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Ed Webb

The Social Split Between TV and Movie Dystopias - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen.The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class conflict.Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining; survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,” “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges from the ruins of civilization.
  • Movies project a morose, scary future where man is his own worst enemy, whereas television can’t entirely suppress a smile.There is something positive about the end of the world on shows like “The Walking Dead,” and “Z Nation” on Syfy and “The Last Ship,” on TNT. True, civilization as we know it is gone, but so is social stratification. Survivors don’t group into castes according to birth, race, income or religion. People of all kinds bond with whomever seems friendly, or at least unthreatening.
  • Dystopian movies based on young-adult novels understandably focus on the oppression of young adults, but in “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games,” a despotic elite divides the little people into cliques, only there is no prom in sight.Engels wrote about “contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” He meant in the movies. On TV, all men are equal and equally at peril in the apocalypse.
Ed Webb

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977) | Open Culture - 0 views

  • Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today.
  • Ballard made several disturbingly accurate predictions in interviews he gave over the decades (collected in a book titled Extreme Metaphors)
  • he gave an interview to I-D magazine in which he predicted the internet as “invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information.” This may not seem especially prescient (see, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” for a chilling futuristic scenario much further ahead of its time). But Ballard went on to describe in detail the rise of the Youtube celebrity: Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We'll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
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  • ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.” Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
  • this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc.
  • Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian---“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”
  • “Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the "real" coming many decades ago. As he told I-D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”
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

The future of stupid fears | Bryan Alexander - 0 views

  • Culture of Fear argues that media and political fear-mongering teaches consumers and voters to see problems in terms of stories about heroic individuals, rather than about social or political factors.  The contexts get set aside, replaced with more relatable tales of villainous criminals and virtuous victims, which Glassner calls “neurologizing social problems” (217). There is also a curious, quietly conservative politics of the family involved.  Such fears emphasize stranger danger, which is actually statistically very rare.  Instead, they minimize the far more likely source of harm most American face: our family members (31).
  • fake fears reveal cultural anxieties, much as horror stories do
  • “news is what happens to your editors.”  By that he means “editors – and their bosses… [and] their families, friends, and business associates”(201)
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  • Our politics clearly adore fear, notably from the Trump administration and its emphasis on immigrant-driven carnage.  Our news media continue to worship at the altar of “if it bleeds, it leads.”
  • that CNN is the opposite of a fringe news service.  Between Fox and MSNBC it occupies a neutral, middle ground.  It is, putatively, the sober center.  And it simply adores scaring the hell out of us
  • What does the likelihood of even more stupid fear-mongering mean for education?  It simply means, as I said years ago, we have to teach people to resist this stuff.  In our quest to teach digital literacy we should encourage students – of all ages – to avoid tv news, or to sample it judiciously, with great skepticism.  We should assist them in recognizing when politicians fire up fear campaigns based on poor facts.
  • politicians peddle terror because it often works
  • the negative impacts of such fear – the misdirection of resources, the creation of bad policy, the encouragement of mean world syndrome, the furtherance of racism – the promulgation of real damage
Ed Webb

Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2021 - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - 0 views

  • The capture of the regulatory state by capitalism is why companies spy on you: spying only makes money if all costs (breaches, loss of agency, etc) can be externalized onto society, and if companies can manufacture consent by cramming an "I agree" button down your throat. In other words, they spy on you because they can get away with it, because the state permits them. We don't have a federal privacy law with a private right of action, we don't have statutory limits on terms of service. Even where you do have some rights, we let companies take them away with "binding arbitration" waivers that confiscate your right to sue them and join class actions
  • Vizio is a surveillance company that incidentally manufactures TVs. A Vizio TV nonconsensually spies on you and shows you ads, and it does so despite the fact that you're paying for it. Vizio's latest financials show that the company makes more money from spying on you than it does from selling TVs.
  • our justice system treats corporate crime as a feature, not a bug, and allows firms to use the proceeds from their misbehavior to buy their way out of accountability.
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  • There's nothing inevitable about an ad market that requires surveillance. Contextual advertising – advertising based on the content of articles, rather than data on the readers – is far more profitable for publishers than behavioral ads.
Ed Webb

New research indicates that robots may already be self aware and plotting our demise / ... - 0 views

