'This depiction of the digital marketing landscape was shown at a Buddy Media event marking the launch of the social marketing software agency's new suite of measurement tools. You can click to enlarge it, but that won't make it look any simpler.'

'IT admins, six sigma types rushing to the data bandwagon, ex-BI types, visualization and infographic geeks, analytics geeks, programmers, old-school statisticians, Hadoop wranglers — they all seem to be calling themselves data scientist now. One speaker quipped that the difference between an “analyst” and a “data scientist” is about $40,000. The bigger the market, the bigger the incentive to stop infighting and forge an opaque consensus. Infighting creates a kind of transparency that benefits buyers, by allowing them to play divide-and-conquer games. -- Big Data is unique among recent IT trends in that it is a market and opportunity created by an open source movement. The entire industry exists because of Hadoop, an infrastructure component inspired by Google technology. So there has been a sense of unity around a shared non-commercial mission from Day 1. The consensual label “data scientist” is partly a consequence of a sense that the data scene is a social fraternity rather than a business sector. There is also a pragmatic consensus that the biggest gains will be found by mixing up large datasets owned by different parties (think “mashups for titans”). This is an element of the scene that is rather like the effort to standardize railroad gauges in the 19th century, or containerization in the twentieth century. It reinforces the cultural mission by making standardization and data interoperability a matter of shared interest.'

'I'll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn't clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga's games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga's games.'

'My goal as a website is to ‘be the ass hole who pointlessly interjects himself into the conversation’ without being as overtly annoying as ‘the ass hole who always pointless interjects himself into the conversation.’ Lana Del Rey is the perfect buzz topic, and I’ll never forget the times we shared in late 2k11 and early 2k12. I honestly do wish the best for her career, not because I have a rooting interest in her/care about her as a person, but because Lana Del Rey is an important search term to refer viewers to my website. I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.'

'... judging by some of our industry’s public discourse, it would seem that large parts of ad- and marketingland are behaving as if they don’t know the difference between effects and effectiveness. Or as if they think they’re in the entertainment business. In which getting people to watch – and maybe ‘engage’ with – our content is the whole end purpose of the enterprise. If there’s one thing digital stuff is good at, it’s leaving behind it a vast trail of data. It gives us more and more things we can easily and immediately count – searches, views, visits, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, linking, forwarding, following, referring, clicking, friending, liking, +ing, and so on. All these things are easy to monitor and count... Tens of thousands of this! Hundreds of thousands of that! But counting and analysis are very different things.'

'"Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those." Pagel argues that our evolution as "social learners" has likely had the effect, as it's played out through hundreds of millennia, of encouraging the development of copying skills, perhaps over the development of originality. "We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species," he explains. "But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves ... And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators." What that also means is that as the scope of our potential copying broadens, through advances in communication and networking, we have ever less incentive to be creative. We become ever more adept at cutting and pasting.'

'...since interchangeability limits the need for communication among collaborating makers, refinement of component technologies can progress much faster... You could say that work previously achieved by communication among makers is now achieved via communication among artifacts. A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies. This creates a refinement surplus. Exploitation of this refinement surplus is fundamentally what creates the predictable “growth” in industrial age Schumpeterian creative destruction. But it isn’t the intent to exploit that drives the evolution. It is a collective unconscious drive to exhaust possibilities and find limits, independent of any specific need. The most high-impact technologies of the day are almost never whatever the wisdom of the day identifies as the most potentially useful ones. They are the ones that can spread most rapidly through The One Machine, mopping up refinement surplus. So the best and brightest flock to Facebook or Google, and cancer remains uncured.'

'Phony electronic parts have wound up at the U.S. Missile Defense Agency seven times in the past five years, its director told Congress on Tuesday. Phony chips have started infiltrating other military services, as well.'

'WikiLeakers may have to think twice before clicking on that “classified” document. It could be the digital smoking gun that points back at them. Darpa-funded researchers are building a program for “generating and distributing believable misinformation.” The ultimate goal is to plant auto-generated, bogus documents in classified networks and program them to track down intruders’ movements, a military research abstract reveals. “We want to flood adversaries with information that’s bogus, but looks real,” says Salvatore Stolfo, the Columbia University computer science professor leading the project. “This will confound and misdirect them.” Under this plan, the decoy docs would undermine hackers’ trust in the integrity of data, make them question whether releasing it in the public domain would be worth it, and force WikiLeakers to do more work verifying their authenticity.'

"Why do we need this??"

'Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the software we use.' -- "New York City is being 'optimized' to run like a motherboard."

'The machine is itself built entirely out of the Lego system, which raises the possibility -- theoretically at least -- that the machine could, with some modifications, build a copy of itself.'

'Hey look, it’s an Internet of Things that’s gone all Facebook and Foursquare-y.' -- I make friends. They're toys. My friends are toys. I make them.

'...a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption. The ring only allows the ghost of Smeagol to persist because it brings with it the capacity for cunning, deception and trickery, which it needs to further its own objectives. The ring itself though, remains unchanged by Smeagol-Gollum, even as it transforms and consumes him. It is important to note that the One Ring does not actually destroy Gollum till its own end is imminent; it keeps Gollum alive to serve. ...consumerism is not about humans consuming products. It is about products consuming humans. ...visit a Vegas casino and wait for someone to win reasonably big. You will see the exact same applause and encouragement from the staff. And the applauding front-line service employees in both cases aren’t faking it. They genuinely believe the little guy has “beaten the house” rather than provided it with cheap marketing.'

'...debates are more than opportunities to hear candidates present views and policy. They’re intellectual boxing matches. People like keeping score. There are, however, reasons to be suspicious of the graphs, known as “worms” in colloquial reference to their squiggling path across TV screens. Many studies describe how people are influenced by what others think, especially when they’ve yet to form an opinion of their own. It seems to be instinctive: Motivated to be accurate, we take others’ assessments of reality into account, whether we want to or not. (As an example, just think how much easier it is to laugh at a joke when it’s followed by laughter.) -- Manipulative effect could also be measured even in test subjects who said they didn’t pay attention to the worm, and couldn’t remember whom it tended to favor. “The worm’s influence may be quite difficult for viewers to discount,” wrote Davis and Memon.' -- How many fingers, Winston?

'Agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt... Schiebinger: "Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."' -- Betancourt: "Agnotologic capitalism": The systemic production and maintenance of ignorance. The creation of systemic unknowns where any potential "fact" is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value renders engagement with the conditions of reality – the very situations affective labor seeks to assuage – contentious and a source of confusion... Affective labor is the enabler for the creation of the bubbles that are characteristic of the digital capitalist economy. Where the reduction of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.'

'Information overload actually takes two forms, which I'll call situational overload and ambient overload, and they need to be treated separately. Situational overload is the needle-in-the-haystack problem: You need a particular piece of information - in order to answer a question of one sort or another - and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information. Filters have always been pretty effective at solving the problem of situational overload. When we complain about information overload, what we're usually complaining about is ambient overload. Ambient overload doesn't involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we're surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.'

'Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?'

'In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online "personas," allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they'd like. #Manufacturing consent. Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. "Persona management software" can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual "people" could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.'

'Given that Mum has painted her house and added some new furniture, she also wanted a new tv. So we went shopping for one. This is an account of her thought decision process: Factor #2: “how much dust will it gather and how easy can I clean it”? Did not see this one coming. Nor the impact it had on her final decision. In this case a design that had the least amount of holes in it and could be easily moved around during house cleaning, won the sale. Even if the TV was EUR 200 more expensive.'

'As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it's free. Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn't work any more. In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn't free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit. And it's hard to go backward. More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.' -- Kipple drives out non-kipple

'For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.' -- Art?? We have no need of art! We simply do everything as best we can.

'The emerging field of synthetic biology aims to transform biology as we know it into a discipline of engineering. The top-down BioBricks approach prefers to hack existing organisms. The more research-oriented field of so-called protocells aims to create minimal living machines and may on the way discover the nature of life itself. What both technosciences share is that, if successful, they will profoundly shift or even erase our distinction between nature and culture. After the first truly artificial life form has been created and employed, everything can potentially become technology. If their main subject is increasingly an object that is made, biologists are becoming creative. What will be the role of the arts in a future where life is a thing to be designed? Will scientists become the poets of the time, or do art, design and architecture need to play a role in this development? Can these possibilities be explored collaboratively?'

'Garbage eschatology (I claim credit for this neologism) is based on the premise that our technological infrastructure has acquired too much complexity for us to fix. It will kill us not by turning sentient and (for whatever obscure reason) wanting to kill us, but by stupidly and dumbly collapsing on top of us, like a gigantic Windows Vista, while we watch, powerless to prevent our impending accidental death. Technology will kill us by collapsing into a pile of rubble, turning the planet into a gigantic landfill. ...it takes a smarter person to fix a buggy program than to write the program in the first place, and that every bug fix introduces 2-3 deeper bugs/flaws/cracks in the system. Eventually, intelligent environments run on civilizational software built by the smartest possible humans, and the even-smarter people required to fix bugs in that system don’t exist. The probability is far higher that a fatal bug will turn the system into junk, rather than lending it sentience.'

