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adamcrowe + criticism   149

Mssv -- The Pursuit of Perfection
'While I can set myself some tasks in Chore Wars to scrub the garden table and mop the floors, no amount of repetitions will get rid of the nasty stain on the table or the bits of dirt ingrained into the floor – unlike in game worlds, where perfection can always be realised given enough effort. It’s hard to see how the conventions of games – conventions designed to be fun and relatively easy to code – can cover all these contingencies without becoming as complicated and subtle and unpredictable as, well, life itself. Gamification holds out the promise ... that if you play the right games with enough enthusiasm and persistence, then you can have a perfect life and make a perfect world – at least, according to the game, if not necessarily in reality. We all need to be careful about games that promise to change our lives. Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined game is not worth playing.'
criticism  thegamingofeverydaylife  ludotopianism  simulation  simulacra  themapisnottheterritory  from delicious
april 2011 by adamcrowe
Slate Magazine -- Gamification: Ditching reality for a game isn't as fun as it sounds by Heather Chaplin
'...gamification advocates do not preach the beauty and power of play. Perhaps without knowing it, they're selling a pernicious worldview that doesn't give weight to literal truth. Instead, they are trafficking in fantasies that ignore the realities of day-to-day life. This isn't fun and games—it's a tactic most commonly employed by repressive, authoritarian regimes. ...there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor. You want to transform peoples' lives into games so they feel as if they're doing something worthwhile? Why not just shoot them up with drugs so they don't notice how miserable they are? There's no wonder corporations are so excited about turning the world into a game. One of the movement's central insights is that a sense of accomplishment sometimes feels more meaningful than a paycheck...'
ludotopianism  socialengineering  technocracy  soma  thegamingofeverydaylife  criticism  from delicious
march 2011 by adamcrowe
The Last Psychiatrist -- The Decline Effect Is Stupid
'The true explanation for the Decline Effect is one no one cites because the place you would cite it is the cause itself. I am not exaggerating when I say that the cause of the Decline Effect is The New Yorker. A wide range of fields from the almost entirely made-up to the slightly less made-up are losing their "truth?" Jonah Lehrer is the Decline Effect. ...he ultimately grades science the science he's not knowledgeable about based on value judgments. Which is fine, it's his life, though I wonder: if he goes psychotic, will he actually want me to give him Haldol over Abilify? The trouble for the Earth is... he writes for The New Yorker. And Wired. Which means that his value judgments carry more weight than the science itself. If they didn't, I, and those who are real scientists, wouldn't have to explain why the Decline Effect doesn't exist, I wouldn't have to waste time rebutting his article. But I do. That's the problem.'
science  criticism  pseudoscience  subjectivism  populism  themapisnottheterritory  from delicious
february 2011 by adamcrowe
Meme Hacking -- Douglas Rushkoff: Branding Doesn't Work! So Now What? PivotCon 2010 (Video)
"The human organism is attempting to evolve to the next level of awareness. And brands have no place in that conversation—I'm not saying products don't, services don't—brands don't." -- "Now you're dealing with a multi-dimensional, non-fiction conversation between people who are conversing expressly for the purpose of connecting on higher levels of organization." -- "The real problem [with the idea of 'real' social media conversations] is that there's frightfully very little real going on." -- "The reason they want to have the brand conversation is because that's all they are: brand" -- "Social media exists to help people create and exchange value directly with one another." -- "If the company doesn't have the most qualified, the most enthusiastic, people doing the thing that that company does, then nobody is going to care what that company or anyone in it is saying. And if [companies] do ... all you have to do is let them speak and the marketing part will take care of itself."
criticism  branding  marketing  socialmedia  productnarratives  authenticity  peoplearethekillerapp  DouglasRushkoff  from delicious
february 2011 by adamcrowe
Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia -- animadversion
'1. Strong criticism. 2. A critical or censorious remark.'
words  criticism  discourse 
january 2011 by adamcrowe
The Atlantic -- The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks
'One problem is that information in oceanic magnitudes can confuse and confound as easily as it can clarify and empower, even when the information is correct. A sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. [Exceptionalism?] Vigilantism has always eroded trust and civility, but what's new online is the sterile imprimatur of a digital ideology that claims to offer automatic betterment. Vigilante information violation is a form of assault that degrades society for everyone. [Define "society"] Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. [Evidence?] The only way out is structure, also known as democracy. [Slavery?] We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.' -- LOL!
internet  leaky  flood  wikileaks  vigilantism  criticism  technoutopianism  "anarchy"  falsedichotomy  JaronLanier  2+2=5  from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe
Cult of Mac -- Computers In Schools Are A Failure, Says Computer Pioneer Alan Kay [Apple in Education]
'“When I look at computers in schools, this is what I see. It’s all Guitar Hero.” ... it is not a necessary thing that people will eventually come to use the computer as a real intellectual amplifier and world changer. This is because the level of distraction is much great (including a torrent of non-important but glittery stuff that can be made on computers). Americans were not able to get any perspective on television that would allow them to resist it, and this seems similar for consumer computer technology. One of many things about media design (where x ranges from from art, theater, writing, teaching, to interactive computer interfaces) that most people don’t understand, is that the main purpose of “great x” is to act as a kind of “magic mirror” which reflects the beholders own intelligence back out at them so they both “remember things they have forgotten”, and that one of these things is that they can learn how to think and learn.'
media  themediumisthemassage  computing  education  simulation  opacity  criticism  learning  wisdom  from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe
The Daily Bell -- Is the Internet Anti-War?
'A young person (boys mostly) playing these games regularly is going to have a hard (or harder) time in our view generating an internal critique of his country's use of violence. The individual may be entirely peaceable, but the part of his mind that might be receptive to alternative perspectives regarding the state's larger use of formalized violence has been "controlled" by his avid use of war gaming. -- It is an intensive culture, with its own lingo, superstars and strategies; it is a full culture built indisputably around daily electronic mayhem. It may not encourage violent thinking, but it certainly suggests that violence can provide solutions. -- The only solution to such mind control is a wider frame of reference, such as that which the Internet can provide. Since these young people are often playing these games online, one would hope that they might gradually acquire a wider frame of reference via the many alternative points of view that the Internet offers them...'
forcedmemes  violence  statism  patriotism  war  militaryentertainmentcomplex  gaming  culture  criticism  from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe
NYTimes.com -- The First Church of Robotics by Jaron Lanier
'...algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations. ...while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility. But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent A.I.’s, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings.'
criticism  technology  temes  artificialintelligence  bots  algorithms  elitism  vanguardism  fundamentalism  singularity  JaronLanier  from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe
The Center of the Universe -- What is Money? (From The Banking Law Journal, May 1913. By A. Mitchell Innes.)
