'We are apparently betting the nation’s (perhaps the planet’s) economic future on a service that essentially enables petabytes of frivolous banality to flow through the world’s data pipes. The critics are not wrong. Facebook is frivolous. Incredibly so. What they get wrong though is assuming that old economy stuff is not frivolous. Take the auto industry. For a century people have used cars for completely frivolous things like taking road trips, going to dumb B-movies, going over to visit friends to play board games, or to a workplace to sit in a cubicle and be bored for 8 hours. Drag races, NASCAR, random drives to feel the wind in your face (why not go running so you can lose some weight at the same time?): what is so “serious” about any of this? Still think the old economy is more serious than Facebook? Suddenly, Farmville seems very green and eco-friendly. Ultimately, to a scary degree, everything in the American economy is about sustaining frivolity. Much of it obesity-inducing, gas-guzzling, non-renewable, planet-destroying frivolity. If we’re going to do this, we might at least do it more efficiently. Enter Facebook. By digitizing much of the frivolous banality in our lives that currently takes expensive physical infrastructure, gasoline and tens of millions of jobs to sustain, Facebook is showing us the true value of the fading American industrial economy itself. -- The Facebook IPO is ultimately unsettling for just this reason. It shows us that even those who toil away today at apparently noble, uplifting professions that elevate minds and nourish souls, ultimately do so in service of a fundamentally frivolous economy. An economy that is basically one giant feedback loop between frivolous consumption driven by television and complicated production systems that absorb the talents of millions. It is really a huge circus of sound and fury signifying almost nothing.'

'Pinterest will soon have the richest consumer purchase intent data ever assembled.' -- All that is solid melts into air.

'Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them. In "Alone Together", MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for—and sacrificing—in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools...' -- "...Alone Together is about human vulnerability and technological affordances. People are actually willing and wanting to substitute robots – that seem to care – for people... Nurturance is the killer app for sociable robotics. Human beings are programmed to love what we nurture." -- "'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.' When we use other people in this way, you can get used to seeing them as spare parts; as ways to support our too fragile selves."

'Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing. Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions. And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. ...once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.'

"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."

'rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users. The bot does not born with a fictitious identity, but will be added to the real identity of the user to modify it at his convenience. Thus, this bot can be seen as a virtual prothesis added to an user's account. With the aim to help him to forge a digital identity of what he would really like to be and by trying to build a greater social reputation for the user. Moreover, this bot can be perceived as a threat by defrauding even more the reality of who is really who on social networks and by showing the poverty of our social interactions on these so-called social networks.'

'If there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin.' -- Jean Baudrillard

'Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra ...' -- Jean Baudrillard

'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.'

'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.'

'Comedy series in which Charlie Brooker uses a mix of sketches and jaw-dropping archive footage to explore the gulf between real life and television.' -- #Fear, #The Lifecycle, #Aspiration, #Love

Comment: Anon: 'I think that while the Stand Alone Complex is an amazing phenomenon, the mechanism behind it might lead to a bleak future for society. The over-propagation of memes will lead to a stagnation of original thought. In fact, it is already happening. Have you noticed that many of the films and tv shows in the last few years have been based off of old movies, tv shows, comic books and other types of franchises? I feel that this stagnation of original thought will lead to a society of mindless drones that are easily manipulated by propaganda. In fact, that’s just what happens in 2nd Gig, when Gohda starts his own Stand Alone Complex to serve his own agenda. Jean Bauldrilard suspected this might be the case decades before the Internet, an event which he called the “Termination of History” in which the masses all become a “silent majority” due to a lack of oppositional elements in society.' -- Anon: “I thought what I’d do is pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes.” Or should I?'

"Because publicity pretends to interpret the world around us and explain everything in its own terms, publicity adds up to a kind of philosophical system. The things that publicity sells are in themselves neutral – just objects – and so they have to be made glamorous by being inserted into contexts that are exotic enough to be arresting but not close enough to us to offer a threat. Revolution can be wrapped around anything. In this way, publicity abuses the realities of public figures, events and struggles in other parts of the world. Sometimes this reality and unreality confront each other and we are faced with a contrast which is incomprehensible."

