response. One would hope that it would be as psychoanalytically sensitive as it is violent. I guess to invoke all of this history of character-analysis is rather unfashionable too. Not least because these sorts of arguments fell out of fashion because all sorts of terms - for very good reason - fell out of use. Things like “penis-envy” (and as I quietly have suggested here, in many ways I think this was often a misnomer for work-envy), or “repressed homosexuality”. Nonetheless, these sorts of discussions do - even deprived of vocabulary - offer some scope for addressing the problems of how the crisis of our age is rebounding into hatred and violence against women on a mass scale. In any case, basically I'm well up for a fierce critical discussion of ego-weakness and mass culture. F-Scales at the ready.

[startupljackson]

Request For Hacks

Today Product Hunt launched a hackathon, which I will be a mother fuckin’ judge of. As such, I’m going to suggest a few projects I am highly confident would be judged as awesome.

DeEchoChamber For Twitter - Diversity Index (Crowdsourcing/Mechanical Turk)

Twitter has an interesting social graph and I’ve personally benefited from seeking out a diverse set of perspectives. I think about proactively following more women and minorities in technology and investing, but also try to find more academics, great technology journalists, intellectual conservatives/liberal economists, etc.

I would love to see someone build an app that gives individuals a score, but also that maps out orgs (e.g. executives at company, investors at a venture firm, etc) and scores the diversity of perspectives experienced at the tops of organizations. As they say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

This app could then be used to recommend interesting people to someone who might have a diverse perspective that’s relevant to them. So, if you are in tech, we can cluster the tech people and highlight diverse voices on a number of axes.

You occasionally see people do manual lists that are useful, but I think we could of way better both in terms quantifying interestingness, expanding the kinds of lists we see, personalizing recommendations, and making a UI that makes it easy to form your own opinion (e.g. showing a few sample tweets, common connections, top followers, etc).

My suggested implementation for this would be to use a combination of crowdsourcing and mechanical turk.

The crowd could suggest organizations/people to score and bucket them into organizations. I’d start with unicorn tech companies and venture capital firms, but that’s my jam, so…

The app could then pull in their ‘followed’ list, or take a random sample for folks following large numbers of people where that’s impractical.

Mechanical turk could be used to annotate accounts. For example, we might ask MT to suggest a race, gender, sexual orientation, political bent, industry, etc.

Now we can answer questions like, “which venture firms’ partners have the most diverse following set?” or “who are interesting URM founders I might want to follow?”

This is a little bit crowdsourcing, a little bit AWS, a little bit of ML/likeness algorithm work, but nothing too crazy.

I will figure out how to pay for the mechanical turk for this if somebody builds it.

—————————

FreedomHatingTruthMachine - Scoring Journalism (Machine Learning/NLP/Big Data/Web Crawling)

It’s a shame we talk about fake news, which is a frame oriented around the product of media rather than the process, and allows us to argue about a specific controversy within a news cycle. Are these facts real? Did Trump say X? Is Hillary a Y?

I’m much more interested in a conversation around the process of journalism and what constitutes good journalism. Are we reading good journalists? Does this article meet journalistic standards? As technology platforms, are were biasing towards promoting propaganda and suppressing by omission (e.g. feeds) informative journalism covering sensitive topics? Are we amplifying via discovery (e.g. trending topics) 4chan propaganda laundered through irrefutable media masquerading as journalism?

I believe an input to any solution addressing the “fake news” problem will involve using technology to track and score media, giving publications, authors (named and pseudonymous), and individual articles a “journalism score.” We know humans can do this reasonable well. Now we’re just debating whether we can do this with computers, which I suspect we can.

Inputs to this score might be things like:

Using Politifact and other sources that use humans to assess the veracity of specific claims, and then using NLP to understand the extent to which articles discuss false statements critically, or support them narratively. 

Using the social graph of reputable journalists to understand what articles, authors, and publications they deem high-value. Note: this might also require NLP to avoid the quote tweeting of morons problem.

Using the providence of claims made, i.e. understanding if a source is doing direct reporting (best), reporting claims from reputable sources (good), or shilling for 4chan (bad).

Scoring articles based on the journalistic code of ethics (https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp)

Other more awesome things that come out of thinking about this more deeply, collecting inputs from smart people, and working on the problem.

Collecting this data will involve a combination of analyzing information graphs, and will involve some very tricky decisions around how to match objective data (info graphs, “factual” providence) with human/subjective data (e.g. politifact) in a way that’s easy to explain, understand, and debate. In some sense this is a proof of concept and the methodology is the most important part.

Bold claim: With an intellectually honest approach, it should be possible to build a system that roughly rates publications, journalists, and maybe articles in terms of their journalistic quality without biasing against particular ideologies (unless your ideology is lies).

