The ‘got ours, now let’s fix this mess’ of ‘Poison Fountain’ seems rather performative. HTTP get twice and check the results are the same? Further there’s no indication of how the ‘poison’ data is generated. There were commits to Git for Grok some time back showing they were already having to filter data from social media that was excessively aligned with X’s userbase and discursive style from its own search ingress; this will be no different.
Someone is wrong about the internet! I have to agree with Levine here. On many fronts, I feel uncomfortable agreeing; Doctorow has a long list of achievements, and is prolific in a manner I cannot fathom. Yet I’ve always had the ick from the anonymity-as-a-right, libertarian tinged approach he presents. It’s always struck me a complex: rejecting big tech from an IBM laptop, decrying Microsoft (with which I cannot disagree) while arguing for the ad-hoc world of Linux and open software. There is a self-selecting hierarchy, tinged with libertarianism, at the heart of the old Wired-descended open software world: a meritocracy of engineers, driven by donations and labour surplus, groundless and fleeting as capital, westward ho in the electronic frontier, overwriting what might have been with John Perry Barlow’s naive laissez-faire view that early entrants will sort things out themselves, on their terms. Anonymity, ever at service of the theoretical hero-journalist we all are, overturning evil regimes, in denial of the mendacious and abusive adventures it enables far more frequently. The lousy platformised web we’re stuck in now is the natural evolution of those metastasised narratives of unfettered expansion, inevitably yielding to mass consolidation without oversight. There may have been a more innocent time online, but that innocence showed the way for the deeply cynical nihilism that is Bezos and Zuckerberg’s domain now.
It’s not even a word, it’s a number: Dictionary.com (it’s not even a dictionary, it’s a website) ’s word of the year Is this the tyranny of data-fuelled analytics, where loaded statistical findings come to be reinterpreted back as our culture? (it’s not even a culture, it’s just how skullfat manifests language tensors)
‘alive internet theory’ is a cute and positive idea, but I can’t help but think - other than showing a deconstructed internet archive - everything that’s going up there is scans, rips and archives of dead media items, saying nothing about anything living on the web, and instead showing one site filling with already-dead media in anticipation of being hoovered up by common crawl for unthinking minds to pregurgitate
A micropost about microsites.
Ha. A passing line from the always good Wendy Chun,
everyone is now speculating about the web 3.0, the semantic web
Chun, W. H. K. (2008) ‘The enduring ephemeral, or the future is a memory.’ Critical inquiry, 35(1) pp. 148–171.
Well, that definition didnt take last; in many ways, the web has dissolved into mere carrier for platforms. The term got trampled on by know-nothing1 tech bros.
Web 3.0 now, as we all know, is where the bitcoin grifters that haven’t made the AI jump went to establish some federated bamboozlement there to separate the gullible from their money. Maybe that will wind up soon and we can get back to an actual web again eh
or, maybe worse, believe-in-nothing techbros, who know what they’re doing very much. ↩︎
“Olson” on PDP-1 using 1962 Harmony Compiler. I don’t like linking to YouTube, but here we are; this is breathtaking, a late 1990s song played on a late 1950s computer, 75 years later by the original creator of the music playback hack, Peter Samson. The colours of the machinery, the base elements of computation exposed before circuit boards came to be, the design aesthetics arranged perfectly, the oscilloscope display, layers of nostalgia for things that predated but shaped me passing by as Joe’s punched tape passes by at the end of the film, an elegy to DEC
Just remembering how horrified everyone was about the idea of a one world government the past few decades and how we accidentally now have one made of private US corporations run by kids too oblivious to think they’re fascists because they hire someone to buy their used trainers
I grew up fascinated by arcade games; this has been a life-long fascination with programmatic digital systems. I was always fascinated by games and tactile user interfaces, and portable games were how I would eliminate commutes; games represented an apex of technologies, media production, and experiences working together to entertain. But now my idle time is consumed by networked writing, social media posts; the evidence of others’ experience. I dreamed of my c64 receiving messages from others in the 1980s, that the machine would cease to be a solitary space and permit in the textural changes from another mind, responding to a shared reality, even if only a few words. Now it consumed hours of my day.
In other words, the Trump administration is increasingly gambling the future of the American economy on AI. If they’re right, the US will capture the dual rewards of both coding the tools of the next economic revolution and owning the infrastructure that runs it. If they’re wrong, the US will be left with a bunch of distressed assets and will have dramatically underinvested in the projects that actually mattered. The large tariff exemption for computers is distorting the American economy in ways that could reshape the long-run future of the country.
Interesting take on the role of AI, AI materiality, waste and future economic bubbles. For me, this is an accelerated hype bubble that naturally flows from NFTs and Crypto, and unlike the Web bubble already precludes new entrants - other than Chinese players.