Challenging the accepted history/theory that fixed weights were the standard of value for money metals and arguing instead coins were simply credit money tokens. -- 'The value of a credit depends not on the existence of any gold or silver or other property behind it, but solely on the “solvency” of the debtor, and that depends solely on whether, when the debt becomes due, he in his turn has sufficient credits on others to set off against his debts. If the debtor neither possesses nor can acquire credits which can be offset against his debts, then the possession of those debts is of no value to the creditors who own them. It is by selling, I repeat, and by selling alone—whether it be by the sale of property or the sale of the use of our talents or of our land—that we acquire the credits by which we liberate ourselves from debt, and it is by his selling power that a prudent banker estimates his client’s value as a debtor.' -- Also mention of tally sticks, aes rude and tablets.
*  criticism  history  economics  money  numismatics  trust  credit  debt  commerce  law  tallysticks  from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe
The Daily Bell -- Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America by Nelson Hultberg
(A God-fearing screed, yet still very useful.) -- 'Under Critical Theory/User Friendly Marxism, every tradition of Western life was to be redefined as ... "victims" or "oppressors." The stream of criticism was relentless and extremely sophisticated in an intellectual sense. Thus it mesmerized the pundit class who then disseminated the criticisms' fundamental content to the populace at large.' These intellectuals now control and administer our schools, media, courts, and legislatures. The cultural Marxists adopted Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values," in which the Mad Hatter's world is instituted: Everything that previously was an evil now becomes a virtue while all the old virtues become evils. Individualism, self-reliance, property, profit, family, marriage, fidelity to spouse, strength of will, personal honor, rising through merit -- all these integral pillars of our civilization become distinctive evils that oppress us as humans. They must be rooted out of our existence.'
metanarratives  criticism  marxism  criticaltheory  relativism  subjectivism  intellectualism  vanguardism  subversion  forcedmemes  griefing  demoralization  politicalcorrectness  mindcontrol  from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe
TED.com -- Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships
'TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.'
criticism  technoutopianism  internet  surveillance  psyops  snitching  1984 
july 2010 by adamcrowe
No Need To Know -- Spectacular Times
'Larry Law compiled and edited a series of small 'pocketbooks' in the late 1970s/early 1980s entitled 'Spectacular Times'. They serve as a brief introduction to the ideas of Situationism.' -- 2+2=4.5
criticism  spectacle  situationalism  marxism  agitprop  anarchosyndicalism  from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe
Freedomain Radio -- #270: Perfection is the Enemy of Virtue (MP3)
"The problem is that people believe the wrong things. We claim to be moralists but our enemies understand the principle of universality and ethical theories so much better than we do... The enemies of freedom and rationality know that human beings are run by ethics – that's why they take them when they're children and put them in state schools and churches. They take those children and they mold them into slaves based on 'ethical' commandments that they cannot escape. And we who believe in ethics, don't believe that humans are ethical?? Isn't that astounding! We believe in ethics and we doubt the desires of people to be ethical?? Statists and collectivists claim *not* to believe in ethics but control the entire planet by accepting that human beings want to be good – and corrupting that desire to be good which is innate to our natures."
*  2+2=5  predation  slavery  statism  evil  ethics  morality  philosophy  doublethink  analysisparalysis  perfectionism  criticism  2+2=4  freedom  StefanMolyneux  from delicious
july 2010 by adamcrowe
Telegraph Blogs: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard -- Time to shut down the US Federal Reserve?
'The 20th Century was a horrible litany of absurd experiments and atrocities committed by intellectuals, or by elite groupings that claimed a higher knowledge. Simple folk usually have enough common sense to avoid the worst errors. Sometimes they need to take very stern action to stop intellectuals leading us to ruin. Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data. It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance...'
criticism  intellectualism  economics  humanaction  commonsense  from delicious
june 2010 by adamcrowe
Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? by Robert Nozick
'The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. The wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well. It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.'
criticism  psychology  sociology  education  vanity  intellectualism  elitism  statism  socialism  entitlement  illiberalism  projection  "capitalism"  from delicious
june 2010 by adamcrowe
Freedomain Radio -- How (Not) to Achieve Freedom (PDF)
'If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear and rage within ourselves. The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself. When a man hears that taxation is force, his unconscious hears all of the implications contained in that statement immediately, at light speed, and leaps into action to protect him from being tortured and killed. The hostility that he feels will arise in him as if out of nowhere. You have also provoked a feeling of humiliation in him, by creating fear and anxiety within him that he has to avoid.'
criticism  statism  intellectualism  elitism  vanity  entitlement  libertarianism  doublethink  goodthink  consensusreality  conformity  hypocrisy  delusion  projection  psychology  philosophy  freedom  StefanMolyneux  pdf  from delicious
june 2010 by adamcrowe
Critical Distance -- Jesse Schell, ‘Design outside the Box’
'In his Gamasutra article ‘Persuasive Games: Shell Games‘, Ian Bogost dives into the moral aspects of the world that Schell presents. He cautions against the use of external motivators even for good ends. Bogost says, “I’ll put it more strongly: when people act because incentives compel them toward particular choices, they cannot be said to be making choices at all.” Bogost concludes with the following warning: "Instead of revealing the processes that define values, schell games tend to hide them away, compacted into the ideologies of corporations and governments. In that regard, if Jesse Schell is right and such games are on the horizon, we ought to bear in mind a warning. When we ask the question what is worth doing through games, we’d better hope the operator is not a shill."'
criticism  gaming  thegamingofeverydaylife  achievements  motivation  incentives  opacity  ludocapitalism  casinogulag  grifting 
april 2010 by adamcrowe
zero hedge -- Insights Into America's Disneyland And Our "Neo-Feudalistic, Gulag Casino Economy"
'In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?' — Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984
criticism  economics  statism  corporatism  mercantilism  oligarchy  oligarchicalcollectivism  casinogulag  1984  2+2=5 
april 2010 by adamcrowe
Guardian -- Who watches WikiLeaks?
'WikiLeaks has also infuriated the author, Michela Wrong, who was horrified to discover her book exposing the depths of official corruption in Kenya, It's Our Turn To Eat, was pirated and posted on WikiLeaks in its entirety on the grounds that Nairobi booksellers were reluctant to sell it for fear of being sued under Kenya's draconian libel laws. "He was enormously pompous, saying that in the interests of raising public awareness of the issues involved I had a duty to allow it to be pirated. He said: 'This book may have been your baby, but it is now Kenya's son.' That really stuck in my mind because it was so arrogant," she says. "On the whole I approve of WikiLeaks but these guys are infuriatingly self-righteous." WikiLeaks does apparently expect others to respect its claims to ownership. It has placed a copyright symbol at the beginning of its film about the Iraq shootings.'
criticism  wikileaks  leaky 
april 2010 by adamcrowe
Umair Haque -- Unvarnished and the Economics of Antisocial Media
'Unvarnished is a social Ponzi scheme - borrowing reputation from another, to amp up one's own (until one's own gets trashed). Those economics are so 20th century, it hurts. Unvarnished is the endgame of the "social web". I'm going to mark it as the day the "social web" became antisocial. Increasingly, today's "social web" doesn't empower people. It empowers hate, exclusion, and polarization, to put it bluntly. That's as lame and brain-dead as what went on on Wall St a few years back: hurting others to extract value from them. Except, of course, Wall St actually made billions. Social media's as bankrupt financially as it is ethically and economically: a trifecta of lameness.'
criticism  socialmedia  surveillance  anonequiveillance  narcissism  attention  snark  griefing  rating  socialcapital  whuffie  ponzi  internet  immunesystem  autoimmunity  equiveillance 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
MetaFilter -- Int +1: RE: Jane McGonigal asks if gaming can help create a better world.
