#network horror

[yr-bed]

“There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better,” Judith Butler, founding director of the critical-theory program at UC Berkeley, told me, helping parse the ideas at play. “Or that human potential — that’s the fascist idea — human potential is more fully actualized with AI than without it.” The AI dream is “governed by the perfectibility thesis, and that’s where we see a fascist form of the human.” There’s a technological takeover, a fleeing from the body. “Some people say, ‘Yes! Isn’t that great!’ Or ‘Isn’t that interesting?!’ ‘Let’s get over our romantic ideas, our anthropocentric idealism,’ you know, da-da-da, debunking,” Butler added. “But the question of what’s living in my speech, what’s living in my emotion, in my love, in my language, gets eclipsed.”

You Are Not A Parrot

[yr-bed]

It's normal to get excited by social media likes. Some say social media is "fake." But to the receiver of the like, they feel appreciated and heard, and to them, that's real. It's perhaps more real than going out into the world and saying interesting things and receiving real-world "likes" and praise. The activity is reduced to its essence and delivers intense satisfaction. Likes are hyperreal. For something to be fake, it can't produce the intended result. It should be counterfeit. But hyperreal is the opposite. To make a hyperreal object from a real one, take only the details that excite the mind — like getting praise — intensify them, and drop everything else. When you reduce food to its most intense elements — sweet & salt — you get hyperreal (junk) food. That is the formula for hyperreality. [...] Are we doomed to eternal hyperreality addiction? It is a potential answer to Fermi's Paradox. Intelligent life evolves until all it does is produce and consume hyperreality at the expense of exploring the stars. I don't think we're doomed though. And I don't think regulation is the answer either. Religions have dealt with the destructive nature of hyperreality. Why do you think you can't draw pictures of people or animals in Islam? A restriction that generated an art culture rooted in abstract (unreal) shapes. The secular West is especially vulnerable to hyperrealism because societal norms that could protect us are considered oppressive. I love the West's renegade aspect. It resulted in innovative art, science, and technology. But it left us unprotected against hyperreality. Whatever comes next — may be a techno-futurist religion — needs to address this issue.

Amjad Masad, “The Hyperreal”

[yr-bed]

HOW COMPUTERS WORK WHILE PERSON DRESSED AS DRACULA

[yr-bed]

Hamlet’s world is a globe defined by the omnipresence of espionage. Hamlet is arguably the drama of surveillance in a police state, rather like the Elizabethan police state of England in the late sixteenth century or the multitude of surveillance cameras that track citizens as they cross London in the current second late-Elizabethan age. Indeed, during the time of the Cold War, in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, Hamlet was not seen as some existential drama of indecision in a world of bourgeois anomie but as an allegory of life in a totalitarian regime. The First Quarto version of Hamlet was famously performed as something between tragedy and absurdist farce in 1978 at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague, where Václav Havel started as a stagehand. In this interpretation, Polonius has the key role as spymaster general.

From The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

[yr-bed]

At a time where the music ecology around Spotify continues to wither away, its bid to become an all-consuming platform means growing potential for the complete collapse of an engaged music culture and its replacement by a parallel world where music is just filler. “The suggestion that the businesses of pop music, mood-enhancing background sounds, and independent art-making ought to all live on the same platform, under the same economic arrangements, and the same tools of engagement, is a recipe for everything being flattened out into one ceaseless chill-out stream,” she writes. Pelly’s most striking contribution is her observation of where Spotify’s incentive structure seems to be pushing us: toward some sort of cyberpunkean cultural future where the platform fully recontextualizes music as means for passive mood regulation, which, as Pelly illustrates, is pretty much how it’s viewed music for years. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see how the rise of artificial intelligence makes this all far worse. In addition to “ghost artists” the company is accused of deploying to pack playlists with stock music and further reduce royalty rates, Spotify is already littered with white-noise streams made by platform-gaming actors that box out actual music; imagine what’s going to happen when that technology allows them to scale their efforts further.

You Can't Outrun Spotify

[yr-bed]

I recently finished reading Jeremy Atherton Li’s Gay Bar, which is a very good, well researched personal and cultural history of its titular topic. In the opening chapter, Lin does a brilliant job of evoking the general vibe of a night where the dark room smelt like “fog machine or nitrites, syrupy lager spilling over thick fists, smoke’s breath, someone’s citrusy cologne, the bleached vinyl seats.” The night is named Brüt; it’s already been established that there’s a rough, almost bullying quality to the interactions. After doing such a terrific job of creating a sense of place, Lin tops it off with the line “it reeked of toxic masculinity,” which did an equally brisk trade in pulling me out of the scene. Why, after creating a sense of toxic masculinity, do you need to turn to the camera, or pull us out of the scene like an artist’s statement next to a painting, and explain it? Why follow the signifier by just straight-up stating the signified, smothering the more complex and alive set of symbols with something much more tidy and much less interesting — something dead?

