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Soundsuits - Nick Cave

[Jaron] Lanier envisions a future economy in which everyone has access to free or cheap goods and services but not to jobs. As computers replace human workers, efficiency will skyrocket, but wealth and employment will become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few who write the code and control the servers that crunch the data. The rest of us will face unemployment and financial insecurity, even as the data that we create fuels the global information economy. Lanier’s critique is compelling because it runs deeper than the complaint that everyone has about Facebook today, which is that it’s “creepy.” If that were the only problem, the easy solution would be for people to quit Facebook. Lanier thinks quitting Facebook, at least for a while, might be good for your soul. But he recognizes that it will do nothing to stop the big-data revolution that is transforming the economy at large. ...In economics, that’s called a collective-action problem. It can’t be solved through individual decisions in a free market but only through society-wide changes in policy or social norms. In many ways, it’s a new form of the same problem that has haunted capitalism from the time of Marx. Just as money begets money, so does data beget data. Instead of landowners and industrialists, the nodes of power in Lanier’s world are what he calls “Siren Servers.” These are the vast networks of machines at companies like Google and Amazon that lure you in with attractive services and then suck up your data to fuel the continual refinement of their algorithms. The capitalists of old required human labor in order to multiply their wealth, and the reaction was a labor movement that insisted on fair compensation for a hard day’s work. The Siren Servers require only your information. And, remember, you’re giving it to them for free.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2013/05/jaron_lanier_s_who_owns_the_future_review_facebookers_of_the_world_unite.html

phonetish

New study says languages are creating hurdles for global science even today

A new study suggests that almost one third of scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which often end up being overlooked without contributing to our understanding.

At the other extreme, a vast majority of scientific reports published today are in English. The use of English as the universal scientific language creates challenges for those who are not native speakers of English. This inevitably means that scientific information is reaching a more limited audience. Therefore, researchers urge scientific journals to provide basic summaries of a study in multiple languages or use translators to fill the gap.

This is especially important for subjects where local expertise is also required such as the study of environment and related fields.

“While we recognize the importance of a lingua franca, and the contribution of English to science, the scientific community should not assume that all important information is published in English,” said lead author Dr Tatsuya Amano from University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

I’m just going to leave these here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/23497-the-origins-of-totalitarianism

youmightfindyourself

Fake Fliers by Nathaniel Russell

allthingslinguistic

An interesting thread about the discursive function of “waslike”.

Technically speaking, I wouldn’t say that this construction is really a compound verb “waslike”, because it still conjugates like you’d normally conjugate the verb “to be”. (I’m like, you’re like, s/he’s like; I was like, you were like, s/he was like - not I waslike, you waslike, s/he waslikes.)

The linguistic term for it is quotative “like” and there have been several academic papers about it, including this early one from 1990 and this extensive survey of functions of “like” by Alexandra D’Arcy.

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplicaton of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Dolor by Theodore Roethke

jennschiffer-deactivated2019010

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we’re doing. We’re good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself

-Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine

This is the paragraph of the book that made me finally realize it was okay and actually good to be in a constant state of terror as a software developer.

(via jennschiffer)

Selfie Saturday, featuring laser eyes, gradients, and a copy and paste squad

#lookmaimarting #artists on tumblr

'Let me get philosophical for a minute. In a human world, life is made interesting by serendipity,' Yellin told me. 'The more complexity you add to a machine world, you're adding serendipity that you couldn't imagine. Perry Mason is going to happen. These ghosts in the machine are always going to be a by-product of the complexity. And sometimes we call it a bug and sometimes we call it a feature.'

Netflix VP of product innovation Todd Yellin in How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood by Alexis Madrigal

The algorithm annealing into a steady state has to be our culture’s greatest art. That we even had the hubris to encode our senses into a square floating point matrix of numbers. And that we even think that representation is good enough to understand the underlying thing.

Brian Whitman

#the echo nest

linguisten

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

Steven Pinker (via linguisten)

Whispering Pines by Shana Moulton. Saw this at the Oakland Museum of California last year and finally tracked it down again. Hypnotizing Lisa Frank-esque new age domestic astro-kitsch. Also, maybe one of the best migraine depictions I’ve seen.

februarfebruar2222-deactivated2

a short trip to freedom

darksilenceinsuburbia

Pablo Picasso: Mandolin and Guitar, 1924

Not the absence of vice, but vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human state. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human state...Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and the azure meet.

The Dilemma of Determinism by William James

#William James #philosophy #determinism

I think that children can overcome the stigma of poverty. I think children can overcome the stigma of their ethnicity. But what they cannot overcome is the stigma of separation. That is like a damned spot in their being, in their self image. And that's what segregation does to children. They see themselves as apart and separate because of the language they speak, because of the color of their skin, the origin of their parents.

The Problem We All Live With – Part Two (This American Life)

#This American Life #radio #segregation

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