Bold claim #2: This kind of system is inevitable and will be a critical input when Facebook (et al) decide eventually that “real journalism” is critical to vibrant democracy and that “fake news” is an existential threat that requires they (transparently, carefully, etc) build an immune system for political facts into their currently defenseless platforms.

It would be best if this system were build to be open both in terms of code and data.

———————

MagicCoin - (blockchain/games)

We have collectable card apps like PepeCoin, but in addition to being racist they’re also boring. You can’t do anything with them. I’ve long thought that one of the coolest token apps you could build with bockchain would be a collectible card game similar to Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, etc.

You could just even clone the MTG rules and build a simple starter set, and then fork Cocatrice and use it as an initial client for the token network.

This is not just your average blockchain project though. It has some really hard problems and will require some interesting design decisions in the governance model. These games involve printing new sets of cards (inflationary?), reprinting cards (inflationary!) to manage the price on a per-card basis (fed!), errata, and other economic factors that require careful thought.

There is likely to be some centralization in game mechanic design that would be taken on by the “foundation” supporting the game, or maybe not. This is your call. Maybe you can make an entirely decentralized rules engine off blockchain and standards will emerge.

But, given the scarcity properties of the blockchain, this seems like a perfect and fun application. I would love to be able to buy a set of awesome/fun tokens, pick a client that works for me, then take them to a game server that plays by the rules I like (Magic supports ~5 official formats & infinite kitchen table versions), and just have fun.

I am available for beta testing and game design input. Please also airdrop me some bomb-ass tokens if you make this.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

The alt-right's worldwide weaponization of memes

Pepe has made his way to France.

Of the many wildly unpredictable aspects of the 2016 election, the usage of memes by a fiercely active, populist conservative movement stands alone. 

Using easily shareable and emotionally driven images to promote nationalist conservative politics, internet meme evangelists believe that they had a direct impact on the election, carrying Donald Trump all the way to the White House.

Six months later, this coordinated movement has taken their Great Meme War overseas to help elect Marine Le Pen, candidate of the far right National Front Party, as the next president of France.

"This is a global movement because people around the world are being forced to accept a globalist agenda that benefits the few at the expense of our nations, our cultures, and our peoples," the moderators of the subreddit r/The_Donald said about their campaign. "Memes, humor, images, and videos that people come up with ... draw people in... Meme magic works if you have the right message/plan."

Seemingly emboldened by Trump's electoral win, the weaponization of memes has been codified into something that mirrors the form of a social movement. 

That movement has zeroed in the French election. 

Allons meme!

France will elect their next president in a run-off election on May 7, when Le Pen — currently the face of extreme populism — will face Emmanuel Macron, a centrist from the En March! party. Thanks to Brexit, an increase in terrorist attacks throughout France, and the election of Donald Trump, the election is now the center of international attention.

In the months leading up to the election, American nationalists have taken their brand of online activism across the Atlantic, working hard to spread their message to the people of France. Some have even created best practice guidelines for using virality to push Le Pen to a win, while others have more deviously pretended to be French in order to better spread their partisan memes, as reported by BuzzFeed.

The American assistance has not been unwelcome. French meme-makers have deftly accepted the baton and are vocal about "Making France Great Again," even offering tips on how best to fight the Great Meme War on French shores. One post in Reddit's r/LePen forum explained that though French people might not be super familiar with Pepe, the oddly-shaped cartoon frog that became a standard bearer for the alt-right, the community should readily use memes with him. 

"There is no doubt that French people will react positively to dank Pepes, the danker the better," the post by TortueGeniale666 read. "No need to hold back, use Pepe the way he is the most efficient: destroy Political Correctness."

Following this advice, the community has not held back and have focused their attacks on what they see as the immigrant threat to France, and on Macron himself. Images invoking terror attacks, memes of Muslims in France (suggesting an overrun country), and emasculating pictures of Macron have been widely spread on Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit. As they did during the 2016 U.S. election, users want these memes to be easily shared, replicated, and provoke an emotional response, enough so to hopefully sway voters.

Image: Storyful

This particular meme factory believes that they are spreading the will of a greater population than just their own; crossing international boundaries to do is a matter of duty in the fight as what they perceive to be dominant, malevolent forces like the mainstream media.

Many right-leaning meme-makers exude confidence, sure that their populism knows no global boundaries — memes, to them, are just an extremely effective tool to harness a movement and center it on a target.

"There exists a massive internet subculture devoted to creating these masterpieces and distributing them," Reddit user DecoySlug said. "This means that the idea of meme magic is not confined to a specific region but is rather spread over the world. An example is the French who are now using memes to support Le Pen."

The memes have indeed shown support for Le Pen and trashed her opponents, and the community was rewarded when Le Pen thanked her fans for the internet bravado, much as Trump did when he visited r/The_Donald for an AMA last summer, back when he was merely a presidential candidate.