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

"It's a combination of the sublime and the ridiculous." -- Numbers numb -- Praxeological epiphany at 28:22: "I don't think you can use quantitative methods to explain markets... history doesn't repeat itself."

'They’ve been called McMansions, Starter Castles, Garage Mahals and Faux Chateaus but here’s the latest thing you can call them — History.'

'Psychosis in the 21st century looks something like this: You think your every move is being filmed for a reality television show starring you, and that everyone in your life is an actor. The Truman Show delusion, or Truman Syndrome... The delusions are fueling a chicken-and-egg debate in psychiatry: Are these merely modern examples of classic paranoia fed by the current cultural landscape, or is there something about media like reality television and the Internet that can push people over the sanity line? Psychiatrists say that other movies whose characters are living in a unreal world or being watched by malevolent forces, including “The Matrix,” “Edtv” and even the film based on George Orwell’s “1984,” have come up in conversations with psychotic patients. But the premise of “The Truman Show” is strikingly similar to what patients describe as their own experiences.'

'The Matrix is a great movie but a poor expression of Baudrillard's philosophy. The Matrix is quite straightforward, there's no confusion, no paradox: you're either in the Matrix, or you're in the real world. You may not know you're in the Matrix, but that doesn't change the fact that you are or are not in it. A true Baudrillard Matrix would be a single world that became so fake that you no longer needed the original. The whole world becomes a fake; there is no recourse to the real world. "Inability to participate in society," lamented Secretary of Socialism Wilkinson, eyeballs deep in the Matrix. That's what he thinks drives people crazy. He's right; but the solution isn't a redistribution of income, it's reducing the desire to participate in the Matrix. -- I guess that's why they say: May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows. But you ain't thinking that far ahead. Know what I mean?'

Building out the Museum of Consumerism one storefront at a time? -- '...the installation of fake storefronts make downtown Tynesdale look less moribund than it really is.'

'Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside. With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible. The first empty shop unit to be given a makeover with a "flat pack" shop front is in Whitley Bay. "It's an excellent way of promoting how a unit can be used, perhaps inspiring new businesses to come into the town."' -- Keep Calm And Carry On?

'We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right. Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are. -- I think when you have a generation that doesn't see simulation as second best, doesn't know what's behind simulation and the programming that goes into simulation, but just takes simulation at interface value, you really have a set up for a very problematic political, among other things, set of issues. ...things are built out of simple programs to more complex programs, and these programs are cultural creations, cultural constructions... Education has dropped that out of the curriculum. -- We're becoming quite intolerant of letting each other think complicated things.'

"Osama™ is the gift that keeps giving. As long as Bin Laden™ is alive, we have him to point to as the enemy, sort of like Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984."

Al-Qaeda™ The Musical, Al-Qaeda™ Special Edition DVD Boxset, Al-Qaeda™ World Holiday Tours, Al-Qaeda™ 'Terror Tots' Training Camp, Make Me A CIA Operative, Osama-Factor, Al-Qaeda vs Celebrity Big Brother 3, Cell Swap, Al-Qaeda 360™ Terror Cell - Frag Online, Al-Qaeda For Men™, Al-Qaeda For Men™ Extra Strength, Al-Qaeda™ Fluoride-Free Afghan Mountain Bunker Mineral Water. "Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda!" WHEN IS THIS FAGGOTRY GOING TO END?!

'"I wasn't depressed myself. In fact the movie made me happy. But I can understand why it made people depressed. The movie was so beautiful and it showed something we don't have here on Earth. I think people saw we could be living in a completely different world and that caused them to be depressed." -- A user named Mike wrote on the fan Web site "Naviblue" that he contemplated suicide after seeing the movie. "Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' " -- Other fans have expressed feelings of disgust with the human race and disengagement with reality. Hill: "I live in a dying world."'

