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Ed Webb

Seth Priebatsch: The game layer on top of the world | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    This is the TED talk I mentioned in class 9/27
Ed Webb

The fight against toxic gamer culture has moved to the classroom - The Verge - 0 views

  • If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.
  • It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen. “This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you. “Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.
  • An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
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  • “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Ed Webb

Sad by design | Eurozine - 0 views

  • ‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions
  • If only my phone could gently weep. McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ has imploded right into the exhausted self.
  • Social reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects, we too are implicit, far too deeply involved
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  • Google and Facebook know how to utilize negative emotions, leading to the new system-wide goal: find personalized ways to make you feel bad
  • in Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies, where he notices that ‘it seems strange to assert that anything as broad as a class of technologies might have an emotional tenor, but the internet of things does. That tenor is sadness… a melancholy that rolls off it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention, of overloaded awareness, and of gaps between people just barely annealed with sensors, APIs and scripts.’ It is a life ‘savaged by bullshit jobs, over-cranked schedules and long commutes, of intimacy stifled by exhaustion and the incapacity by exhaustion and the incapacity or unwillingness to be emotionally present.’
  • Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way.4 As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.
  • Unlike the blog entries of the Web 2.0 era, social media have surpassed the summary stage of the diary in a desperate attempt to keep up with real-time regime. Instagram Stories, for example, bring back the nostalgia of an unfolding chain of events – and then disappear at the end of the day, like a revenge act, a satire of ancient sentiments gone by. Storage will make the pain permanent. Better forget about it and move on
  • By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue. Organic life cycles are short-circuited and accelerated up to a point where the personal life of billions has finally caught up with cybernetics
  • The price of self-control in an age of instant gratification is high. We long to revolt against the restless zombie inside us, but we don’t know how.
  • Sadness arises at the point we’re exhausted by the online world.6 After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard. The sheer busyness and self-importance of the world makes you feel joyless. After a dive into the network we’re drained and feel socially awkward. The swiping finger is tired and we have to stop.
  • Much like boredom, sadness is not a medical condition (though never say never because everything can be turned into one). No matter how brief and mild, sadness is the default mental state of the online billions. Its original intensity gets dissipated, it seeps out, becoming a general atmosphere, a chronic background condition. Occasionally – for a brief moment – we feel the loss. A seething rage emerges. After checking for the tenth time what someone said on Instagram, the pain of the social makes us feel miserable, and we put the phone away. Am I suffering from the phantom vibration syndrome? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were offline? Why is life so tragic? He blocked me. At night, you read through the thread again. Do we need to quit again, to go cold turkey again? Others are supposed to move us, to arouse us, and yet we don’t feel anything anymore. The heart is frozen
  • If experience is the ‘habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them,’11 the desire to anaesthetize experience is a kind of immune response against ‘the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment’.
  • unlike burn-out, sadness is a continuous state of mind. Sadness pops up the second events start to fade away – and now you’re down the rabbit hole once more. The perpetual now can no longer be captured and leaves us isolated, a scattered set of online subjects. What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the ‘slow cancellation of the future’? By scrolling, swiping and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign – and failing
  • Millennials, as one recently explained to me, have grown up talking more openly about their state of mind. As work/life distinctions disappear, subjectivity becomes their core content. Confessions and opinions are externalized instantly. Individuation is no longer confined to the diary or small group of friends, but is shared out there, exposed for all to see.
  • Snapstreaks, the ‘best friends’ fire emoji next to a friend’s name indicating that ‘you and that special person in your life have snapped one another within 24 hours for at least two days in a row.’19 Streaks are considered a proof of friendship or commitment to someone. So it’s heartbreaking when you lose a streak you’ve put months of work into. The feature all but destroys the accumulated social capital when users are offline for a few days. The Snap regime forces teenagers, the largest Snapchat user group, to use the app every single day, making an offline break virtually impossible.20 While relationships amongst teens are pretty much always in flux, with friendships being on the edge and always questioned, Snap-induced feelings sync with the rapidly changing teenage body, making puberty even more intense
  • The bare-all nature of social media causes rifts between lovers who would rather not have this information. But in the information age, this does not bode well with the social pressure to participate in social networks.
  • dating apps like Tinder. These are described as time-killing machines – the reality game that overcomes boredom, or alternatively as social e-commerce – shopping my soul around. After many hours of swiping, suddenly there’s a rush of dopamine when someone likes you back. ‘The goal of the game is to have your egos boosted. If you swipe right and you match with a little celebration on the screen, sometimes that’s all that is needed. ‘We want to scoop up all our options immediately and then decide what we actually really want later.’25 On the other hand, ‘crippling social anxiety’ is when you match with somebody you are interested in, but you can’t bring yourself to send a message or respond to theirs ‘because oh god all I could think of was stupid responses or openers and she’ll think I’m an idiot and I am an idiot and…’
  • The metric to measure today’s symptoms would be time – or ‘attention’, as it is called in the industry. While for the archaic melancholic the past never passes, techno-sadness is caught in the perpetual now. Forward focused, we bet on acceleration and never mourn a lost object. The primary identification is there, in our hand. Everything is evident, on the screen, right in your face. Contrasted with the rich historical sources on melancholia, our present condition becomes immediately apparent. Whereas melancholy in the past was defined by separation from others, reduced contacts and reflection on oneself, today’s tristesse plays itself out amidst busy social (media) interactions. In Sherry Turkle’s phrase, we are alone together, as part of the crowd – a form of loneliness that is particularly cruel, frantic and tiring.
  • What we see today are systems that constantly disrupt the timeless aspect of melancholy.31 There’s no time for contemplation, or Weltschmerz. Social reality does not allow us to retreat.32 Even in our deepest state of solitude we’re surrounded by (online) others that babble on and on, demanding our attention
  • distraction does not pull us away, but instead draws us back into the social
  • The purpose of sadness by design is, as Paul B. Preciado calls it, ‘the production of frustrating satisfaction’.39 Should we have an opinion about internet-induced sadness? How can we address this topic without looking down on the online billions, without resorting to fast-food comparisons or patronizingly viewing people as fragile beings that need to be liberated and taken care of.
  • We overcome sadness not through happiness, but rather, as media theorist Andrew Culp has insisted, through a hatred of this world. Sadness occurs in situations where stagnant ‘becoming’ has turned into a blatant lie. We suffer, and there’s no form of absurdism that can offer an escape. Public access to a 21st-century version of dadaism has been blocked. The absence of surrealism hurts. What could our social fantasies look like? Are legal constructs such as creative commons and cooperatives all we can come up with? It seems we’re trapped in smoothness, skimming a surface littered with impressions and notifications. The collective imaginary is on hold. What’s worse, this banality itself is seamless, offering no indicators of its dangers and distortions. As a result, we’ve become subdued. Has the possibility of myth become technologically impossible?
  • We can neither return to mysticism nor to positivism. The naive act of communication is lost – and this is why we cry
Ed Webb