  • The printing press, the assembly line, and recently the genetic engineering have all brought along with them protest and outrage from a populace sure that these advances will bring about the end of the human species.
  • “These robots are able to hide and evade in ways that other robots simply have not been able to do. That indicates that such behaviour is not overly complicated and well within the reach of modern robots.”
  • Dr. Edward Webb
    • Ed Webb
       
      Not I, I assure you
Ed Webb

What killed Caprica? - 0 views

  • Caprica may have gone too far, tried to cover too much. It broke one of the cardinal rules of mainstream science fiction, which is that if you have a strange alternate universe you'd better populate it with recognizable, ordinary characters. But I like the kind of thought-experiment audaciousness that says, Hell yes we are going to give you complicated characters who defy stereotypes, and put them in a world whose rules you'll have to think hard to understand. It's too late to bring Caprica back. But I hope that this show is the first part of a new wave of science fiction on TV. Like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, and Fringe, Caprica tackles singularity-level technology as a political and economic phenomenon - not as an escapist fantasy. And that's why it was a show worth watching, even when it stumbled.
Ed Webb

We Are Drowning in a Devolved World: An Open Letter from Devo - Noisey - 0 views

  • When Devo formed more than 40 years ago, we never dreamed that two decades into the 21st century, everything we had theorized would not only be proven, but also become worse than we had imagined
  • May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn't mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come.
  • a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie
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  • There were no flying cars and domed cities, as promised in Popular Science; rather, there was a dumbing down of the population engineered by right-wing politicians, televangelists, and Madison Avenue. I called what we saw “De-evolution,” based upon the tendency toward entropy across all human endeavors. Borrowing the tactics of the Mad Men-era of our childhood, we shortened the name of the idea to the marketing-friendly “Devo.”
  • we witnessed an America where the capacity for critical thought and reasoning were eroding fast. People mindlessly repeating slogans from political propaganda and ad campaigns: “America, Love It or leave It”; “Don’t Ask Why, Drink Bud Dry”; “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”; even risk-free, feel-good slogans like “Give Peace a Chance.” Here was an emerging Corporate Feudal State
  • it seemed like the only real threat to consumer society at our disposal was meaning: turning sloganeering on its head for sarcastic or subversive means, and making people notice that they were being moved and manipulated by marketing, not by well-meaning friends disguised as mom-and-pop. And so creative subversion seemed the only viable course of action
  • Presently, the fabric that holds a society together has shredded in the wind. Everyone has their own facts, their own private Idaho stored in their expensive cellular phones
  • Social media provides the highway straight back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The restless natives react to digital shadows on the wall, reduced to fear, hate, and superstition
  • The rise of authoritarian leadership around the globe, fed by ill-informed populism, is well-documented at this point. And with it, we see the ugly specter of increased racism and anti-Semitism. It’s open season on those who gladly vote against their own self-interests. The exponential increase in suffering for more and more of the population is heartbreaking to see. “Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want,” those Devo clowns said in 1980.
  • the hour is getting late. Perhaps the reason Devo was even nominated after 15 years of eligibility is because Western society seems locked in a death wish. Devo doesn’t skew so outside the box anymore. Maybe people are a bit nostalgic for our DIY originality and substance. We were the canaries in the coalmine warning our fans and foes of things to come in the guise of the Court Jester, examples of conformity in extremis in order to warn against conformity
  • Devo is merely the house band on the Titanic
Ed Webb

CNN produces Gothic horror, and this is a problem | Bryan Alexander - 0 views

  • Remember that for *decades* American violent crime has gone steadily down, but most Americans have been convinced we lived under a nightmarish crime siege. CNN plays a key role in that, as I and others have shown. CNN has continuously celebrated violent crime stories far, far out of proportion to their reality.
  • As an information source, CNN helped skew Americans’ sense of reality in terms of violent crime. As things got better, they took exquisite care to make sure we thought they were the opposite. Why does this matter?
  • remember that Trump won in 2016 in part by arguing that America was under siege from violent crime. Who do you think convinced about 1/4th of American voters of this idea?  Social media played some role, which is in the public eye now, but tv’s huge role is underappreciated
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  • A key driver for gun ownership is self defense. CNN teaches viewers that they live in a dangerous hellscape, with terror about to attack at any moment.  Put another way, CNN is the NRA’s best secret friend
  • I think if CNN is truly possessed of world class storytellers, they could turn heart disease into a gripping narrative.  (Might I recommend a certain book on the subject?)  They could also choose not to flog a relative handful of crime stories into a national terror wave.  Instead they very carefully selected the violent crime horror route.
  • This is Gothic puffery, a deliberate act of fearmongering, with consequences. And we’re not holding CNN and its ilk accountable.  It’s time we should.
Ed Webb

