Group items tagged

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.

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.

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."

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Okay, hackers, it's time to use your powers for good.

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")

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.

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

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

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.