A l'issue du 1er tour, je remercie les militants internautes de la #patriosphère, mobilisés depuis le d��but de cette campagne :#Marine2017 pic.twitter.com/Mki9Vzb8MT

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) April 24, 2017

"At the end of the first round, I thank the Internet activists of the #patriosphere, mobilized since the beginning of this campaign," her tweet read, referring to the alt-right nationalist movement that supports her. 

The message added confidence to the web's alt-right activists, who feel that they are not only helping to elect Le Pen, but are actively involved with educating the masses in a hope for their future. All this, through memes. 

"The goal of weaponizing memes is to get a message across to as many people as possible," DecoySlug said. "With a well-made meme, a poignant point can be made in a format that allows it to be shared and distributed throughout the internet. In this way, these memes can have an actual and profound effect on people."

James Cohen, Program Director and Assistant Professor of New Media at Molloy College had a different take on the message that was being spread through the alt-right channels. He believes that the meme-makers ultimately want to disrupt conventional thinking and create more noise so that signals like traditional media and establishment governmental messages are distorted. The alt-right hope their reactionary ideas will grow dominant through their self-created static.

"It’s less about the message being delivered than about the obfuscation of the message," Cohen said. "The heavier the obfuscation, the less time there will be to do critical thinking. If they can do that, they believe the populism will prevail, because only those with clarity will be able to make the right decision. But the thing is, no one will be clear."

For many supporters of Trump, Le Pen, and memes, the goal is simple and universal: nationalism.  

A Reddit user named Spartharios, who said they lived in Bulgaria, had a basic outlook for what the community should use memes to accomplish.

"Ultimately, the goal of the whole culture of memes and 'meme magic' is to spread our political message, which is nationalism and a right to self-determination of all peoples," Spartharios said simply. 

However, Florian Cramer, lecturer in 21st century visual culture at Rotterdam University in the Netherlands, doesn't believe that the overseas attempt to harness a community into action has an easy path to victory.

"There's, however, one major obstacle for image meme campaigns in France and the rest of continental Europe," he said. "[I]mageboard and meme culture is a very specifically American phenomenon. Its popular cultural references and humor are incomprehensible to most Europeans."

That lack of translation has not, and most likely, will not stop them from trying.

Image: mashable/Christopher Mineses 

But can a meme really move mountains?

Of course, if you live outside of the realm of meme magic, you may have skepticism around memes and their effectiveness when it comes to changing the course of an election. How, you may ask yourself, could some weird frog and text on images really sway anyone's political leanings?

And it's true, measuring memes ain't easy. Gauging the IRL effect of a community spreading images around social media is not an easy task. Cohen called it a "very hard question" and said it was an ongoing focus of studies as they try to understand if it had any actual political impact. The New York Times' analysis actually said that American memes do not translate well to the French population.

However, online alt-right communities have no doubt that memes are successful.

"The whole concept of memes is that they spread from person to person, and there is literally no way of measuring that," Andrew Anglin, editor and founder of the neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer, said over email. "But there is no question in my mind as to the fact that memes elected Donald Trump. A lot of things elected Donald Trump, mainly Hillary Clinton, but without the memes it wouldn't have happened. That's not hyperbole."

While Cohen acknowledged that it's somewhat difficult to tell how effective memes may be at shaping a political climate, he did concede that the current global technological network, combined with the sense of anonymity that comes with joining a large, active group, is capable of imbuing its members with a real feeling of agency. 

"When someone understands the power of anonymity, we return ourselves to that guerrilla technique of power of masks, power without faces," Cohen said. "That one anonymous face could be one person or it could be all people. When you can create five memes per member... If you can show that a meme has power, that power can seem immense."

And, in fact, Cramer said that any meme movement thrives on the fact that no one can really tell if it is effective or not.

France 🇫🇷 is just about gone, LePen is probably the Last Hope ...hope the French people figure it out...😕 pic.twitter.com/WKyv9JAm5c

— DeplorableVETRN🇺🇸 (@DeplorableVetrn) April 29, 2017

"Meme culture is fundamentally based on the fact that neither the origins, nor the addressee of a meme are clearly identifiable," he said. "As a side effect, this leads to uncertainty about the actual size of the network and reach of memes... If people neither know the actual reach, nor the real impact of their meme campaign, they make themselves believe in the most optimistic scenario. This is fundamentally a religious belief."

But that isn't the only thing that the conservative meme movement has going for it. When Trump won his electoral victory, whether or not the meme community could realistically take any credit didn't matter — the win was more than enough encouragement.

"When Trump won it became, 'we could do this anywhere,'" Cohen said. 

When Charlton McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU was asked about whether Trump's win emboldened the meme-ing community, he said, "Absolutely."