'In the last scene, the movie picture appears to jolt suddenly; the only way I can describe it is that it's as if the camera operator started putting the camera down before he turning it off. What's the significance of that jolt? It's in such contrast to the stillness of the rest of the movie. Does it mean it's all a dream? He's killed? What? No, believe it or not, that jolt happens because the camera operator actually did put the camera down before he turned it off. And the director liked the effect.' -- I've *seen* this movie before, but I can't say what it is because the comment above would ruin it for you, though I'm keen to recommend it. Interesting... I kinda feel art finds you, rather than the other way around, so I'm careful not to intervene but— If you'd like to chance my ruining it for you rather than leaving things to fate: Amazon > Search: "Abbas Kiarostami Close Up" > Add to basket > Checkout > ??? > !!! yw ;^)

'Baudrillard: “Just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object but as a social determination.” One can’t pursue authenticity through that route—by using only generic objects that we “need”—anymore than one can by acquiring authentic luxury items. What is “real” about a given object’s provenance is open to constant reevaluation; the emphasis can be shifted to suit the needs of those questioning reality at various junctures. -- But why not use fake luxury goods for other reasons? They function as a kind of social sabotage, a direct attack on distinction that forces those invested in positional goods to become uncomfortable and shift their ground.'

@Baudrillard The map is the territory: Dubai World as a theme park dedicated to Dubai that grew to swallow up the whole country into a 'wealth' miraged debt hole -- On the moral hazard of continuous 'bank' bailouts... Max: "...instead of giving American's foodstamps, they should be giving them Goldman stock."

'As with any abstraction, a lot gets lost in the process, and sometimes what gets left out proves to be important enough to render the abstraction hopelessly misleading. That risk is hardwired into any process of mathematical modeling, of course, but there are at least two factors that can make it much worse. The first, of course, is that the numbers can be deliberately juggled to support some agenda that has nothing to do with accurate portrayal of the underlying reality. The second, subtler and even more misleading, is that the presuppositions underlying the model can shape the choice of what’s measured in ways that suppress what’s actually going on in the underlying reality. Combine these two and what you get might best be described as speculative fiction mislabeled as useful data – and the combination of these two is exactly what has happened to the statistics on which too many contemporary economic and political decisions are based.' -- (Proposes GPP, GSP, GTP to replace GDP/GNP)

<code> // Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.</code> ... "corrected" ... 'You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine. Spin that...' -- So, how do you like living in a programmed pseudo-reality?

'The prompter is just a tool to help the President remember to speak, blink, and breathe.' -- Errr... We're. Going to. Errr... Send more. Troops. To. Errr... CHANGE!!!

Forward march into Idiocracy.

'Designers say the new game explores the endless paperwork, routine patrolling a modern day soldier endures in photorealistic detail.' -- True.

"The presidency of Mr. Obama is truly a landmark event, and I can think of no better way to honor it than with this $2.5 billion advanced digital-imaging project," acting archivist Adrienne Thomas told reporters. "Not only will our sensors provide unprecedented moment-to-moment documentation of a sitting U.S. president, but they will also give the American people the breathtaking realism and seamless layer animation they have come to expect." Many scholars have also praised a feature of the motion capture technology that would allow future generations to digitally alter the president's wire-frame model by retroactively modifying clothing, facial features, skin tone, and even accessories.' -- Shades of PKD's 'The Simulacra'.

'[The] movement toward abstraction has important advantages for complex societies, because abstractions can be deployed with a much smaller investment of resources than it takes to mobilize the concrete realities that back them up. ...economic abstractions keep functioning only so long as actual goods and services exist to be bought and sold, and it’s only in the pipe dreams of economists that the abstractions guarantee the presence of the goods and services. Vico argued that this trap is a central driving force behind the decline and fall of civilizations; the movement toward abstraction goes so far that the concrete realities are neglected. In the end the realities trickle away unnoticed, until a shock of some kind strikes the tower of abstractions built atop the void the realities once filled, and the whole structure tumbles to the ground. -- An economy of hallucinated wealth depends utterly on the willingness of all participants to pretend that the hallucinations have real value.'