Comment: localroger: "The reason gamers don't exhibit all the unpleasant reactions to games that they do to the real world is that if they want to, they can leave the game. That is itself one of the most important psychological mechanisms in gaming; no matter how much you enjoy the work you do for your job the fact that you are forced to do it makes it unpleasant. ...when you can't stop playing it even if you want to it stops being a game." -- Comment: vacapinta: "All this is to say is that, the positive forces of gaming are an example of how people can thrive in an orderly and idealized environment which consistently and predictably rewards them for their efforts. Such environments rarely exist in the real world." Comment: Rory Marinich: "In a way McGonigal is trying to create religion. Religion helps individuals, but I'd argue it helps them by oversimplifying certain aspects of life, and in the process devaluing certain other things."
criticism  thegamingofeverydaylife  gaming  nudge  coercion  JaneMcGonigal 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
Umair Haque -- The Social Media Bubble
'Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. The "relationships" at the heart of the social bubble aren't real because they're not marked by mutual investment. At most, they're marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there. #Trust. If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? ...social isn't about beauty contests and popularity contests. They're a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It's about trust, connection, and community.' -- Attention economy is a ponzi?
criticism  internet  web  socialmedia  socialnetworking  attention  sharecropping  UmairHaque 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
Global Guerrillas -- ONLINE GAMES, SUPEREMPOWERMENT, AND A BETTER WORLD
'...the really big idea isn't figuring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes (as in the dirty word: crowdsourcing -- people doing work for you for FREE -- blech!). Instead, it's about finding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD. This isn't tech utopian. It's reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, it's a game that being run for the benefit of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we don't have any choice. Let's invent something better and compete with it. Let's provide people with a choice.'
thegamingofeverydaylife  criticism  ludotopianism  ludocapitalism  darknets  anarchism  voluntaryism  rewards  incentives  economics  retribalization 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
Christy's Corner of the Universe -- Parody and Design
Righteous parody is righteous (Are we not yet sick of McGonigal's endless fixings of the world? Can has 'research' monies in return for *youth recruitment*, plox? Yes, Ms McGonigal, you rankle every possible suspicion when you're being funded by global government.) -- As many of you would be aware, the World Bank is behind a new online game called Evoke. A parody has been created. Invoke is described as an “ARG to save the World Bank”. The parody is a critique of the World Bank, capitalism, branded entertainment, ARGs, Jane McGonigal’s online games [and] the rhetoric of ‘games saving or changing the world’. This is something that Jane has been championing for years. The Invoke attack on branded entertainment is somewhat specific to the World Bank being behind this project.' -- The World Bank is not a 'brand', it's a non-voluntary, global government institution, specifically mandated with 'shock therapy' debt predation.
criticism  thegamingofeverydaylife  paternalism  ludotopianism  nudge  communityorganizing  socialengineering  alternativerealitygaming  parody  JaneMcGonigal 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
Mssv -- Can a Game Save the World?
'If we develop games that make people rely more and more on external recognition – on achievements and rewards and points – they will not be prepared for when things go badly. Every leader board has the worst player as well as a top player. The way to cope with reverses in life is by developing resilience against the caprices of the world; to determine and internally maintain a steady direction and sense of worth, and to remember past successes and recognition. Yet I fear that the games we are designing, focused on real-time things that other people have decided to measure and reward – will undermine rather than build that resilience. You can design a game that encourages resilience, although it wouldn’t work for everyone, and books and movies might work better for some people. But can you design a game that will save the world? No. The question is meaningless. It is people who save the world, each in their own way, through perspiration as well as inspiration. It is not always fun.'
criticism  thegamingofeverydaylife  gaming  makebelieve  reflexivity  motivation  ownlife  demotivation  rewards  incentives  achievements  nudge  persuasivegames  seriousgames  ludotopianism  peoplearethekillerapp 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
Freedom Daily -- Something Must Be Done!
'In other words, government spending should be increased to raise the demand for goods and services; interest rates should be lowered to stimulate investment activity; protection should be given to domestic producers to insulate them from the unscrupulous "poaching" of foreign producers; public-works projects should be used to guarantee a job at a "living wage" to all of those desiring to work. We live in an era that has seen the bankruptcy of socialism, the failure of the welfare state, the corrupting influences of governmental regulatory activity, the irresponsibility of government deficit-spending and the unprincipled political pandering to every conceivable special-interest group. And yet still the cry is heard: "Something must be done!"—by the government. As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we are at a dead end with collectivist and interventionist economic policy. Something must be done! But not by the government.'
criticism  government  statism  socialism  keynesianism 
march 2010 by adamcrowe
The Observer -- My bright idea: Jaron Lanier
Lanier: "Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. Initially people aren't sure what the pack is. Somebody tries to ridicule something else, and other people who want to play it safe join in so that they're not the target. Gradually, the pack forms. You can tell it's formed by two things: an internal enemy and an external enemy. The internal enemy is the low person on the totem pole who gets ridiculed. And then there's the external enemy, the "other"." -- Krotoski: "We see this in playgrounds, we see this pack mentality in other, non-web environments. -- Lanier: "That's because it comes from the people, not from the machine."
criticism  internet  web  cyberspsychology  socialsoftware  socialdesign  socialmedia  socialnetworking  groups  behaviours  smartmobs  dumbmobs  commonenemy  status  hierarchy  conformity  consensus  JaronLanier 
february 2010 by adamcrowe
Global Guerrillas -- JOURNAL: Driving Resilience By Building Networks (Comment)
On augmented reality etc. Comment: g48: '...when people become dependent upon things that are not necessary, they become leveraged, they become vulnerable, they become subject to manipulation. What they lose is an increment of resilience, an increment of self-reliance, and an increment of direct contact with others. -- The most resilient technologies are simple machines that can be maintained (and ideally, built) in community workshops with community labor. -- More digital media will not house us, feed us, keep our towns clean, or protect us against attack. It won't lessen the labor of digging a trench for water pipes, as the machine for that purpose is a simple one, hand shovels still work in a pinch. It won't make our food taste better or keep us warm. It won't deepen our capacity for friendship, love, and philosophical or spiritual insight. But it may very well distract us from all of those things, to the point where there is nothing left for us to do, except watch, and be watched.'
criticism  technology  temes  extensionsofman  numbing  augmentationistsvsimmersionists  hackersvsvectoralists  sustainability  resilience 
february 2010 by adamcrowe
YouTube -- Freedomain Radio: Fractional Banking, Private Currencies and Humble Freedom
Nobody knows.
criticism  statism  economics  humility  money  currency  markets  libertarianism  freedom  philosophy  StefanMolyneux 
january 2010 by adamcrowe
NYTimes.com -- Excerpt: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ (PDF)
'CHAPTER 2: An apocalypse of self-abdication: If you believe the Rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the Rapture in to being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring. But in either case, the rest of us would never know if you had been right. The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living.'