"Sometimes people search for invitation to act in different ways, but there’s an increasing sense of visibility," he said. "People in the crowd who are like minded in their beliefs and their behavior say, 'When I see a president like President Trump and the way that they communicate, I look and say, it’s not so fringe or hush hush, I can say it out in the open, because there are people who think like me.'" 

To others in the alt-right, the success of their Great Meme War is nothing but highly specialized, and extremely effective, trolling against a mainstream media that they see has left their ideals far behind, but has also evolved into something easy to control — like Pavlov's dog.  

"The 'meme phenomenon' is simply a grass-roots push-back against the transparent shilling of [the mainstream media]," an active meme creator on Reddit, who preferred not to use their username.

According to them, prodding the media with inflammatory or emotionally reactionary expressions like memes ended in a predictable reaction; the alt-right has Pepe ring a bell, the media salivates.

"It has been insanely successful precisely because the media are not made of Journalists, but shills," this Redditor said. "The reason why we are winning is not the memes, they are a symptom. The memes win the day because the media is easy to troll."

But, in the end, regardless of the actual electoral results, the nationalist meme movement rests assured that its sheer exposure will attract more to their cause. 

"It has certainly been effective at reaching the youth on the internet, especially on Reddit," Spartharios said. "The reason why it's succeeding is because our memes are not only funny, but they ignore the PC culture and don't give a damn about offending anyone, which adds a certain edginess to it. Just enough edginess for it to be effective, and not annoying and polarizing."

Oh, the places Pepe will go

Naysayers may believe that the international spread of memes will make little difference to the ultimate outcome of the French election, but effectiveness doesn't seem to matter to the participants in digital populism. To them, the goal is to maintain their energy and grow their prospective influence.

Should this level of digital populism continue to grow in numbers and energy, how will that affect not only the American or French government, but ultimately the world? Even if the memes don't resonate into mainstream internet culture, the goal is still to build numbers and resolve. 

My fellow Kekistanis if Le Pen makes it past the first round this is not over until May 7th. Use your meme magic! pic.twitter.com/uVuhVhG1DH

— Keks Army 🥛🐸👌🏻 (@ArmyofKek) April 23, 2017

"The definition of populism is an appeal to the masses, and memes are intended to transmit concepts which hold universal meaning among the targeted group using simple language and imagery," Anglin said. "The democratization of meme-production would necessarily lead to a populist mindset among the masses."

For now, the masses are online, though the meme makers still see that as a place to rack up perceived victory after perceived victory.

"Hundreds of thousands of Redditors are on the path to nationalism, simply because of /r/The_Donald," Spartharios said. 

If that growth's gonna happen, this movement might have some growing pains. The meme movement has attracted a wide range of people that might not exactly agree on its goals. 

"I think earnest or sincere political memes produced by the alt-right are often effective at revealing the absence of a cogent political position among those who create them," Matt Applegate, Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Molloy College, said. 

The people I spoke to subscribed to widely varied politics, from far-right, racially-based ideals to simple disenfranchisement with a system they felt didn't represent them.

"These aren't white supremacist neo-Nazis, they are trolls who know that the media hates Trump and will grab at ANYTHING which makes him look bad...," the Redditor who asked not to be identified said of the meme makers. "I am Jewish, and I am more socially open-minded than any liberal I know. The internet trolls pretend to be crazy in a way that reveals the hypocrisy of the other side, but most of them are like me, I believe."

This view of people like Anglin and his readers over at the Daily Stormer have more rigid social ideas about the ultimate goal. 

"The goal is to create a new culture, a new identity for young white men who don't have one," Anglin said. "Basically, it took the young white male population some time to get to the point where a significant percentage of the intelligent members of that demographic understood that they were part of a collective - a populace - with collective interests. Once a certain number of such persons was reached, they began to meme the message. The meme is the message."

#TuesdayMotivation Paris, you can end all this crap by electing Marine Le Pen. Take your nation back. pic.twitter.com/Ge0jCYGbxi

— Philip Schuyler (@FiveRights) April 25, 2017

The professors that we spoke to had a much more alarmist view of a possible future highly influenced by this type of digital populism. They thought this emotionally-driven expression, filling up people social feeds could spell doom for us all.

Cohen, who encouraged "meme literacy" for everyone, had the most memorable description of this possible future. 

"What could happen is frightening as fuck," he said. 

For him, the natural outcome of the growth of digital populism is fascism, not necessarily on purpose, but as the result of particular people directing the expression of the masses towards an authoritarian fate.

"If we do not gain control of this [movement], we being people," he said, "If we do not take control of this and take a step back, we will accidentally walk ourselves right into this.” 

To sum up his ultimate thoughts on the end result of this globalized movement, Cohen pointed me to the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin's 1968 book Illuminations, in which he writes:

"Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves."