Shades of PKD's 'Now Wait For Last Year' -- Max Keiser: "nobel prizes before he does anything ... we live in a world so pressed for time, things happen before they happen now. it’s a by-product of the futures markets.. as if they are trading time on futures markets – time futures that don’t allow for time to happen yet before a transaction must be made.. any transaction.. the pyscho program trading computers are running everything now.. including parts of the collective unconscious. did obama win the prize? yes, I remember that happening in the future. Is he still president.. no, he had to retire or bets made on his policies would have gone bad and bankrupted the bankers on wall st. i explain it all in my novel; Buy Love, Sell Fear"

'When we deal with this condition of outformation, we concern ourselves with rates, flow, vector, flux, and its messaging types [unicast, multicast, broadcast, or anycast]. We deal with paths, closeness, link, connectivity, signaling, entropy, self-similarity, throughput, and latency. It doesn't matter what the content is. Rather, the critical standpoint deals with its entropy, its signaling, its rate, flux density and messaging type. -- The requirement for citizen-actors on reality television reflects not nearly the need for such vocations of entertainment, rather, it is the construct of computer networks and software algorithm attempting and stuggling to learn to mimic the bizarre banality of a society dwelling in the afterburn of failed capitalism. It is not staged idiocy, it is pre-school for the machine screens comprehensively looping the simulation of the western debt class.'

'The news doesn't just influence our values. It changes the way we think so that certain values become inevitable.' -- Comment: Joseph Bergevin: "I agree that our reality is one of convenience more than comprehension, but I don't see a way around this. People don't care about truth, they care about other people. If an effort or cost doesn't advance their esteem with others, most people don't see its value. You just can't make them care about things they don't - only sell it in terms of what they do."

'10,000 cases and counting of Brawndo have sold online or via convenience stores in the Northeast and other regions. This happened not because of a movie-studio marketing brainstorm. It happened because of an “Idiocracy” fan in Oakland named Pete Hottelet. A graphic designer with very particular pop-culture tastes, Hottelet has started a business devoted to bringing to life certain products from movies. His business is called Omni Consumer Products, a name borrowed from the fictional megacorporation in “Robocop.” -- “I watched ‘Idiocracy,’ and I was like, ‘O.K., we’re in,’ ” Kirby says. “Based on how things are going on in the world, and especially our country right now, this is a shoo-in.” He laughs as he says this, so I wasn’t sure what he meant. Are we already living “Idiocracy”? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s all about overcommercialization.”'

'... Taste buds that never learn to disguish sweet from sour from bitter but that only register abstractions like "fun" and the taste of pleasure. A tongue that tastes only emotions rather than physical properties of consumed substances. These physical properties become even more unknowable to the mind, the food-in-itself a lost dream to the consumer, who can only consume her own expectations. "What does coffee taste like?," Carles asks, "what does beer taste like?" We can never know. Our perceptions of these things are purely self-referential. -- Once perception becomes a matter of interfacing with brands rather than our sensory organs, a trademark synesthesia ensues to the point where sound and taste are no different from one another... ... the brand is written [into] our bodies, which are written and overwritten over and again like any other media storage device, which is that to which we have been reduced.'

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

'#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.

'The simulacrum is less a copy twice removed than a phenomenon of a different nature altogether: it undermines the very distinction between copy and model. The terms copy and model bind us to the world of representation and objective (re)production. A copy, no matter how many times removed, authentic or fake, is defined by the presence or absence of internal, essential relations of resemblance to a model. The simulacrum, on the other hand, bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a putative model. The process of its production, its inner dynamism, is entirely different from that of its supposed model; its resemblance to it is merely a surface effect, an illusion. A copy is made in order to stand in for its model. The simulacrum affirms its own difference. It is not an implosion, but a differentiation. The resemblance of the simulacrum is a means, not an end.' -- It's simulacra all the way down

'Within days of the discovery, the nation's top archaeologists had begun excavating the massive subterranean army of fresh-faced clay youths, already considered the finest collection of relics from the Early Disney Dynasty ever unearthed. The opulently decorated mausoleum—suspected to be the final resting site of Emperor Retlaw I—houses row upon row of life-sized ceramic sculptures modeled after clean-cut teenagers, their faces forever frozen in a mix of joy and wonder. -- While surveying the massive dig site, the expedition also uncovered the foundations of an ancient Epcot Center that accurately depicts life in the Middle Ages, and the ruins of three previous Space Mountains.'