*  criticism  technology  temes  manifestdestiny  singularity  religion  cults  apocalypse  inevitablism  fatalism  antihumanism  reflexivity  death  irrationality 
january 2010 by adamcrowe
Amazon.com -- You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
'The original turn of phrase was "Information wants to be free." And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are given to people. If you express yourself on the internet, what you say will be copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme. However, the information, the abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, the new holy of holies. You never see it and are not allowed to touch it. This is exactly the wrong set of values. A weird cult in the world of technology has done damage to culture at large.'
criticism  information  sharecropping  hackersvsvectoralists  informationwantstobefreebutiseverywhereinchains  technology  temes  technoutopianism  singularity  posthumanism  uploading  JaronLanier 
january 2010 by adamcrowe
NYTimes.com -- Jaron Lanier’s ‘You Are Not a Gadget’
'“Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier observes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.” -- “pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise.” -- “online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media.” -- Online culture “is a culture of reaction without action” and rationalizations that “we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm” are just that — rationalizations. “The sad truth,” he concludes, “is that we were not passing through a momentary lull before a storm. We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.”'
criticism  web  culture  popculture  derivatives  meta  coprophagia  attention  ponzi  technoutopianism  hivemind  JaronLanier 
january 2010 by adamcrowe
Alex Payne -- Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity
'There is the perception, particularly in American culture, that criticism and negativity go hand-in-hand. We understand well the idea of being in favor or something, or against something, but we don’t particularly understand how criticism fits into this dichotomy. As someone with a penchant for criticism, I’ve often found myself misjudged as “being negative” when mere complaint is furthest from my intention. I’m here to explain myself and people like me.' -- '#Criticism Is Not Negativity: The reason a person is critical of a thing is because he is passionate about that thing. Passion breeds critical thinking. #Everyone Wants A Cheerleader: Critics are the most passionate people you can find, but we’re conditioned to assume that critics are negative curmudgeons with nothing more than slings and arrows to contribute. So rather than seeking out critics, employers seek out cheerleaders.'
criticism  passion  insecurity  immunesystem  happytalk  philosophy 
december 2009 by adamcrowe
YouTube -- Daniel Hannan: Climate change shouldn't be an excuse for global government
'...on attempts to turn the climate change debate into a reason for greater global governance, ever more distant from national democracies.' -- Packs a lot into this one.
criticism  bureaucracy  statism  globalgovernment  DanielHannan 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
I’ve Said Too Much -- Sneering is not argument
Obvious above it all is above it all.
criticism  snark  indignation 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
O'Reilly Radar -- Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age: Part Two
'#Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller -- '...the long tail has gangrene at its extremity - the niche. More disarming is the conclusion that it isn't just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls "monopoly populism"and the end of niche culture ... The network effects that so characterize Internet services are a positive feedback loop where the winners take all (or most). The issue isn't what they bring to the table, it is what they are leaving behind.' -- Success is measured by what's successful.
internet  web  behaviours  choice  longtail  populism  recommendation  socialproof  success  feedback  herd  mimesis  heteronomy  circumscription  #ubiquity  #specialization  criticism  technoutopianism 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
O'Reilly Radar -- Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age: Part One
Discuss -- #More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. -- Elizabeth Kolbert: "People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still." -- The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” -- Birds of a feather...
psychology  internet  web  socialmedia  consensus  consensusreality  groupthink  socialproof  bias  feedback  #socialization  #specialization  criticism  technoutopianism 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
TechCrunch -- NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth
Rubbernecking 2.0 -- 'Moore’s [tweeted] coverage was quickly picked up by bloggers and mainstream media outlets alike, something that she actively encouraged so she could tell them the truth, rather than the speculative bullshit that was hitting the wires. There was just one problem: Moore’s information was bullshit too. -- ... the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. Her behaviour had nothing to do with getting the word out; it wasn’t about preventing harm to others, but rather a simple case of – “look at me looking at this.” I’m sure she genuinely believed she was helping get the real truth out, and making an actual difference. And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something...' -- On Neda Agha Soltan's death: '...the last thing that terrified girl saw before she closed her eyes for the final time was some guy pointing a cameraphone at her. “Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.”'
criticism  socialmedia  twitter  behaviours  journalism  voyeurism  attention  narcissism  surveillance  sousveillance  paparazzi  rubbernecking  lifecasting  ambientimmediacy  privacy  dignity  empathy  ethics 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
PopMatters -- George Orwell: Forgiving and Championing Bad Art
'Orwell's essays remind us that better than our best intentions is our inescapable nature, our shared ordinariness, which will always have the potential to redeem us all if only we will embrace it. -- One of Orwell’s most appealing tendencies as a critic is that he never presumes to improve our tastes. He dispenses with aesthetic appreciation in favor of sociological questions, and he rarely seeks to justify his own preferences. He is pleased to come across as the common man’s representative, delivering common sense to a snob intelligentsia whose contrarian posturing has left it twisted it up with “humbug.” Appreciating avant-garde art, championing utopian crusades, sneering at plebian entertainments: these are available only to a pampered leisure class. Orwell instead romanticizes an emotional Spartanism that’s open to everyone.'
writing  criticism  intellectualism  commonsense  folk  morality  dignity  people  GeorgeOrwell 
november 2009 by adamcrowe
Guardian -- Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good by Madeleine Bunting
Another pointless smear on Hayek (forgetting, as people always do, that Hayek wanted a free market in money, and without that, there is no 'free market', thus no critique of the failings of the current pseudo free market is vaild or in any way insightful.): -- 'The institutions that so benefited from Hayek's legacy—in the financial sector—seem oblivious to the crisis of legitimacy they have stumbled into. That's because the public outrage they prompt has no language or intellectual framework to make sense of itself, or to shape a new settlement. But it's only a matter of time.' -- Yes, eventually—after much blame-mongering and philosopher king-worship—people are going to start pointing fingers at their central banks and 'outrage' at their price-fixing of money. There's no freedom without choice, and no choice without prices. But rather than focus on this—the very foundation of 'ethics' in economics—we're to piss about figuring out a new language of a common good. How about "freedom"?