'...garbage is possibly the only complete, empirical big-picture view of humanity you can find. If you cut through the crap of all our lofty views of ourselves, humanity is essentially a giant system that feeds on low-entropy resources on one end (mines, forests, oilfields) and defecates high-entropy waste at the other. Among other things, this transformation allows us to create low-entropy islands of order around ourselves (cities, buildings and everything else physical that we build). If this flow from resources to garbage were to shut down, nature would rapidly reclaim every inch of civilization. -- There are 2300 landfills around the country. You could say the United States is a collection of 2300 large families, each with one giant trash can. What is the true DNA of the world of garbage? -- What is its significance within an overall understanding of our world? Is it merely a treasure-trove of anthropological insights, or is there a deeper level of analysis we can get to?'

'As much of an online paradise as Twitter is, it's not *completely* free of the kinds of annoying behavior we see in the real world. High on the list are the sorts of adolescent posturing that social media in general make so easy--preening, name-dropping, ass-kissing, pandering, cliquishness, slavish trend-following. Yes, a tweet is usually just a tweet, but sometimes it's as conspicuously coded as the brand of jeans a high-school girl wears.'

"Glorified report cards."

'We scramble to keep up with the never-ending inflow of demands and commands, under the false premise that moving faster will allow us to get out from under the endless stream of pings for our attention. For answering email and responding to texts or tweets only exacerbates the problem by leading to more responses to our responses, and so on. Every answered email spawns more. The quicker we respond, the more of an expectation we create that we will respond that rapidly again. We mistake the rapid-fire stimulus of our networks for immediacy, and the moment we are actually living in for the thing that needs to catch up. -- The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discrete, yes-or-no, symbolic language. We are making choices not because we want to, but because our programs demand them. ...the more we learn to conform to the available choices, the more predictable and machinelike we become ourselves.'

'Foley has allegedly been saving McDonald’s hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and Big Macs from McDonald’s for over 19 years, and “they look EXACTLY the same!” says Foley. “These hamburgers are not food substances (the way we normally think of food), says Foley, “they are chemical concoctions that contain the look, taste, and smell of food but don’t be fooled. There is nothing ‘food-like’ about these substances at all.”'

'Overview and demo of Articulated Naturality Web (ANW) technology from QPC.'

'Equipped with a camera that snaps a picture of the peering customer, the computer digs into a database of more than 10,000 patterns to accurately determine the gender and approximate age of the individual. With that info, the billboard can then show off a targeted advert, appropriate for the viewer. -- ...future implementations will involve environmental data and location awareness, so ads can direct you to shops, offer up exclusive geographical promotions and even advertise a sale on umbrellas if it starts raining.'

'The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection. But why stop there? In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes.'

'"The First Law of Kipple…'Kipple drives out nonkipple'." No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot. "The entire universe is moving toward a state of total, absolute kippleization."'

'Toybots ushers in an "internet of things" that will disrupt the gaming, entertainment and toy industries. We have been building the Toybots Platform for connected toys with full 3G, WiFi, GPS and accelerometer capabilities tied to online and mobile games. Imagine a physical toy you can tickle online and it giggles in the real world. Imagine a grandmother in Iowa recording a family story and the toy telling the story to her grandchild in Florida. You will be able to download audio books as well to the toys and play full online games with these toys. Toybots will bridge mobile, online and physical gaming worlds together for the first time in an inspirational and unique way.'

Homo-Interruptus

'...when I wrote Pattern Recognition, we were in a world in which we all hadn’t yet become coolhunters. But since then, it’s been democratized. It’s become a kind of function of the individual. What I notice about advertising lately is how incredibly little attention I pay to most of it, and how relatively little it influences my purchasing patterns. I don’t know what that’s about. I think I’ve tuned into my own universe of advertising and consumption. I just ignore the mainstream, and that may be where we’re all going. Advertising today seems after the fact; I don’t feel like it’s addressed to me. If I pay attention I can see how it’s structure, and I don’t think I’m at all remarkable in that. I think consumers are generally becoming dangerously sophisticated about advertising, and how it works. Bigend is a fantasy figure I came up with to interrogate that situation, to make fun of it. I think I created him to enjoy the impotence of much of 21st-century marketing.'