'These guys were never heard from again -- but their promotional savvy lives on. Many at the early screenings believed that the film's novel premise -- three student filmmakers disappear in the woods while shooting a documentary about the legend of a local witch and their footage is found a year later -- contained some grain of truth. "The blurb on the poster said this was 'found footage,' and there was nothing in the marketing to lead you to believe it was anything but that." That perception was reinforced by the movie's clever website, launched before Sundance, which expanded the "Blair" lore with bogus news reports, historical timelines and video interviews. "Did the marketing overshadow the movie? Yeah, in some respects," "Blair" co-director Eduardo Sánchez says. "But since we created 90% of the marketing, I never had a problem with that."' -- Haha-hackers.

'There are just four people who control all of the U.S. markets through their use of dangerous and explosive DERIVATIVES. These gambling interventions by the "Four Financial Dictators" have successfully brought the markets back each time... despite the inflated financial realities that existed. The purchase of these gambling DERIVATIVES at a great loss have transformed each market crisis into a rally. By manipulating the markets in this way, they have further inflated the highly overvalued market indexes. Perhaps Americans can now understand why the major U.S. banks, such as JP Morgan, are holding TRILLIONS of gambling derivatives on their books as the PPT group of four use them to rig the markets. Sooner or later, these market "fixes" will no longer hold the bubble from bursting. Thus, we have witnessed the creation and growth of the financial bubble that is on the brink of explosion... and we know who rigs and controls the markets to create this inflated bubble of gambling debt.'

'Metaphors become real when we act as if they are real – whether or not we intellectually "believe" they are real. This behavioral definition of "real" means that metaphors are tools. In this way the role and power of metaphor is rising in our culture. Our modern digital world is a metaphoric world. We make things real by first constructing them as a metaphor, an "as if" type. Then we slowly deepen the metaphor, adding more layers of meaning and realism, until metaphor slowly passes whatever invisible barrier lies between the real and fake, and it becomes "is" -- it becomes "real." Pinocchio is at last a real boy, earning the love of his mother. We have made as-if realities, which someday may be felt as real. We are making as-if communities, as-if democracies, as-if intelligence, as-if life. ...we are beginning to act as-if there was a global brain. We ask Google expecting it to know the answers to all our many questions. We assume a global awareness...'

'The map is not the territory is a remark by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.' -- 'The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra & Simulation: "Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory."'

"This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over." -- @Baudrillard The desert of the real estate?

"Maybe this is why our parents loved the Beatles so much. Maybe they knew that their songs would last 4ever, eventually ending up in some ’sweet ass’ video game that ‘doesn’t promote musicianship’, ‘the spirit of music’, but primarily highlights the fact that bands are ‘brands’ which ‘create art’ that can be protected and licensed out whenever u need some more money. Feel like it’s hard for young people to ‘authentically enjoy music’ because we enjoy aligning ourselves’ with brands and criticism more than any of the ‘more organic’ elements of music. I don’t think that is ‘a bad thing’ but feel like it turns good artists into a ‘hokey experience’ when ‘too many ppl start 2 suck their dicks.’ Like a concert will become a high priced show where people ‘act the way that they think they are supposed to act. Do u think that these music games are ‘fucking ghey’?’ Would u rather ‘jerk off’ for 3 hours than ‘get good at playing fake instruments’?" -- HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

'Doctors could soon be testing medications or surgery on your virtual twin before you get to undergo the real treatment. Researchers around the world are creating different personalised simulations of living body parts, so that bespoke therapies can be tested and optimised without risk to the patient. Models of individual body parts could eventually be integrated to simulate a patient's entire body.'