economics  criticism  ethics 
october 2009 by adamcrowe
Douglas Rushkoff -- Irish Times Gets Life Inc
'...many readers will enjoy this book most when Rushkoff lets rip at some modern craziness. He’s none too happy about the corporatisation of friendship, charitable causes and even political beliefs via Facebook et al; while the popularity of self-help psychobabble phenomenon The Secret and pseudo-philosopher Malcolm Gladwell (much loved by “compliance professionals”) unsettles him greatly.' -- Compliance Professionals! I really need to read this book.
economics  criticism  immateriallabour  precuperation  hype  falseconsciousness  complianceprofessionals  DouglasRushkoff 
october 2009 by adamcrowe
a grammar -- why snark works
'...if flippancy is more fun then it’s also more attractive. Much like the coolest kid in middle school, it’s funny and it’s exclusive and it’s confident of being understood by just the right people—maybe even especially when it’s being superior and snarky and speaking at someone else’s expense. It can be so attractive, in fact, that you want to share its assumptions, whatever they are. It’s not addressing those assumptions, or earnestly explaining them to you in some dull droning unfunny voice, but you want to share them even more, because you aspire to be on the right side of the cool person’s joke. You might not even think about those assumptions, or notice yourself adopting them. Which means flippancy and snark can be convincing, substantively convincing, without even making an argument. They convince socially, not rhetorically. Being convinced socially isn’t anything complicated or new, not in the least...'
psychology  criticism  communication  groups  groupthink  consensus  conformity  rhetoric  snark  retribalization  argumentation 
october 2009 by adamcrowe
zero hedge -- An Open Letter To The Financial Media
#1. Anonymous speech is not a crime. #3. The era of personality-centric media needs to end- quickly, and (hopefully) painfully. Your shrill cries of "coward" in the face of anonymous or pseudonymous authors somehow implies that narcissism is equivalent to bravery. #4. You can't fight a dead model. It is not our fault or our problem that your business model is dead. We didn't kill it. You did. You killed it when you hired an audio producer to dub in dramatic music in times of financial crisis. You killed it when you started paying someone six-figures to create eye-catching graphics. Every dollar you spent on this nonsense was a dollar you took away from the newsroom. Is it any wonder that reporters at the Wall Street Journal are paid shameful trifles while "the talent" (for the unwashed, we mean the TV anchors) rival investment banking paychecks? -- ...you have hauled your audience down with you into the blackness of personality-dependence addiction.'
criticism  journalism  tv  news  celebrity  fame  spectacle  television 
september 2009 by adamcrowe
Mises Institute -- Why Is Capitalism So Unpopular?
'To a "man of system," to borrow Adam Smith's terminology, capitalism just isn't that exciting. Participants in the market economy are wholly beholden to consumer wants. The academics envision a grand world, where Great Men fight Great Wars, periodically inventing Great Things or developing Great Ideas. Instead, the market provides us with incremental processes, which expend enormous piles of resources, in a quest to make better Triscuits. It is hardly the stuff of high drama, to say nothing of Great History. Under capitalism, the common man does not need an intellectual vanguard or a group of virtuous surrogates to make his decisions for him or to defend him against the rapacity of his fellows. He can do just fine without our help, thank you very much, and would be much obliged if we would go back to our ivory towers and leave him alone.' -- Pretty much
criticism  intellectualism  elitism  corporatism  commonsense  mercantilism  "capitalism" 
september 2009 by adamcrowe
The L Magazine -- The Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster: Part 1
'At a time when summer movies seem uniquely capable of consolidating the cultural discourse, our Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster series looks back to the summers, and summer movies, of 1984 and 1989, when MTV editing, post-Boomer cynicism and other cultural sea changes converged to shape the summer blockbuster we all know and can't avoid.' -- In 5 parts
america  theamericandream  popculture  tv  entertainment  musical  movies  cinema  criticism  editing  vernacular  culture  television 
september 2009 by adamcrowe
Guardian -- Do we want to shop or to be free? We'd better choose fast
'We consume to sustain life, but over the last 30 years we have become turbo consumers. Many people recoil at being told that, like me, they live their life like glorified soldier ants in an army whose purpose is to reproduce a social system over which they have no say. They genuinely feel they follow no fashion and live a free life. -- ...we feel compelled to keep up on the consumer treadmill for fear of being defined as abnormal; as failed consumers. We end up in a vicious negative feedback loop; we shop literally for retail therapy, to make us fleetingly feel better because we live such narrow monocultured lives. But the very act of finding compensation for a truly free life through consumption further closes down the space for real alternatives. And so it goes on. [Politicians like] every other consumer they represent only themselves and their own private dreams. -- There is still time to choose – just. Shoppers of the world unite – you have nothing to lose but your chain stores.'
criticism  consumerism  precuperation  theadvertisedlife  via:jonhoward 
august 2009 by adamcrowe
Marginal Utility -- Reified design
'Designy-ness, like so many consumerist products, lets us consume ourselves. ...designy-ness is an ideological sheen on consumerism, redeeming commodification while furthering it, permitting mass-distributed designy-ness to supplant genuine heterogeneity: the chance that we might really redeem the promise of individualism—that we will be able to garner social recognition for being ourselves, and recognition could be separated from being judged or taxonomized. But designy-ness and its off-the-shelf aesthetic (often prepared by lauded gurus) militates against that. However much we enjoy our own tastes in such stuff privately (solipsisticly) we become typecast when we exhibit those tastes publicly. ...we are isolated by our tastes and the goods whispering our ersatz uniqueness to us, and we gloat in our transcendence until the loneliness overwhelms us, and we are driven to participate in society, which we can do only on those same terms, at the level of our tastes in everyday goods...'
criticism  design  designwank  reification  precuperation  usevaluevssignvalue  consumerism  consumering  signalling  status  selfobjects  objects  self  individualism  delusion  solipsism  taste  curation  theadvertisedlife 
august 2009 by adamcrowe
Stuff Black People Don't like -- #283. Barack Obama Depicted as The Joker
'Barack Obama was the first Black person to portray the Joker, and he has done so with gusto and disquieting brilliance. -- With the majority of the nation that isn’t categorized as a Black person believing that President Obama has already failed, one begins to understand the reality that criticism of Mein Obama is strictly not allowed in the vicinity of Black people. Black people consider Obama – like comic book illustrator Alex Ross’ infamous drawing – a real-life Superman, incapable of doing anything bad. -- With these Barack Obama-Joker images, Black people are worried that white people might finally realize the “that’s racist” smear is fully without merit. And the Damoclean Sword of racism that hangs over all white people's head potentially being removed for good, makes the Obama - Joker poster yet another inclusion in Stuff Black People Don't Like lore.'