The stories of Ray Bradbury. - By Nathaniel Rich - Slate Magazine - 0 views

  • Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, now required reading for every American middle-schooler, Bradbury is generally thought of as a writer of novels, but his talents—particularly his mastery of the diabolical premise and the brain-exploding revelation—are best suited to the short form.
  • The best stories have a strange familiarity about them. They're like long-forgotten acquaintances—you know you've met them somewhere before. There is, for instance, the tale of the time traveler who goes back into time and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing irrevocably the course of history ("A Sound of Thunder"). There's the one about the man who buys a robotic husband to live with his wife so that he can be free to travel and pursue adventure—that's "Marionettes, Inc." (Not to be confused with "I Sing the Body Electric!" about the man who buys a robotic grandmother to comfort his children after his wife dies.) Or "The Playground," about the father who changes places with his son so that he can spare his boy the cruelty of childhood—forgetting exactly how cruel childhood can be. The stories are familiar because they've been adapted, and plundered from, by countless other writers—in books, television shows, and films. To the extent that there is a mythology of our age, Bradbury is one of its creators.
  • "But Bradbury's skill is in evoking exactly how soul-annihilating that world is."    Of course, this also displays one of the key facts of Bradbury's work -- and a trend in science fiction that is often ignored. He's a reactionary of the first order, deeply distrustful of technology and even the notion of progress. Many science fiction writers had begun to rewrite the rules of women in space by the time Bradbury had women in long skirts hauling pots and pans over the Martian landscape. And even he wouldn't disagree. In his famous Playboy interview he responded to a question about predicting the future with, "It's 'prevent the future', that's the way I put it. Not predict it, prevent it."
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  • And for the record, I've never understood why a writer who recognizes technology is labeled a "sci-fi writer", as if being a "sci-fi writer" were equal to being some sort of substandard, second-rate hack. The great Kurt Vonnegut managed to get stuck in that drawer after he recognized technolgy in his 1st novel "Player Piano". No matter that he turned out to be (imo) one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, perio
  • it's chilling how prescient he was about modern media culture in Fahrenheit 451. It's not a Luddite screed against TV. It's a speculative piece on what happens when we become divorced from the past and more attuned to images on the screen than we are to each other.
  • ite author of mine since I was in elementary school way back when mammoths roamed the earth. To me, he was an ardent enthusiast of technology, but also recognized its potential for seperating us from one another while at the same time seemingly making us more "connected" in a superficial and transitory way
  • Bradbury is undeniably skeptical of technology and the risks it brings, particularly the risk that what we'd now call "virtualization" will replace actual emotional, intellectual or physical experience. On the other hand, however, I don't think there's anybody who rhapsodizes about the imaginative possibilities of rocketships and robots the way Bradbury does, and he's built entire setpieces around the idea of technological wonders creating new experiences.    I'm not saying he doesn't have a Luddite streak, more that he has feet in both camps and is harder to pin down than a single label allows. And I'll also add that in his public pronouncements of late, the Luddite streak has come out more strongly--but I tend to put much of that down to the curmudgeonliness of a ninety-year-old man.
  • I don't think he is a luddite so much as he is the little voice that whispers "be careful what you wish for." We have been sold the beautiful myth that technology will buy us free time, but we are busier than ever. TV was supposed to enlighten the masses, instead we have "reality TV" and a news network that does not let facts get in the way of its ideological agenda. We romanticize childhood, ignoring children's aggressive impulses, then feed them on a steady diet of violent video games.  
Ed Webb

AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific Ame... - 0 views

  • Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.
  • Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.
  • Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”
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  • Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.
  • output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem
  • Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.
  • the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few
  • the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place
  • the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.
  • employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.
  • too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity
  • We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.
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