Memes may have begun as harmless internet jokes, but their impact on the French election, and the world, is someone no one could have expected.

[shirlleycoyle]

A Linguist Explains Why Texting and Tweeting Aren’t Ruining the English Language

As a social media editor, I am Extremely Online, and pride myself on knowing the latest memes and internet-speak. I see how phrases enter the lexicon and travel a similar pathway: used by a small group of people online (often young people and people of color), then spread out to a wider net of people who are also Very Online, eventually reaching those who aren’t on Twitter for 10 hours a day (and, for better or worse, brands).

The phenomena of memes, gifs, and other ways of communicating online are increasingly the subject of serious academic inquiry. There’s already been a dissertation on memes, and another on 4chan, for example. While some may dismiss “doge” and “smol” as insignificant, others know the internet is changing the fabric of the English language daily. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch has been writing about the language of the internet for seven years, and now she’s encapsulated some of that knowledge into a book. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language , which comes out July 23, breaks down the history of internet language, from the first-known use of “lol” to emoji to memes.

VICE spoke to McCulloch about why she wanted to write a book about internet linguistics, as well as why we shouldn’t worry about emoji “replacing” English. It has been edited for length:

VICE: What made you want to write this book? Gretchen McCulloch: It was a bit weird to say, “Oh, I want to write a book about the internet.” The internet is so fast moving, and a book is so much of an archive that preserves something in a very static form. You can’t just go update it like you could, say, a blog post. I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a book about something that was so fast moving as the internet; another generation, people won’t necessarily know what it was like to be around at this time. Websites decay, websites go down, Geocities went away.

When you write a book, you’re trying to figure out how to distill something that’s living and breathing into a format that’s very static and fixed. At the same time, it’s an opportunity; if you can kind of encapsulate a particular era, then you have that as a sort of historical record. You have it to look back on, even when it eventually becomes a history book.

In terms of why you should read this book now and not 50 years from now: a book is still the best way we have for people to experience something big in the same order. I write a lot of short articles, but each of them have to start with the assumption that people have never necessarily read anything I’ve written, or read anything else about linguistics, or don’t necessarily know anything about the internet. With a book, you can build up for a bigger idea because you have a longer space.

Every so often I see people concerned that emoji will “replace” words and we’ll all be talking in emoticons in the future. In the chapter on emoji in Because Internet , you say there’s no reason to fear that because emoji are not a language. So what are they? My favorite analogy for emoji in terms of what they’re doing in communication is that they’re akin to a gesture—say, a thumbs up or a middle finger. We gesture all the time but we don’t really think about what we’re doing when we do it. My podcast co-host, Lauren Gawne, has done a bunch of research on this.

Thinking about emoji as gesture explains a lot about how they caught on so quickly. There are systematic ways people use gesture. One big distinction is that some gestures have conventional names and some don’t. A thumbs up, or the middle finger, or a wink has a name. You know what the gesture looks like. But if you were to describe your travels, you’re probably going to make gestures to describe your trip. But those gestures don’t have conventional English names. Maybe you pointed, maybe you used your open hand—you could’ve done a bunch of things. We don’t have names the way a thumbs up is a thumbs up is a thumbs up.

This is one of the distinctions you can make in terms of emojis. Some emojis have iconic names and they’re used specifically as emojis. You have the winking face, the thumb and index finger on your chin—that’s a specific thing that has an additional meaning it brings when you say an utterance. It’s used as its capacity in emoji to change something about what you’re saying, to change something about the meaning of what you’re saying.

And then you have emojis that are more of a literal illustration, like a birthday cake. You don’t have to have any “emoji fluency” to interpret that the birthday cake is a birthday cake. You have to have a cultural fluency of what a birthday cake is, but there’s nothing special about that emoji. Whereas the thinking face emoji requires an “emoji competence” to interpret.

Some emojis have a specific “extra” meaning—like the “tears of joy” emoji, which someone could interpret as crying if they are not “emoji fluent.” If you think of them in this kind of relationship to gesture, then the different types of functions that emerged have make a lot more sense. This also means that—we gesture along with our speech, and that doesn’t mean we don’t talk. They have a mutually-beneficial relationship.

Something that wasn’t really covered in Because Internet —maybe it will be in a future edition!—is the rise of voice memos and smart devices like Alexa and how they impact internet linguistics, or linguistics overall. I thought about whether I should include a discussion on this in the book. I decided not to because a lot of what people are doing with voice tech at this moment is giving commands to a machine. You’re saying, “Set a timer for five minutes.” That’s a user interface, that’s not a conversation. Even things we talk about conversational design is a different kind of user interface. I’m not talking about the design of menu buttons in the book, either. Not talking about voice commands like, “Set a timer for five minutes” is the same as not talking about the graphic design of your timer app where you press a button to set a timer.