'Hayes said completing the overdue maintenance on the nation's filter would immediately increase the country's performance and reduce viscosity, greatly enhancing flow and circulation. The properly functioning filtration system will also reportedly help drain standing water and slow down the nationwide buildup of mildew on the sides and edges. Department officials said they had searched online for replacement filters, but acknowledged the original packaging had been thrown away, making it difficult to track down the model number. Sources confirmed preparations were being made to order the part from a manufacturer overseas.'

'Finally, the drudgery of corporate life has been captured in a play set for adults! Bob, Joe, and Ted spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters. Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee (how about Level C Systems Associate? Or Senior Accounting Coordinator?). Each additional set comes with the figures noted, plus character specific accessories.'

'Well, unemployment in my home state of Michigan has gone past fifteen percent, the worst in the nation. People are now thinking with nostalgia about their earlier lives spent in comfortable cubcles, and the employment situation just isn't getting any better. In his classic 1963 short story The Days of Perky Pat, Philip K. Dick wrote about people who longed for the good old days, when they lived in little box houses full of gadgets, surrounded by neat lawns and paved roads. Everyone had a Perky Pat layout that they used to return to the good old days. -- Nostalgic about your lost job? Thankfully, you can now purchase The Cubes, cubicle playsets. Bob, Ted, and Joe each come with one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters.'

'A very special playset into which adults could project their very being. We are all familiar with how children are able to project themselves into a playworld. What if adults are placed in hideous conditions on other worlds, and long to have their old world back? A Perky Pat layout, along with Can-D, manufactured from a lichen, allow people to achieve "translation" into the pretend world of Perky Pat: 'Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boy friend. We lived then, Norm Schein said to himself, like Perky Pat and Leonard do now. This is how it actually was... Playing this game... it's like being back there, back in the world before the war. That's why we play it, I suppose. He felt shame, but only fleetingly; the same, almost at once, was replaced by the desire to play a little longer.''

'In this story, survivors of a global thermonuclear war live in isolated enclaves in California, surviving off what they can scrounge from the wastes and supplies delivered from Mars. The older generation spend their leisure time playing with the eponymous doll in an escapist role-playing game that recalls life before the apocalypse — a way of life that is being quickly forgotten. At the story's climax, a couple from one isolated outpost of humanity play a game against dwellers of another outpost (who play the game with a doll similar to Perky Pat dubbed "Connie Companion") in deadly earnest. The survivors' shared enthusiasm for the Perky Pat doll and the creation of her accessories from vital supplies is a sort of mass delusion that prevents meaningful re-building of the shattered society. In stark contrast, the children of the survivors show absolutely no interest in the delusion and have begun adapting to their new life.'

'"iButterfly" is an entertaining iPhone application using AR, motion sensor, and GPS functions to collect coupons. Through the iButterfly, we will deliver not only coupons but also diverse information and contents as well.' -- Kipple takes flight.

'The whole ambush marketing thing is interesting, what happens if I go to the World Cup and use a product like TagDis and leave a graffiti tag to say ‘Drink Pepsi’ rather than Coke. The tag is left in virtual space but who controls that, who would even know? In the future will we see teams of branding police patrolling venues with mobile devices looking for virtual tags and advertising? Perhaps they already are.' -- Kalling the Kipple Klean-up Krew

'Google TV Ads is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using the familiar AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes.'

'The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.'

'Witnesses indicated that upon entering into his relaxed state, Oberlin—who had no e-mails to respond to and was finally caught up with everything at the office—spent a full 90 seconds staring quietly at nothing in particular, and then approximately 8.5 minutes paging leisurely through the evening newspaper. During this period, he did not once concern himself with his finances, his in-laws, or his dental coverage. And as his mind began to wander freely, he neither relived painful humiliations from his past, nor felt any anxiety about his personal shortcomings.'

'A never-before experienced web trend performed by one human website.'

'4chan is that freebased version of mankind's new drug of choice. Permanently glued to their computers, the Anonymous users of 4chan exist in a kind of suspended animation, where no attention span is too short. The Chans show us the chaos at the edge of human perception, where the mind has consumed so much information through artificially enhanced sensory inputs that it begins to break down and cannibalize itself. The brave pioneers of 4chan are the Magellans of media desensitization, who abandon the grim reality of their parents' basements to wallow in infinite, recursively self-referential filth. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip. It is the car crash that cannot be looked away from. Ever.' -- AMIRITE?