Wrote an essay about language/metaphor/mental health, in the age of the internet 

[yr-bed]

So the internet broke the other day! Well, not actually the entire internet, but three of the main platforms through which people access its contents: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The worldwide outages were the result of a misconfigured access protocol, but had devastating effects: not just for bored millennials and Mark Zuckerberg's stock price, but for a significant amount of global infrastructure. These platforms are vital platforms for commerce, communication and even public services in many countries which, in itself, is pretty fucked; that a private company's screw-up can have devastating effect on such a wide, varied scale is as good an argument as any for why it shouldn't exist.

The news put in mind of another widely-shared tech-related story from the past month: many current college-age students apparently don't now what files are. It's been shared with, of course, incredulousness and animosity towards generation Z and such. The actual article is much more considered, however, assessing the way in which our mental models of how computers (and the internet) have changed across the past few decades:

"Guarín-Zapata is an organizer. He has an intricate hierarchy of file folders on his computer, and he sorts the photos on his smartphone by category. He was in college in the very early 2000s — he grew up needing to keep papers organized. Now, he thinks of his hard drives like filing cabinets. 'I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers,' he told The Verge. 'Like a nested structure. At the very end, I have a folder or a piece of paper I can access.'

"Guarín-Zapata’s mental model is commonly known as directory structure, the hierarchical system of folders that modern computer operating systems use to arrange files. It’s the idea that a modern computer doesn’t just save a file in an infinite expanse; it saves it in the 'Downloads' folder, the 'Desktop' folder, or the 'Documents' folder, all of which live within 'This PC,' and each of which might have folders nested within them, too. It’s an idea that’s likely intuitive to any computer user who remembers the floppy disk."

This is largely how I think of and organise my own files, inboxes, Google Drive, even the photos saved on my smartphone. I can see also how this is largely outdated, since I grew up with a big boxy desktop PC where you had to know where you saved stuff, bookmarks on AOL browser were a necessity (the painfully slow crawl of the 56k modem meant searching for a page would add another interminable step), and early MP3 players would be impossible to parse were you not obsessive with your organising of albums and playlists. This is a world away from our current tech landscape, with everything mediated through social media, apps and the like.

"Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, has seen similar behavior from his students and can’t quite wrap his head around it. 'Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,' he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously. 'I’m kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files.'

"It’s possible that the analogy multiple professors pointed to — filing cabinets — is no longer useful since many students...spent their high school years storing documents in the likes of OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy. 'When I want to scroll over to Snapchat, Twitter, they’re not in any particular order, but I know exactly where they are,' says Vogel, who is a devoted iPhone user. Some of it boils down to muscle memory."

I think this also speaks more broadly to how restricted our thinking around/access to tech and the web are, compared to twenty or even ten years ago. People don't make their own websites, they have social media accounts; if they do build a website, it'll likely be a drag-and-drop Squarespace job, rather than built with code from the ground up. When our laptops or phones give up the ghost, we trade up for a newer model, rather than trying to fix or upgrade what we currently have. In fact, it's often impossible — or at least, will invalidate your warranty — to tinker with these products. It's the idea of products-as-service, rather than something you own and can do whatever you want with, which is prevalent also within film and music (you don't own anything, you stream it for a subscription fee), games, and the platform capitalism model in which in the likes of Uber insisting they're not a company who hires employees; they simply offer a service for drivers to use.

This, too, is how the big wide open internet, nominally full of possibilities and infinitely malleable, has been reduced to just Facebook for many in South East Asia. WhatsApp is so popular as a business tool "in South America that it chose Brazil as the first country to get WhatsApp payments—a method of using the app to pay for goods and services." People in Afghanistan and Syria couldn't get in contact with family. As Facebook have been behind a lot of web infrastructure in countries like the Sudan, it's going down literally did mean a complete loss of access to the internet. Thinking of these platforms — which are privately-owned, profit-making and largely despicable— as the be all and end all of the web is one thing; and it's something that can be changed. But it's also, uh, sort of true for a great many people. So what do you do about that?

[yr-bed]

Viewing anecdotes of sudden social combustion according to comprehensive, deterministic accounts of neurochemical response, social dynamics, and platform incentives can certainly be clarifying, but such theories are incomplete...In which case, rather than asking what is wrong with these systems, we might ask, 'What is wrong with us?

From “Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive” by Max Read