It’s an interesting space. That’s something I really hope they’ll be more research about in the next few years because I think there are people using voice memos for communication. There’s been a little bit of research about that so far, especially refugee populations because some of them are illiterate, or they don’t have keyboards that support their languages. So, they’re using voice memos because it’s difficult for them to communicate with each other otherwise. It’s easier for them to use recorded voice, which is a really interesting use case.

Do you think we’re going to eventually sound the same, is our vocabulary going to merge as we all spend time online? Will there be a death of regional slang? This has been a constant prediction that has never actually been borne out. Over time, there’s been people thinking that the rise of various kinds of mass media will lead to the collapse of different regional ways of talking. Some of the early dialect surveys from the 1800s featured people saying, “Well, now we have newspapers so people aren’t going to talk the way that they used to.” A few decades later it happened with the radio, then with the television, and now with the internet.

It’s an understandable type of impulse, but we haven’t seen it with any other types of mass media. I think it’s probably overblown. There are definitely some slang terms that can spread via the internet. There is internet-based slang, while other slang terms are regional or local or age-based, or generational. Those slang terms are passed along through other means. You’ll see internet-based slang may have specific spelling, or include emoji or emoticons, that are based on the writing format itself. An example is “smol”—that’s an internet-based slang not attached to any region that spread through the internet.

Finally, is there an internet linguistic trend you hate, like a slang term or meme? What really gets me is people dismissing internet languages. The people that are creating it are doing so consciously and intentionally and creatively. It’s really easy to say, “Oh, well, the kids are doing something that I don’t understand, therefore, they’re not doing anything important.” What annoys me is the annoyance over internet languages itself. It’s easy to dismiss something as laziness, when in fact, it often takes more effort to punctuate exactly how you want to convey a particular tone of voice online.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A Linguist Explains Why Texting and Tweeting Aren’t Ruining the English Language syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[nchyinotes]

Alt-Age: Designing Belief

May 19 2018

https://designmuseum.org/whats-on/talks-courses-and-workshops/alt-age-designing-belief

Thoughts: I found the first session on conspiracy theories fascinating (because I knew nothing about it beforehand, and the Trump analysis was very cool too), I liked Daniel Keller’s crypto starter kit profiles (and he was super nice, I had a great conversation with him after his talk!), and I thought Timandra put an interesting perspective to data profiling.

Trumped Up: The President and Conspiracy Theories

DR CLARE BIRCHALL

which conspiratorial theories are successful and which fail at explaining contemporary ?

conspiracy theory: speculative story that fashions historical/contemporary events as outcome of a conspiratorial design. often sits at odds with official story. it asks who benefits, and points the finger.

Richard hofstadter’s paranoid style:

all of history is a conspiracy

perpetuates the idea that conspiracy theories are totally other and unhinged

clinical paranoia vs paranoid style

conspiracy theorists are naive people who can’t really engage in the public sphere because they’re so irrational and ??

fredric jameson: conspiracism is often a symptom of something else

marxist

narrative is a v flawed attempt to map out the ever elusive social totality

system of overwhelmingly subjugating and repressive landscape

conclusion is wrong - it’s the faceless system of capitalism that is to blame

doesn’t take the form the left wants politics to take

lived experience of social injustice gets turned into a conspiratorial narrative

historical precedent informs the turn to conspiracy as explanation

justified fear that black people have about the way black bodies have been used and abused (ie. tuscany syphilis study) - institutional supported

ie. impotence, AIDS

—> tools of resistance used to galvanise a community - this is their social function or cultural work that they do  (tanya??)

example of popular knowledge that puts on display undecidable nature of all knowledge. exaggerated version of modes of knowing. so share a lot with legitimised forms. risks showing us how all knowledge is ever theory, and legitimacy is conferred by mystical constructions. so this binary is drawn to secure our own position.

Trump

what kind of conspiracist is trump? He seeks to target and delegitimize three targets:

particular political opponents

institutions (liberal media, federal reserve)

any knowledge that threatens his interest (climate change)

trump’s style:

not as the sustained narrative that hofstader way, but uses conspiracist fragments to highlights gaps/doubts and dispenses with necessity of evidence.

never quite takes responsibility over theories, just repeats others.