SHOP MAOR.

'A good model of the future needs to incorporate lots of old baggage. ... civilization is fragile. The best chance of information survival is not publicity, authority, power, electronic storage or even paper recordings. Our oldest surviving stories were written on clay tablets and buried it in the desert, dependant as much on fluke as human planning for their survival. -- Hopefully we’ll always exist in a place somewhere between information dystopia and utopia, a place that allows enough happy accidents, that there will always be a need for search. The buried doubloons. The lost and refound manuscript. The private collection. Though I’ve defined the future librarian mainly as an organizer, the passion is equally the hunt. And even more than the hunt is the importance of what we serendipitously find along the way. The Internet is great for this. But so is fossil hunting. Forward and backward. We need both.'

It's all gone a bit Perky Pat.

'In the networked city, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists and technologists both, for the foreseeable future, as will ensuring that the public’s right to benefit from the data they themselves generate is recognized in law. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?'

'Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who completed 30 of 51 passes for 357 yards, three touchdowns, and three interceptions, said he would have performed even better if it weren't for the wind and the difficulties he experienced throwing the two-liter Pepsi bottle, the oversized Viagra tablet, and the 13 other objects that served as balls during the game.'

'"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing western civilization's fall into the depths of depravity. "If our calculations are correct, this complete erosion of all that is enlightened and unique will reach absolute rock bottom on the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2009."'

'#Simulations, by Jean Baudrillard ...when the world is so saturated by media that people have seen fake versions of things before seeing the things themselves. If you've played thousands of combat videogames, then go to war, are you no longer capable of grasping the truth of what you're experiencing? If you've seen hundreds of "dates" on reality shows, can you ever make a genuine connection with a person you go on dates with? Or will your mind be so fogged by simulation that you are unable to access your true feelings and experiences? Though Simulations is about more than just television, Baudrillard's fears about a media-created reality seem especially relevant to TV (and, today, the internet).' -- Nice discussion on McLuhan in the comments.

'Every year, in the first week of August, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, and Japan Rail East hold a promotional event called the "Pokemon Stamp Rally". This has been going on for maybe ten years. The nature and scope of this promotional event is mind-blowing. And if we've consumed the right amount of Brain Lube, the things it implies are even more amazing and depressing.' -- Got to catch them all. Pokemon! -- A brief history of kleptomania (in video games): What stingy consumers started doing was buying games, clearing them, and then selling them back to used shops as soon as they could. So what game developers started doing was #1. Making games needlessly difficult #2. Padding games with artificial barriers such as level-grinding, side quests, etc. It's no tinfoil-hat theory that many of the conventions of the Japanese RPG were born out of publisher mandates such as "keep people from selling the game back in the first two weeks".'

'The physical and emotional junk in the lives and households of Deckard and Jack Isadore in 68DADO. It builds up so much it almost smoothers Deckard, so he is forced to deal with all this kipple - his attitude to androids; his views on electric sheep; his wife; Mercerism - and either overcome it, or succumb to it. Note, however, that it's the intrusion of Roy Baty into his life which forces this action and self examination upon him. This theme pops up again for example in 66NWLY; Here Dr. Eric Sweetscent is also under a pile of kipple, especially in relation to his wife and relationship to his employer. The novel in some ways is his journey to remove this kipple from his life, again forced upon him by the intrusion of President Molinari into his life. Kipple is also mentioned more flippantly in 69GAPH. Joe Fernwright is on the shore of Mare Nostrum, where Glimmung is submerged and possibly dead.'

'... a technology that turns everyday objects like a plate or a lemon slice into gaming controllers, is launching a technology solution that could be of particular interest to advertisers. The software solution is able to identify brands, such as a can of Coca-Cola or of Pepsi, and use them to operate computer games. CamTrax Technologies boasts that its unique, patent-pending technology enables the tracking of hand-held objects in real time, with high reliability, and low CPU consumption through any standard webcam. Since it is a software-only solution, it is easily portable to virtually any platform.' -- Interesting...!