'The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks: "Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US."' -- The cancer that is killing /e

"... fashions in other academic disciplines and also in the general culture contributed at least as much to a willingness to engage in absurd risks and to provide and accept valuations of complex and inherently unfathomable securities. The general cultural developments are sometimes termed post-modernism, which involves the replacement of reason by intuition, feeling, and allusion. The recent era of global finance differed from the financial surge of a century ago. Its cultural manifestations also appeared to be novel. It was playful, allusive, and edgy - in short, post-modern. It treated tradition and history not as a constraint, but as a source of ironic reference. When incomprehension no longer produces new heights of prosperity, but rather economic collapse and failure, it is not surprising that it turns to anger. Finding out who is to blame becomes more and more like the late medieval and early modern search for witches: a way of making sense of a disorderly and hostile universe."

'James argues that financial innovation, political cowardice, and postmodernism all worked together so that “every sort of value - including financial values - came to be seen as arbitrary and fundamentally absurd.” But just because philosophers may have been exploring the possibility that there was no “there” there with regard to Western values doesn’t mean they advocated the idea that fictitious values should be actively created to artificially inflate asset values, or that derivatives whose notional value far exceeded the assets from which they were derived should be written. Just because both critical theory and quantitative finance are hard for laypeople to comprehend does not make them morally equivalent. And the fact that a postmodern analysis could be used to elucidate the techniques of finance (the building something out nothing aspects of it anyway) revealed how awry finance had become; it didn’t supply a justification for it. Greed did that.'

'In Rudy Rucker's novel Postsingular, nanomachines (called "nants") turn the world in to a virtual simulation, called "Vearth." And it turns out that Vearth is kind of a sucky copy of the "real" Earth, because it takes up too much bandwidth to create a decent version. "The water, clouds and fire were never quite right. In any case, the nants didn't always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon." And then the Big Pig, the super-intelligence that runs the simulation, comes up with an economy, where if you pay a monthly fee, you get rendered at a higher resolution. There's only so much room to live in Vearth's highest resolution and best-simulated zones, so most people have to live in tiny apartments or in worse areas. Eventually, there are terrorists and computer viruses that wipe out tons of people. And the Big Pig realizes that people can get along without their subconscious minds, so it takes those away.'

'After two years of performing management and coordination tasks at an "exceptional level," Stephen Baldwin's personal assistant, Matthew Phillips, was rewarded for his efforts when he agreed to take over the position of Stephen Baldwin Thursday. "We really wanted to hire from within for this opening, and Matthew was a natural choice," said publicist Melina Disanto, adding that the 33-year-old Phillips is the first person who comes to mind when she thinks of Stephen Baldwin. "Although this new position doesn't come with a pay raise or more benefits, it actually has fewer responsibilities than Matthew's old job." According to Stephen Baldwin sources, Stephen Baldwin applied for the Stephen Baldwin personal assistant position but was turned down.'

'Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online. -- Wu calls Google "the barometer of the world." Indeed, studying the clicks is like looking through a window with a panoramic view of everything. You can see the change of seasons—clicks gravitating toward skiing and heavy clothes in winter, bikinis and sunscreen in summer—and you can track who's up and down in pop culture. Most of us remember news events from television or newspapers; Googlers recall them as spikes in their graphs. ...every bit of data, no matter how seemingly trivial, has potential value.'

Meat

'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.

"World Of World Of Warcraft's amazing level of detail makes players feel like they are actually in a cramped, dark apartment playing World Of Warcraft."

"Unpopular ideas require euphemisms, and these euphemisms wear out over time. From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense. Hence, politically dominant elites don’t see themselves as acting ideologically and react with hostility when ideological labels are pinned on them. Ideology is only useful for an insurgent group of outsiders, seeking a coherent basis for a claim to displace the existing elite. [Initial] users of [the euphemism] rapidly [drop] it, once they [get] into power.'