racism!  america  identity  discourse  criticism  obsfucation 
august 2009 by adamcrowe
Psychology Today -- Why Most Journalists Are Democrats: A View from the Soviet Socialist Trenches
'"Journalism, like social work, tends to attract individuals with a keen interest in bettering the world.” In other words, journalists self-select based on a desire to help others. Socialism, with its “spread the wealth” mentality intended to help society’s underdogs, sounds ideal. Most journalists take a number of psychology, sociology, political science, and humanities courses during their early years in college. Unfortunately, these courses have long served as ideological training programs—ignoring biological sources of self-serving, corrupt, and criminal behavior for a number of reasons, including lack of scientific training; postmodern, antiscience bias; and well-intentioned, facts-be-damned desire to have their students view the world from an egalitarian perspective. Instead, these disciplines ram home the idea that troubled behavior can be fixed through expensive socialist programs that, coincidentally, provide employment opportunities for graduates of the social sciences.'
criticism  journalism  socialism  marxism  ideology  falseconsciousness  usefulidiot  groupthink  cults  elitism  paternalism  propaganda  bias  criticaldistance 
august 2009 by adamcrowe
Times Online -- Break free of this world wide delusion
On 'web 2.0': 'The cult is the problem. I know that this article — it always happens — will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it. I will be called a Luddite. It is the cultists who threaten the web. They are the ones encouraging dreams of a utopia of the self. They fail to see that the web is just one more product of the biology, culture and history that make us what we are. In the real world, it is wonderful, certainly, but it is also porn, online brothels, privacy invasions, hucksterism, mindless babble and the vacant gaze that always accompanies the mindless pursuit of the new. The web is human and fallen; it is bestial as much as it is angelic. There are no new worlds. There is only this one.' -- And books still don't bend flat!
internet  web  technology  criticism  virtuality  utopia 
june 2009 by adamcrowe
Lessig Blog -- Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism")
'Words have meaning. -- Kelly's argument is like so many today that has implicitly embraced the view that free market, libertarian sorts believe that the only thing in the world is competition, or people working to non-common goals. It is the idea that we are free only if we are antagonistic, and that free market theorists have been working to create a world where individuals struggle against, not with. A world that aspires to dog-eat-dog as its central value. But that conception of capitalism/free-market/libertarianism has no basis in fact. -- Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods (nonrival and nonexcludable) created by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. The thing that Smith was pointing to, is not "socialism." Coercive government action is—IMHO—a necessary condition of something being "socialism." On this account, none of the things that Kelly (and I) celebrate about the Internet are "socialist." No one forces Wikipedia editors to build a free encyclopedia.'
*  economics  criticism  socialism  collectivisim  sharing  libertarianism  liberty  civility  freedom  LawrenceLessig  collectivism  "capitalism" 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
New Statesman -- "We were so keen to believe that Web 2.0 would make the world fairer that we rejected all evidence to the contrary"
The "techno-utopian manifest destiny" of Wired magazine via MIT MediaLab pwnage: 'Negroponte was seeking a publicity vehicle for his “concept factory”, a novel business proposition spun out from the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Negroponte’s Media Lab didn’t trouble itself with boring engineering and scientific research – the empirical bedrock of technological innovation, which takes years to bear fruit. The Lab was designed to coax corporate sponsorship with attention-grabbing ideas. Few of the whimsical concepts from the Lab – furry alarm clocks that run away, “ambient furniture” – would ever be viable products, but they generated acres of newsprint. And the press coverage drew in the sponsorship. Negroponte sold the proposition that his whizz-kids knew the future, and if you, too, suspended disbelief, so could you. A new business had been created. Negroponte became [the magazine's] first investor, and his flagship guru. Wired magazine was born.' -- Content is kin!
criticism  economics  free  businessmodels  hype  pr  productplacement  content  wired  NicholasNegroponte  theadvertisedlife  technoutopianism 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
New Statesman -- Caught in the net
"People have always been affected by the taste of those around them, and that susceptibility to influence helps them make up their own minds. The effect discovered by the Columbia University researchers, however, was much bolder and more specific than that. When an electronic feedback loop is called on to make decisions about quality, their work suggests, there arises an effect that throws everything out of kilter and amplifies the decisions of a few early arrivals into a randomly self-reinforcing spiral of continued popularity. Left to fend for ourselves in a sea of online information, with only our online peers for direction, our decisions about quality and taste, it seems, can become snagged in a self-perpetuating feedback loop of follow-the-leader."
criticism  cybernetics  feedback  popularity  socialproof  influence  conformity  groupthink  herd  circumscription  power 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
The Archdruid Report -- Toward Ecosophy
"... the cultures best suited to the deindustrial age will have to embrace an attitude toward nature differing sharply from scientism: an attitude that starts from humility rather than hubris... Ecosophy isn’t a science, any more than scientism is, nor is it a religion – though ecological religion is likely to be significant in the deindustrial age, whether it borrows existing religious forms or evolves new ones of its own. Rather, ecosophy is a worldview and value system that gives meaning to ecology and ecotechnics, and makes sense of human life not in terms of some imagined conquest of nature, but of our species’ dependence and participation in the wider circle of the biosphere."
gaia  symbiosis  economics  ecology  science  scientism  ideology  criticism  hubris  philosophy  context  JohnMichaelGreer 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
FT.com -- Lunch with the FT: Slavoj Žižek
'“The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win,” he says. “Never forget that this is how Hitler won.” -- What particularly intrigues Žižek is how films that seemingly resist the prevailing ideology, such as Titanic ["It is not a love story. It is vampiric, egotistic exploitation."], often serve to strengthen it. It was a similar story, he suggests, in communist times when people who told seemingly subversive jokes only succeeded in spreading cynicism and indifference... Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system. This is all explained, according to Žižek, by Marx’s theory of “commodity fetishism”, the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs. “The importance is in what you do, not in what you think. I love this dialectical reversal.”'
storytelling  metanarratives  postmodernism  criticism  ideology  cynicism  precuperation  philosophy  praxis  do  reflexivity  SlavojŽižek 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
Rough Type -- Is Twitter making us stupider?
On popularity crowding out quality.
web  twitter  criticism  popularity  homogeneity  conformity  groupthink 
may 2009 by adamcrowe
BusinessWeek -- What Good Are Economists Anyway?