“some people say”, “many people say”

meme friendly format

uses it as one tactic to disorientate and disarm

helpful ideas:

conspiracism can be employed for ideological reasons

conspiracism is often a symptom of something else

proliferation of conspiracy theories is due in part to fact that so many actual conspiracies have been uncovered during the 20th century

problematic ideas in age of trump

conspiracy theory is a pejorative term

identity of president, at white house, legitimises

conspiracy theories are tools of resistance for historically marginalised people

trump isn’t a minority lol

arise because it is not possible to limit interpretation or safeguard knowledge

idkkkk post truth era stuff

concept of fully agential, sovereign, cartesian individual who believes with their whole body and soul

fragments enter upon a thoroughly networked sphere, so they circulate virally

belief becomes distributed and exists within the network through method of circulation

belief without believers?

for many trump supporters, believing the theory may be of little importance. what builds is the impression of a figure that isn’t beholden to elitists, who says the unsayable. mode might be most important.

to understand role of trump here:

this isn’t the first time conspiracy theories have been expressed from positions of power but the info environment is different

languages of disenfranchisement can be mimicked and appropriated

must think about trump’s conspiracy fragments within whole range of post truth tactics

we might need to rethink the nature of belief in a digital, networked era

The Nouveaux Cryptoriche: A Consumer Profile

DANIEL KELLER

GINI coefficient - measurement of de/centralisation, all bitcoin and ethereum stuff is actually very centralised and unequal (wealth disparity of owner of wallets, etc)

within crypto: huge gender divide, white/male/millennials

all fairly libertarian and right wing in orientation - neo liberal logic that behaviour must be incentivised economically for anything altruistic to happen (ethereum, bitcoin, ripple)

motivation through economics = neoliberal + reactionary worldview

who are the cryptorich?

richest: white men, some asian men

starter kits: caleb, priscilla, andsprei, elijah, roger

PANEL DISCUSSION

With Daniel Keller and Michael Dieter. Chaired by Natalie Kane

spiritual/magical terminology in describing technology

manipulation as neglect (malice)?

no, intention in business model to maximise profits and attention, so no not neglect because its intentional

CA = great “accident” of this business model

mindless logic that goes into all the platforms we use today, addictive nature (brains have been completely rewired in the last 15 years)

digital dependency

neglect - politics of care ?

history of the whole science and technology studies being ignored

digital mindfulness - theres a genealogy to it

cyber culture + counterculture new ageisms

subversive tactics ?

florian kramer - subversive media

angela nagel - think of alt right in terms of subcultures and critiques of subculture theory

thinking more about continuities

platform capitalism fosters these communities - reaction of no platforming them? can further radicalise + alienate them

legitimate claim at being the alt bc of the monopoly on liberal terminology  

understanding truth is based on an understanding of what non truth is or are ?

forms of behavioural economics were embedded into platform design - promoting mode of behavioural design. tracking, nudges, in the context of business propositions.

tokenising all possible economic activity, market of IOT

politics of attention - extreme edgelord ism results on 4chan

critique of behavioural dimension on platforms as being very causal

by saying these mechanisms actually work and lead to addiction, there may be a chance to launch stronger critique against platform monopoly and get them to bear more responsibility for certain dynamics we associate with them

is this a mistake, bc do we really know to what extent these mechanisms actually work?

micro targeting

distracts us from thinking through what type of longer term social issues/conflicts/antagonisms are being manifest through these types of dynamics (algorithm is revealing something that’s natural, given too much credit for this stuff)

these things work we need to regulate them vs ^

deemphasising determining role software may have in this (is ignoring the possible slippery slope tho, negligence)

targeting: sub culture of people who feel like you’re be targeted + tracked constantly by government, mental health, communities that reinforce mental illness

philosophical regulation (speculative design theory) being seen as against innovation

level of ignorance they’re trying to preserve

reinvestment of desktop as focused productivity, minimise work dimensions of mobile devices (redesign of mobiles)?

people who aren’t on social media right now aren’t shaping the cultural discourse ? - national and international influence

foam space app - decentralised proof of location, micropayment constantly for that

steem it

conspiracy vs speculative design

hyperstition

epistemology of reductionism

Was It Big Data That Won It?

TIMANDRA HARKNESS

resources diverted by govt in targeting voters - 2 types of people, bc otherwise its a waste of time (ie. already have a strong affiliation + go out to vote)

daniel scarvaloni - obamas campaign

how politics ad targeting works now - tailor messages etc

profiling, data brokers, inferred data

easily misprofiled / inferring is not loads better than chance

we’re calling everyone else the “gullible fools”, we’re not the gullible fools

problem is this model of humanity - people that can be measured, predicted, nudged in ways (more complex lab rats) vs people with whom we have to engage

Beyond Belief: Being Converted in a Post-Truth Era

DR MICHAEL DIETER

digital well being strategies part of new behavioural design paradigm to deal with distraction, scandals

wellbeing.google

managing unconscious user and guiding them into habitual behaviours/habits even when it may actually be contradictory to their intentions

“conversion”: language

obfuscation is part of the business model

sleepwalking into new forms of exploitation

targeted if you share traits with other fragments of users (segregating into segments) - dominant ??? of captivation

james bridle + youtube as the great radicaliser - targeting children on youtube

UX conversion

alt right conversion

like attracts like

center for humane technology (humane tech.com)

new design politics to be articulated? realignment of tech with humanity’s best interests. who decides on what these interests will be? these structures or dependant on this type of behaviouralism.

paternalistic rather than exploitative nudging

Detecting Fake News and Misinformation: Spotting the Common Themes

BARNEY JACKSON (FACTMATA)

fake news spreads faster than true news

creating a quality score for content, to serve to advertising platforms

creating community driven AI, automated algorithms for detecting 5 things

author credibility, publisher credibility, headline analysis, ad/media analysis, content analysis

^ how did you come up with the criteria?