#1. FALSE REALITIES Dick remains the supreme mythmaker of the false reality. His 1959 novel, Time Out of Joint, was the original Truman Show, while his 1964 book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, describes a society that succumbs to permanent hallucination. Faced with such illusions, Dick's characters have to ask, "What is real?" because their lives (and sanity) are on the line. That's why hipster Hollywood loves him: Dick turned metaphysics into a whodunit. #3. ENTROPY One thing you learn from drug addiction, five marriages, and a visionary imagination is how easily your world can fall apart. Perhaps this was why Dick was obsessed with how things decay. He even invented a word for one of entropy's most ordinary manifestations: "kipple," which he defined as all the useless crap that creeps into our daily lives, like junk mail and gum wrappers and old newspapers. Don't bother fighting it - Dick's First Law of Kipple states that "Kipple drives out nonkipple."'

'... a Swedish company, The Astonishing Tribe, has gone a step further, with a facial recognition system called Augmented ID. It tells you who people are, based on identifying their picture via a technology called Polar Rose, which analyses faces and then searches for photos on Flickr that match it - and pulls out the name from the tags.' -- What motivates this? Is the motivation even human?

"... the essence of dumb growth: spending millions to create a boy band with the half-life of a mayfly... all to push-market sugar-water and lowest-common-denominator flicks that fail to make kids smarter, happier, or better in any meaningful way. Welcome to the zombieconomy - want fries with that decline?" -- LAWL

"I want to see a new digital agency model that sells a package of 100 small digital experiences, that can each be executed quickly and cheaply, instead of selling the 1 big digital experience."

Ohh noes!!!

"'POSSESSED' enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions. The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism. When does collecting become hoarding and why do possessions exert such an influence on our lives? This is a very common and growing problem. If you know anyone who is clearly a hoarder, please try to show them this film. I would be very interested to know how they respond. A feature of the disorder is that people often deny there is a problem. When they finally do realise they are in trouble they tend to think they have a unique problem which leads to a feeling of shame, isolation and despair. It's a very complex problem without a quick fix, but with care and understanding it is possible to get on top of it. I've seen it done."

'Philip.K. Dick documentary on BBC's "Arena" originally broadcast on 9th April 1994.' -- Rubbish fllling up the streets, rubbish filling up the houses, rubbish filling up your head.

"As information costs plummet, our investment (in terms of mental energy) in challenging that information also drops. Information, as a commodity, becomes too cheap. It no longer pays to worry about our standards while making more of it or in sorting through it. In fact, we have an incentive to consume as much information as possible and sort out at some later date what the utility of it should have been. Convenience goes hand in hand with consumption acceleration. In short: Thanks to the internet it has become simple for us to produce and disseminate information—creating information pollution. It has become simple for us to gather information—creating convenience bias. These offset the gains for freedom that the internet affords."

'Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don't have to justify every word they utter.'

“They sleep like Count Dracula, he thought, junkies do. Staring straight up until all of the sudden they sit up, like a machine cranked from position A to position B. ‘It–must–be–day,’ the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him the instructions, the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio.... it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something. The music from the clock radio is to wake you up; the music from the junkie is to get you to become more of a means for him to obtain more junk, in whatever way you can serve. He, a machine, will turn you into his machine. Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.” -- From Philip K. Dick’s 'A Scanner Darkly' (via Ambient Girl)

"Brookside Close is a state of decay and disrepair after years of neglect.

"Darwin at Home is an open source software project that aims to bring the process of evolution into your computer at home so that you can see it working." -- Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7989532956224708331 -- "Any shape can learn to move." !!!

What do you mean???!!!1 :(

"... virtual goods sales and distribution system, connecting celebrities, artists and content creators with a new generation of fans through the online trade of likenesses, fashion, catchphrases, and other virtual representations of real-world talent."

"I am Jesus. I am son of God." -- Quick, someone make him a Virtual World... Kerching!

'This enhanced realism is based entirely on the idea that ads permeate our daily lives to the extent that any recreation of reality lacking them will be unconsciously seen as less than perfect.' -- IF Ads THEN Ads++

"The Fox/7-Eleven deal is an example of a practice called reverse product placement. Instead of just putting products prominently in a movie or TV show, fake goods move from the screen to reality... Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal and Squishees..."

"cooling costs are escalating rapidly as newer, denser servers come online. Power consumption that was 1kW per server rack in 2000 is now closer to 10kW. Customers building new datacenters are planning for 20kW per rack."

"... attacks account for about two percent of internet traffic, with peaks of up to five percent. By contrast, email composes around 1-1.5 percent of internet traffic."

"Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008 approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories" -- World's a stage

"Will we be a race of mindless drones, only concerned with instant gratification and convenience, looking to the next distraction to ease our pulsing brains?" -- Rubbish filling up our streets, rubbish filling up our homes, rubbish filling up our heads...