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies - Mark Dery - Doom Patrol:... - 1 views

  • Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies
  • Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.
  • The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.
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  • Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.
  • the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media
  • Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.
  • His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.
  • there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil
  • he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building
  • By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook
  • Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)
  • there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade
  • The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.
  • the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society
  • SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”
  • risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”
  •  
    Brilliant
Ed Webb

How the Google/Verizon proposal could kill the internet in 5 years - 0 views

  • Okay, hackers, it's time to use your powers for good.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Here's the cyberpunk response
  • The "public internet" is for the poor Pledging to keep the "public internet" neutral is great, but what happens when companies stop wanting to offer their services on it? Googlezon has the answer: In their proposal, they say that it's perfectly OK for companies and consumers to buy non-neutral, non-public "special services" online. If you're a media company that streams videogames, for example, your customers want a guarantee that the game won't stall out because of a crappy "public internet" connection. So you make your game available only to people with the special service "gamer package." Your customers pay you; you pay Googlezon; now there's a superfast connection for the privileged few with money to burn. And what happens when news websites start delivering their pretty pictures and infographics in 3D? Verizon has already suggested 3D is a perfect "special service" to deliver in a non-neutral way. In five years, the public internet is going to look boring and obsolete. Where's the 3D? Where are all the cool games and streaming viddies? The public internet? Yeah, that's just for poor people. But guess what's going to remain on the public net, the place where you go when you don't have money? Certainly there will be educational resources like Wikipedia. But mostly it's going to be advertisement-saturated free content from major entertainment companies. And of course there will be many opportunities to give your personal information to Facebook, or gamble away your non-existent savings on Zynga games. (Sorry - did I say gamble? I meant "pay for premium poker game content.") Put in brick-and-mortar terms: There won't be any produce markets on the public internet, but there will be plenty of liquor stores.
  • Googlezon will be a gatekeeper not just for new web services but also for content. The companies can choose to support services from any small business they like, and block others. Same goes for sites providing news or entertainment. Googlezon might make an agreement with the New York Times to load its pages faster than the Washington Post. And Googlezon might not load io9 at all, unless of course you're reading this blog via the Google Reader (as part of the "special service" package called "blogs and podcasts")
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  • the special "conservative service" package
  • if you access the internet via your Android phone (or other mobile device), there will be no public internet at all. Your access to the web will be determined by your carrier
  • A burning vision of the internet in 2016 The public internet is basically overrun with 4Chan-like social networks that run very slowly and are drenched in advertising and spyware. You can watch some TV on the public internet, if you're willing to wait through long "buffering" times and bad commercials. You can play casual games, especially if you want to fork over a few bucks. There's webmail, though sometimes all your saved messages disappear - for "guaranteed backups" you need to subscribe to the special mail service via Googlezon. Plus, the only way to get to the public internet is with an unwieldy laptop, which sucks. Most people go online with their mobiles. Anybody who wants to get access to games, movies, news, or other services online has to buy separate "special service" packages to make sure they run fast. Premium services guarantee you can watch movies on your Droid, or do your mail and calendaring on your Nexus SE234. An informal market in special service minutes springs up anywhere that people are too poor to get a mobile that does more than make phone calls. Ironically, the public internet is the least public place online: It's an antisocial space, a crumbling, unsupported legacy network, full of ads and graffiti. Googlezon has succeeded in creating a caste system in the online world, and the public is the lowest caste of all.
Ed Webb