“toxic content”

hyperpartisanship

[datingadviceonreddit]

I feel the best way to format this post and explain the situation would be in bullet points, so here we go.Background:19 year old boyVirginNot friends with any girls at all. It frustrates me a lot, I read stories on 4chan about guys getting with their childhood best friend and they're so close and everythings so perfect for them. But then there's me, with no girls at all in my life.Work as an IT Technician at a primary school.I'm a hobby music producer, been making house/trap music for 2-3 years. I'm thinking of learning violin/piano in the future. Funny thing is I mostly do this because it's the only interesting thing about me, I want to become really good at producing music and maybe one day a girl will actually be interested in me (though she'll soon find out it's the only thing I have going for me).Watch a lot of anime, mostly romances recently and have also been reading a few romance stories online which have made me realise I really want a girlfriend (not just for sex, though that'd be great).Never had a girlfriend.Biggest reasons why I think I'll never get a girlfriend:Have Chron's Disease which is a chronic illness that means I have long phases of my life where I have a lot of stomach pain and need to go toilet A LOT. It's probably pretty unattractive that I need to go for a s**t all the time and I'd need a girlfriend that can accept that and not treat me any differently because of it. Also having Chron's Disease means I can't really get drunk, I haven't actually tried since I've found out I have Chron's Disease so I may be able to tolerate it, but usually people with Chron's have to quit alcohol.Have an eating disorder which put simply, massively limits my choice of foods. I pretty much have 4-5 meals (quite unhealthy meals) that I eat at home, meaning I'm eating the same meals every 2 days. It's probably a huge turn off and things like dates at resturants or eating dinner at a girlfriends house would be extremely embarassing as I probably wouldn't be able to find something I can eat.I'm pretty unsociable, I like being around people but I'm awkward and can never think of things to say. I'm usually pretty quiet when I'm with my group of friends and even more quiet if there's girls around. My social skills are truly awful which I hate. I'm cringing at the idea of me having a girlfriend and not being able to think of anything to say to her, she'll probably end up finding me boring. I am pretty unconfident but that isn't even the main issue, even if I did have the confidence to talk to girls, I'd have no fucking idea what to say.Not friends with any girls and I don't think I've even spoke to a girl the same age as me since high school like 5-6 years ago. Lol as if all my big flaws weren't already a problem, I don't even know any girls so where do I start? There's no one at work I'm even slightly interested in, I don't go to college/school or anything.I have incredibly high standards, I really want an attactive girlfriend. I know this point seems ridiculous and you probably think I should just lower my standards, but it's really not that easy. It's a pretty huge personal preference that I really want a girl I think is beautiful.My personality and interests are pretty weird. I want someone else that I find interesting, not necessarily matching my interests because it's pretty hard to find other girls that like anime/video games.. but yeah I just don't want a completely normal girlfriend.No sexual experience, I haven't even kissed a girl before.Small things that make the situation even worse:Tongue tied so I can't really make out properly, though I think there is surgery I can do so if I ever get a girlfriend I really like, I'd probably go through with that, so this isn't a huge problem but I can imagine it's going to be awkward explaining to a girl why I can't make out with her properly :/.I get easily stressed out and depressed (and yes I'm using the word as it's supposed to be used.. not just 'unhappy'. I go through periods where I am legitimately depressed). I'm listing this as a small issue because I could probably hide it and possibly even overcome it if I had a girlfriend.Not really attractice, wouldn't consider myself very unattractive but probably somewhere below average.There's probably more things that make it even harder and if I think of any I'll add them. But yeah you can see my situation is pretty shit... I have loads of flaws (some of which I can't get rid of, like Chron's, and kind of the eating disorder though it is possible to overcome it, just VERY difficult) and even if I didn't have these flaws, I don't know any girls to begin with, let alone girls I'm interested in and are interested in me.This is eating away at me every day. I don't go a day without thinking about how lonely I am and how badly I want a girlfriend, and it gets more and more painful to think about every day. I want to have someone I can protect and give support to, I want someone that I can make happy just by being with them, but I feel I'll never be able to do that.. It feels way, WAY out of reach :(I hope someone can give me some advice. via /r/dating_advice