"There are three orders of simulacra: #1) natural, naturalistic simulacra: based on image, imitation, and counterfeiting. They are harmonious, optimistic, and aim at the reconstitution, or the ideal institution, of a nature in God's image. #2) productive, productionist simulacra: based on energy and force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production. Their aim is Promethean: world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of indeterminate energy (desire is part of the utopias belonging to this order of simulacra). #3) simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control."

'What separates the Stand Alone Complex from normal copycat behavior is that the originator of the copied action is not even a real person, but merely a rumored figure that performed the copied action. Even without instruction or leadership a certain type of person will spring into action to imitate the rumored action and move toward the same goal even if only subconsciously. The result is an epidemic of copied behavior–with no originator. ...mass hysteria-with purpose. ... an emergent phenomenon catalyzed by parallelization of the human psyche through the cyberbrain networks. ...by exploiting the mechanism of information transmission in society, one could achieve a very efficient and subtle thought control. Indeed, since people tend to modify slightly the information (and forget where it came from) in the processes of consumption (or appropriation), it becomes difficult to sort genuine ideas from modified, implanted ones.' -- And a whole new reality was set into motion.

"It was an adult Disneyland."

Quotes Baudrillard's The Vital Illusion: "#Ecstasy of the social: the masses. More social than the social. #Ecstasy of information: simulation. Truer than true. #Ecstasy of time: real time, instantaneity. More present than the present. #Ecstasy of the real: the hyperreal. More real than the real. #Ecstasy of sex: porn. More sexual than sex … Thus, freedom has been obliterated, liquidated by liberation; truth has been supplanted by verification; the community has been liquidated and absorbed by communication … Everywhere we see a paradoxical logic: the idea is destroyed by its own realization, by its own excess. And in this way history itself comes to an end, finds itself obliterated by the instantaneity and omnipresence of the event." -- Carr: "What we see today is not discontinuity but continuity. Mass media reaches its natural end-state when we broadcast our lives rather than live them."

'China has been in effect financing American consumers going into debt and indulging in consumption practices that allowed the U.S. to become "really good at branding" -- both at the level of corporate marketing practice, serving a buoyant consumer marketplace, and at the level of personal self-actualization, in copious acts of self-branding. The underdeveloped consumer market in China has meant that Chinese consumers are exempt both from the dilemmas of self-branding and of mounting resistance to hyper-targeted brand-marketing campaigns. Hence Carles remarks that we still believe ourselves in America to be "'cooler'" even though the economic relations of production underlying that ideological notion have now begun to shift. The equation of "cool" with "smart" has never seemed more tenuous, even though the entire hegemonic consumerist superstructure of American quotidian existence has been built upon that equivalence, operating as reflexive common sense.'

"They’re all over there laughing at us. It sucks. My whole life, I have been raised thinking that America was the best country on the planet, but I think it might have all been a lie. Maybe we were just really good at branding. Feel like we just control what it means to ‘be cool’, but we might not even have that n e more. Because of the internet ‘coolness’ doesn’t really have a ’source’ and the brand can exist anywhere with no point of origin. Sad about the economic crisis, and how AZNs have been smarter than us about saving ‘money’ and only spending what they have. I think America is beautiful. We’ve had a good run, but maybe we’re not as special as we thought we were. Kinda sad. I still feel ‘cooler’ than a lot of foreigners, and like smarter. Should I h8 azns and hold them responsible for the destruction of my country? Or should I move out of the USA and move to an authentic city like Paris/Beijing/Tokyo/Cairo?"

"The popular culture tried to warn us. For 20 years, we've had Homer Simpson's spot-on caricature of the quintessential American: childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy. We knew, in our heart of hearts, that something had to give. The '80s spirit endured through the '90s and the 2000s, all the way until the fall of 2008, like an awesome winning streak in Vegas that went on and on and on. American-style capitalism triumphed, and thanks to FedEx and the Web, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint and unnecessary. During the '80s and '90s, we were Wile E. Coyote racing heedlessly across the endless American landscape at maximum speed and then spent the beginning of the 21st century suspended in midair just past the end of the cliff; gravity reasserted itself, and we plummeted."

'Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, who requested anonymity because her company had not given her permission to talk to reporters, termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”' -- 'Nigel Goldenfeld, whose company sells derivatives software: "Because the math is really complicated people assume it must be right."' -- Numbers numb

'Derivative contracts total about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in "notional" amounts, according to the Bank for International Settlements. These contracts are tallied in notional values because no one really can say how much they are worth. [For comparison] The total value of all the stock markets in the world amounts to less than $50 trillion, according to the World Federation of Exchanges. Few know what derivatives are worth. I spoke with one derivatives trader who manages billions of dollars and she said she couldn't even value her portfolio because "no one knows anymore who is on the other side of the trade."' -- Keyser Söze? (Check the comments)

"I, in my stories and novels, often write about counterfeit worlds, semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds inhabited, often, by just one person, while, meantime, the other characters either remain in their own worlds throughout or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones. This theme occurs in the corpus of my twenty-seven years of writing. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudoworlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one, the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium [general consent], agree on."

"Is the real self always the naturally occurring one? If a patient on the antidepressant medication Prozac tells his therapist he feels more like himself with the drug than without it, what does this do to our standard notions of a real a self? Where does the medication end and the person begin?"

'We are ill prepare for the new psychological world we are creating. We make objects that are emotionally powerful; at the same time, we say things such as "technology is just a tool" that deny the power our creations both on us as individuals and on our culture. I find it amazing how in less than one generation people have gotten used to the idea of giving their children Ritalin–not because the childen are hyperactive but because it will enhance their performance in school. who are you, anyway–your unmedicated self or your Ritalin self? for a lot of people, it has become unproblematic that their self is their self with Ritalin or their self with the addiction of a Web connection as an extension of mind. As one student with a wearable computer with a 24-hour Internet connection put it, "I become my computer. It's not just that I remember people or know more. I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I'm a better person."'

"This is Max and Stacy talking through the headlines for The Oracle for 13 February." -- Including the 'Dubai Mirage Crash/Dubai Debt Dash'.

"For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home. Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans." -- Run!

'The challenge is to design an application that would would allow a child to receive comfort from being able to have simple, virtual conversations with a parent who is not available "in-person".' -- *gulps*

"James Parker dissects two of Jim Carrey's most unnervingly subversive onscreen moments, and contrasts them with a scene from the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day."

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind imagines a pair of lovers, played by Carrey and Kate Winslet, in the heat-death of their togetherness: bored and disgusted, each submits to a disreputable clinical procedure in which the whole relationship is expunged from their memory banks. It works, but somehow, as freshly minted strangers, they meet again; they are drawn to each other; they begin to fall in love. Then the attempt at mutual erasure comes to light: they learn that they have been through all of this already. What to do? In an overlit, discolored hallway, they stare at each other, grim with foreknowledge—and decide to go for it all over again. How beautiful! Ghastly as they look under the fluorescent tubes, the lovers stand together in this instant on a scuffed little summit of human dignity: by embracing their situation (and each other), they have transcended it." -- YES! (Love this movie.)

"Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self. Who knows how the self became such a problem, or when we began to feel the falseness in our nature? Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience. An oracular bum holds up a handwritten cardboard sign in Bruce Almighty: LIFE IS JUST. We know we’re frauds; we fear a reckoning is due."

"[World of Warcraft is a] detailed simulacrum of a process of “becoming a success”. The game offers its players a capitalist fairytale, in which anyone who works hard and strives enough can rise through the ranks of society and acquire great wealth. Moreover, beyond simply representing capitalism as good, World of Warcraft serves as a tool to educate its players in a range of behaviors and skills specific to the situation of conducting business in an economy controlled by corporations... the game is training a generation of good corporate citizens not only to consume well and to pay their dues, but also to climb the corporate ladder, to lead projects, to achieve sales goals, to earn and save, to work hard for better possessions, to play the markets, to win respect from their peers and their customers, to direct and encourage and cajole their underlings to outperform, to become better employees and perhaps, eventually, effective future CEOs."

'This episode examine[s] how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period.'