Chez Pazienza: The Death of Privacy and the Death of Tyler Clementi - 0 views

  • digital age technology, which now allows for the psychological torment that used to be confined only to school to be relentless and omnipresent
  • They felt like they could do it because everybody does it. A good portion of our media culture is now based on prurient voyeurism and a constant invasion of privacy. The public disclosure of a person's most intimate secrets and moments is no longer considered shameful or condemnable -- it's just called entertainment. Why wouldn't a couple of college kids turn their classmate into an unwitting reality TV star? It's basically the same toxic horseshit they grew up watching on MTV, VH1 and E! For all they knew, maybe Tyler Clementi would've loved the mainline of notoriety. If the dipshits on Jersey Shore don't have a problem mining their most repugnant traits in the name of 15 minutes of fame -- if anyone can go to YouTube and post video of a guy complaining about how there are rapists in his neighborhood and suddenly turn that guy into a viral sensation and his complaints into a catch phrase -- why the hell can't two Rutgers freshmen live-stream a roommate in bed with a man? This is the age of the unauthorized sex tape. This is Bentham's Panopticon come to fruition on a global scale. You're always being watched. You're always on camera. You have no expectation of privacy. Clementi should have known that, right?!
  • anyone he personally feels deserves it and he and his website are at the forefront of America's culture of shameless voyeurism and a constant, irrepressible invasion of privacy. It's because someone like Perez Hilton has spent the past few years making himself rich by indiscriminately circulating images of Miley Cyrus's crotch to the world that the two teenagers who tortured Tyler Clementi likely didn't think that what they were doing was a big deal.
Ed Webb

Anti-piracy tool will harvest and market your emotions - Computerworld Blogs - 0 views

  • After being awarded a grant, Aralia Systems teamed up with Machine Vision Lab in what seems like a massive invasion of your privacy beyond "in the name of security." Building on existing cinema anti-piracy technology, these companies plan to add the ability to harvest your emotions. This is the part where it seems that filmgoers should be eligible to charge movie theater owners. At the very least, shouldn't it result in a significantly discounted movie ticket?  Machine Vision Lab's Dr Abdul Farooq told PhysOrg, "We plan to build on the capabilities of current technology used in cinemas to detect criminals making pirate copies of films with video cameras. We want to devise instruments that will be capable of collecting data that can be used by cinemas to monitor audience reactions to films and adverts and also to gather data about attention and audience movement. ... It is envisaged that once the technology has been fine tuned it could be used by market researchers in all kinds of settings, including monitoring reactions to shop window displays."  
  • The 3D camera data will "capture the audience as a whole as a texture."
  • the technology will enable companies to cash in on your emotions and sell that personal information as marketing data
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  • "Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy.” 
  • hey plan to fine-tune it to monitor our reactions to window displays and probably anywhere else the data can be used for surveillance and marketing.
  • Muslim women have got the right idea. Soon well all be wearing privacy tents.
  • In George Orwell's novel 1984, each home has a mandatory "telescreen," a large flat panel, something like a TV, but with the ability for the authorities to observer viewers in order to ensure they are watching all the required propaganda broadcasts and reacting with appropriate emotions. Problem viewers would be brought to the attention of the Thought Police. The telescreen, of course, could not be turned off. It is reassuring to know that our technology has finally caught up with Oceania's.
Ed Webb

Sinclair tells stations to air media-bashing promos - and the criticism goes viral - Ap... - 0 views

  • they're seeing these people they've trusted for decades tell them things they know are essentially propaganda
Ed Webb

On coming out as transgender in Donald Trump's America - Vox - 0 views

  • I used to think I wanted to see June and the other women on the show persevere in the face of suffering, because on some level, I believed that to embrace my own womanhood was to embrace suffering. Now I realize that I do want to see Gilead burn. I don’t want suffering anymore. I want catharsis. And not just for me.
  • As soon as I came out, an entire lifetime of unrealistic expectations for women’s beauty came crashing down on my head
  • What I believed for too long, and what you might believe too, is that your body is not a gift but an obligation. That it is not who you are but a series of tasks assigned to you by the accident of your birth. This is not true. The best obligations — the only real obligations — are chosen. Your life is your life. It is worth fighting for.
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  • I recognize this scene from a lifetime spent among men who are angry and women who know precisely how to handle that anger. The men get to feel things, sometimes clumsily, sometimes eloquently. But the women are so often defined not by who they are but by what they have been asked to handle
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