*The Classics* -- John Maynard Keynes on useful idiots: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." (Oh, the irony.) -- Ben Bernanke (Holder of a PhD in How To Create A Great Depression) on the Fed-created Great Depression of the 1930s: "You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again." (NEVAR FORGET) -- Alan Greenspan on a career built of doublethink: "I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." (Got Gold, Mr Greenspan? http://bit.ly/77ifu) -- Paul Krugman (useful idiot par excellence) on nobel-prized-prat keynesist fundamentalism: "This is really fairly shameful, that we should be wasting precious months as a profession retracing debates that were settled 70 years ago." (Meaning: 'The logic of spending your way out of debt is irrefutable!') -- Listen to these numbskulls at your peril
economics  debt  fraud  criticism  cronyism  keynesianism  ideology  conformity  groupthink  doublethink  government  corruption  AlanGreenspan  BenBernanke 
april 2009 by adamcrowe
The Register -- The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell
"A guru for the brain dead." -- Big hair = Crazy genius person.
criticism  theadvertisedlife  MalcolmGladwell 
april 2009 by adamcrowe
The Big Money -- Mr. Taleb Goes to Washington: A black swan meets some ugly ducklings
'To Taleb, the supposed stability brought about by complex financial derivatives, global banking connections, and accelerated flows of capital was a mirage masking the accumulation of massive amounts of hidden risk. We cannot have both debt leverage and a hyper-efficient system—the volatility is just too great. What Taleb explains—which no one else does—is that efficiency is already a form of leverage. A highly efficient system removes slack and magnifies small changes. A deleveraged financial system is a stable one, especially if we increase the redundancy within the system. That's an idea Taleb has taken from biology. But in finance, redundancy means two things: not having players in the game who are "too big to fail" and not allowing anyone—from the individual to the institution—to play with too much money. Redundancy means have cash on the side, not risking it all, and not becoming dependent upon financial assets for your economic well-being.'
economics  criticism  leverage  derivatives  risk  speculation  delusion  hubris  NassimNicholasTaleb 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Marginal Utility -- Outsourced motivation
On services that... 'attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. ...a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can “unite” us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services [that] meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. ...nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value.'
criticism  experience  service  games  design  gamemechanics  control  measurement  experiencepoints  points  numbers  rewards  status  hierarchy  simulation  motivation  feedback  existentialism  solipsism  self  selfservers  quantifiedself  thegamingofeverydaylife  #bandwidth  #complexity 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Hipster Runoff Exegesis -- 19 February 2009: "H4X0R3D - fuck hipster runoff i hacked this blog. readers of this blog are idiot lemmings"
"Carles adopts an alterego diametrically opposed to the persona he has created for lingustical-philosophical-cultural space of HRO in an effort to problematize the identity that has been constructed therein and which perhaps has begun to deconstruct his subjectivity outside of the delineations of that space. Though Carles writes HRO, there is clearly a sense that it has begun to write him... The audience is blamed for the commercialization of expression, as if the terms of any kind of communication exchange have been ineradicably infected by commercial exchange, which no structures all efforts at reciprocity. The pseudo-Carles challenges the notion of creative consumption and derides a culture transfixed with surfaces... by adopting this new persona, Carles tries to demonstrate the manner in which identity itself is surface." -- dutr
*  HipsterRunoff  trolling  criticism  popculture  socialnetworking  socialmedia  behaviours  backlash  seif  egoism  narcissism  identity  authenticity  theadvertisedlife  quotes  reflexivity  satire  culture 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
H4X0R3D - fuck hipster runoff i hacked this blog. readers of this blog are idiot lemmings
"there’s more to life than trying to make your personal brand into a commodity. stop standing on the sidelines of life and actually LIVE. get off the internet. you are all afraid to live your life. you want it to mean something, but at the same time, you want every one else to feel more trivial than your life. you just want to sit there and gawkerfy everything. like i said, i am deeply disturbed by today’s internet culture and the trends amongst the latest generation. every thing is like a mirror and every one just wants to reflect. they waste time on their bullshit myspaces posting photos and creating themselves. it’s just fucking bullshit. waste of time. you spend so much time thinking about who you are that you don’t even become someone. needless to say, with sites like this promoting that, this world is headed down the shitter. of course kids are gonna makes mistakes, but not if they are told that it is okay to make mistakes and that it is cool to act like a dumbfuck all the time."
*  HipsterRunoff  trolling  criticism  popculture  socialnetworking  socialmedia  behaviours  backlash  seif  egoism  narcissism  identity  authenticity  theadvertisedlife  quotes  reflexivity  satire  culture 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
YouTube -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb Angry
'Nassim Nicholas Taleb angry with economists.'
economics  risk  modelling  probability  statistics  literacy  epistemology  criticism  NassimNicholasTaleb 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Marginal Utility -- The Attention Economy (13 April 2006)
"... status games are perhaps an inherent part of humanity, they are also the engine that drives consumerism. If adults dismiss such games, it’s not because they see them as juvenile, but because their experiences of such games were probably humiliating and horrible for them, and they are now hoping against hope and prevailing cultural tendencies to grow out of such preoccupations, rather than internalize them. -- If people cease to blog for the pleasure of existing in public space, and begin to demand something more tangibly beneficial (power, connections, money), then it will probably turn into a giant MySpace where one parleys the attention of marketers into some paltry excuse for self-esteem and one congratulates oneself not for the substance of one’s contribution to public debate, but for how many others whom, by virtue of your connections, you can feel superior to. In short, it will reflect the society that already persists in real space."
criticism  authenticity  status  attention  consumerism  identity  theadvertisedlife 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Edge -- The Forth Quadrant: A Map of The Limits of Statistics by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system). I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we [think] they have, in which we can be suckers. And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence... the good news is that we can identify where the danger zone is located, which I call "the fourth quadrant", and show it on a map with more or less clear boundaries.'
epistemology  economics  finance  mathematics  statistics  literacy  probability  risk  predictions  criticism  rearviewmirror  fallacy  myopia  blackswans  NassimNicholasTaleb 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
NYTimes.com -- Better and Brighter by Judith Warner
'When was it, exactly, that the titans of Wall Street, among their many other perks and privileges, got to be crowned with the title of “best and brightest”? -- Susan Jacoby, the author, most recently, of “The Age of American Unreason,” a best-selling account of contemporary anti-intellectualism: "The best and the brightest meant the people who were supposed to be the smartest, not who made the most money. This application in the last few years of the phrase to anyone who’s made a pile of money on Wall Street shows a real degradation of the culture. It’s part of the dumbing down of language as well as culture. It shows a real real dumbing down of everything." -- Maybe it will be discovered that some of the best and the brightest are already teaching third grade and providing low-paying, low-glory health care services. Maybe the definition of the term will come to depend less on money and power, and more on service, ideals, even character.'
criticism  greed  culture  virtues  values  ethics 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Economics in One Lesson -- The Lesson Restated by Henry Hazlitt
'Economics, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run. ... [some] men get lost in complications. They do not reexamine their reasoning even when they emerge with conclusions that are palpably absurd. ... a little economics can easily lead to the paradoxical and preposterous conclusions we have just rehearsed, but that depth in economics brings men back to common sense. For depth in economics consists in looking for all the consequences of a policy instead of merely resting one’s gaze on those immediately visible. And this is our lesson in its most generalized form. To see the problem as a whole, and not in fragments: that is the goal of economic science.'
economics  criticism  literacy  learning  commonsense 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Columbia Journalism Review -- Derivatives Echo Chamber
"What role did the press play in diffusing financial warnings in the years leading up to the current crisis? ...we can offer an example for your consideration: the press’s supremely insufficient response to an important 1994 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warning about the dangers of derivatives—those largely unregulated financial instruments that have played such a central role in the current collapse." -- "One of the reasons we don’t see economic collapse coming is that we would prefer to see ourselves as on track, rather than spinning wildly out into the ether. To that end we, perhaps understandably, sometimes fit the facts to our sensibility, rather than the other way around. But one job of the press is to be better seers than everyone else, less willing to be lulled into false contentment."
economics  finance  derivatives  journalism  criticism 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Harpers -- Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits by Wendell Berry
"... once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition ... the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable... this credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress. And, necessarily, it must lead to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. That it should finally produce a crowning cult of political limitlessness is only a matter of mad logic." -- Supersize We
*  economics  debt  ponzi  criticism  consumption  consumerism  delusion  denial  insanity  virtuality  reality  freedom  friendship  ethics  trust  loyalty  empathy  communities  civility  ecology  sustainability  austerity  humanity  philosophy  religion  art  life 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Marginal Utility -- Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff
Quotable! -- "#2. Social criticism has been resolved into self-expression. #3. Hipsterism consists of its own repudiation. #4. Social networks mandate identity formation on the model of cloud computing ...we now have self as a service. #5. The variables we transfer to the cloud increasingly delimit the field of identity and condition what sorts of data will subsequently be considered relevant or applicable. #6. Existence online... forces on us unremitting self-consciousness. There can be no harmonizing of action and its preconception; no spontaneous authenticity. #9. The collapse of language into abbreviations, arbitrary conditions of brevity, self-enforced infantilism and the like are attempts to import the the inflexible conditions of reality, against which we shape ourselves, to the online world, which lacks such conditions and threatens us with an amorphous and intolerable incontinence of identity." -- Phew!
internet  web  self  identity  infantilism  criticism  selfservers  sousveillance  feedback  criticaldistance  precuperation  authenticity  reality  virtuality  popculture  culture 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Marginal Utility -- The “idea crunch”
'Nihon Cassandra writes, “maybe credit crunch is wrong description. Maybe it’s actually a useful productive idea crunch. Maybe, we are—for the moment—overbuilt, over-satiated, over-consumed, and just full-up. And that is before we ask anyone for credit.” Capitalism has no incentive to develop socially useful ends. The category of the socially useful, though not given by human nature and immutable, is not automatically elastic either; it needs to be fostered. Marx contends that capitalism, basically, fails to foster the socially useful—that is, the pursuit of surplus value prevents resources from being devoted to developing and reproducing human capabilities so that more things can be considered socially useful. (This may be part of the answer to why don’t Chinese workers consume more—at the site of the most intense capitalist exploitation of labor, the capacity to consume is stunted both by inadequate wages and inadequate cultural capital.)' -- Not 'capitalism', capitalisms.
economics  criticism  capital  malinvestment  marxism  surplusvalue  production  innovation  "capitalism" 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Mike Davidson -- Last Rites
"I’ve noticed there are many non-obvious costs associated with us becoming a society of news snackers: #Our attention spans are shrinking below even the levels caused by the television explosion of the ’80s and ’90s #We value timeliness of information more than depth of coverage, or even truth in some cases #We’re uncovering more of the who’s, what’s, when’s, and where’s, but less of the how’s and why’s"
literaryculturevsoralculture  news  journalism  criticism  myopia  individualism  narcissism  solipsism  #specialization 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Rough Type -- The luddite McLuhan
"McLuhan: No, and so the only alternative is to understand everything that's going on, and then neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and frustrate them as much as you can. I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what's happening because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I'm resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button."
McLuhan  media  criticism 
march 2009 by adamcrowe
Wired -- Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic
"...I wonder if the root of the emergence of the superhero in American culture might have something to do with a kind of an ingrained American reluctance to engage in confrontation without massive tactical superiority. It does seem to me that massive tactical superiority might be a key to the superhero phenomenon. That wasn't what it used to mean. That wasn't what it used to mean to me when I was a child. What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly." -- "...there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination."
archetypes  america  metanarratives  reflexivity  culture  criticism  comics  storytelling  watchmen  theleagueofextraordinarygentleman  AlanMoore  heroes 
february 2009 by adamcrowe
Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? by Robert Nozick
"From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best." -- Ouch!
criticism  psychology  sociology  education  intellectualism  elitism  statism  socialism  academia  vanity  entitlement  illiberalism  projection  "capitalism" 
february 2009 by adamcrowe
Sherry Turkle -- Seeing Through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation (PDF)
"understanding the assumptions that underlie simulation is a key element of political power. People who understand the distortions imposed by simulations are in a position to call for more direct economic and political feedback, new kinds of representation, more channels of information. They demand greater transparency in their simulations (particularly the ones we use to make real-life decisions) make their underlying models more accessible. We come to written text with centuries-long habits of readership. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: Who wrote these words, what is their message, why were they written, how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central goal for computer education must now be to teach students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit. The specific questions may be different but the intent is the same: to develop habits or readership appropriate to a culture of simulation."
criticism  psychology  politics  simulation  education  learning  literacy  interface  transparency  opacity  reality  virtuality  realityprogramming  representation  reflexivity  ideology  hegemony  power  thegamingofeverydaylife  SherryTurkle  pdf 
february 2009 by adamcrowe
Guardian -- Bobbie Johnson: Why I'm finished with 'social media'
'Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale's expletive-laden bullying as a "social drinking sensation". They don't call people giggling about it on the phone as a "social telecommunications sensation". They call it joking, or they call it gossip, because that's what people do. Whether they do it online or offline, down the pub or on Facebook doesn't matter. "Social media" is mainstream - we don't need to claim any more victories for it. So, that's it. I'm sick of "social media experts". (If I know you and you are one, then obviously I'm not talking about you). I'm sick of "social media sensations". And I'm sick of social media. Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.'
socialmedia  criticism  rant 
february 2009 by adamcrowe
WSJ.com -- 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years
'...the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs... and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism. The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. With each successive bailout to "calm the markets," another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as "Atlas" grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate "windfalls."'
economics  debt  fraud  government  socialism  corruption  politics  feedback  doublethink  ignorance  predictions  criticism  fiction  objectivism  AynRand  libertarianism  atlasshrugged 
january 2009 by adamcrowe
io9 -- SciFi Makes You A Better Person - Possibly
Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor in the School of Communication at American University: 'What we find among the general public is that fictional TV portrayals of science are not currently turning the public off to controversial biomedical research, at least among regular consumers of these programs. To the contrary, science fiction may in fact be preparing viewers for some of the real-life ethical and moral policy debates that are likely to arise in coming years, preparing audiences to think through the implications of startling new discoveries or research initiatives rather than react in an immediate "yuk factor" response.'
simulation  sciencefiction  ethics  criticism  reflexivity  argumentation 
january 2009 by adamcrowe
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