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The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)

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

themediumisthemassage literaryculturevsoralculture technology technouptopianism transhumanism temes tethered telepresence simulacra virtuality borg bravenewworld THX1138 thematrix malgorithms collapse
december 2011 by adamcrowe

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NYTimes.com -- Cyberspace When You’re Dead

'I spoke to a couple of Entrustet users, who said they particularly wanted to protect photos stored online, along with hosting and domain-registration information for personal and business sites. Entrustet also offers an “account incinerator,” to obliterate content its users would prefer not to have linger on after them, and one person I spoke to mentioned having tagged a personal Twitter account for deletion — “it’s just inside jokes, personal ranting and raving” — along with a Gmail account. “I don’t need people judging the personal e-mails that I sent to my friends,” he explained. If we try to control the way we are perceived in life, why not in death, too? It’s not wholly unusual to do this with physical artifacts: letters to be opened only after death, or even to be destroyed. If nothing else, those Entrustet users figure they are leaving behind some guidelines about which bits of their online lives matter, and which don’t.' -- Like tears in rain

digital death estateplanning daemon traceeradication data internet virtuality persistence legacy archives lifecasting sousveillance selfservers memories halflife ubik psychology from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- RT: 'Virtual goods! Virtual currency! Virtual output!'

The computer finds its own use for things?

virtuality virtualgoods virtualservices virtualmoney subsistenceclicking from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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FT.com / Brussels -- Carbon trade cyber-theft hits €30m

'Cyber-thieves have stolen as much as €30m in carbon allowances from the European Union’s emissions trading system, authorities said, as exchanges across Europe halted trading on Thursday. Exchanges including ICE Futures Europe, Nasdaq OMX Commodities Europe and London-based LCH.Clearnet stopped trading of emissions contracts, which are central to the bloc’s fight against global warming.'

globalwarming virtuality WTF from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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Edge Perspectives with John Hage -- Alone Together - An Important New Book by Sherry Turkle

'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.'

psychology tethered self technology behaviours virtuality simulation simulacra quantifiedself financialization numbers numbing dissociation ambientintimacy ambientimmediacy augmentationistsvsimmersionists SherryTurkle from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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STANFORD Magazine -- Digital Immersion

'Psychiatrist Aboujaoude says that immersion in gaming runs the risk that a player begins to believe that behaviors acceptable in a game might also pass offline: Heavy gamers may develop an offline persona with the swagger and bravado of their avatars. "It also becomes easier to lose perspective on one's divergent priorities: the need to perform well as a favorite game character or as an accomplished player versus the need to function as a responsible adult. It's all one big life with one big 'cumulative' score, the faulty justification goes, and if we are breaking records in an online game, we may feel, in aggregate, responsible and productive enough, and thus allow for some gross negligence elsewhere in life." -- "Addictions happen when people are trying to control their emotional state. You find something that makes you feel better and then you want more of it, but then there is emptiness in the payoff."

psychology technology temes virtuality simulation behaviours extensionsofman centralnervoussystem control feedback addiction reflexivity grandiosity thegamingofeverydaylife from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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DVICE -- The next Lady Gaga could be a Japanese holographic singing idol

'The spectacle of a hologram performing on stage, with a live backing band in front of thousands of screaming fans is pure science fiction brought to real life. To really process exactly how amazing (and hauntingly creepy) the Hatsune Miku music tour is, take a look at the HD video below.'

japan virtuality idoru from delicious
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- NMAWorldEdition: Dating episode 2: Help Jen Jen pick a man

'Our fans have spoken in preferring the demure look for anchorwoman Jen-Jen. She posted the photos you chose to her online profile and now she's got a stack of replies to sort through. Which man should she pick? As usual, your vote will drive the story.' -- Too interesting.

news virtuality idoru
january 2011 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- VPRO - Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street

"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."

praxeology markets numbers finance financialization simulation algorithms blackboxes opacity simulacra virtuality documentaries from delicious
december 2010 by adamcrowe

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Terra Nova -- An Exodus Recession? by Edward Castronova

Wondering when this guy is going to spot the power cord snaking out of the back of his 'virtual' computer. There is no such thing as a free virtual lunch. -- '...there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. What if real world consumption refused to grow not because people were becoming hippies, but because they remained selfish materialists who had, however, come to enjoy virtual matter? If an exodus recession were underway, what would the world look like? There’d be no sign that people had given up on the idea of buying and selling things. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction.'

virtualworlds digital consumerism virtuality technoutopianism economics fallacy from delicious
november 2010 by adamcrowe

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CNN -- The blurry lines of animated 'news'

'Welcome to billionaire Jimmy Lai's newest gamble: Animated news. When news agencies didn't have footage of scenes from the car crash involving Tiger Woods, Lai's team raced to put together animation dramatizing the incident, garnering hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. The end product drew derision, with critics saying there's a credibility gap because the animated features mix real news footage with dramatizations of often unverified versions of events. Every day they churn out about 20 reports, often a combination of animation and real video, for the Web sites of Lai's Apple Daily newspapers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. "You have a lot of missing images, in the TV, in the news reporting," Lai said. "If this is an image generation or image era that we are in, that is a big gap we are filling."'

visualization news journalism transmedia storytelling virtuality retcon spectacle
september 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- TED: Peter Molyneux demos Milo, the virtual boy

The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Milo?

virtualworlds avatars artificialintelligence replicants toyfriends nurturance simulation virtuality voigtkampf from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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ThinkGeek -- The Cubes: Cubicle Playsets

'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.'

work toys toyfriends thesims virtuality pseudoworlds nostalgia kipple PKD lulz from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Perky Pat-Style Unemployment Layout

'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.'

america greatestdepression babyboomers pseudoworlds virtuality nostalgia kipple PKD from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Perky Pat Layout by Philip K. Dick from The Days of Perky Pat

'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.''

america greatestdepression babyboomers nostalgia pseudoworlds virtuality kipple PKD from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- The Days of Perky Pat

'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.'

america greatestdepression babyboomers nostalgia pseudoworlds virtuality kipple intergenerationalwarfare PKD from delicious
august 2010 by adamcrowe

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Gamasutra -- The Chemistry Of Game Design

'Upon the click of comprehension, a natural opiate called endomorphin, a messaging chemical in the brain similar in structure to morphine, is released. Players pursue skills with high perceived value over skills with low perceived value. Play is, perhaps counter intuitively, a deeply pragmatic activity. Our impulses to engage in play are instinctual, selected for by evolution because it provides us with the safe opportunity to learn behaviors that improve our lot in life without the threat of life threatening failure. We play because we are built to expect the eventual harvesting of utility from our apparently useless actions. We stop playing when we fail to find that utility. Our brains never evolved to deal with modern games. The existence of a set of skills that are tuned just to entertain us and that never actually lead up to a real world skill is something new to the world.'

gaming gamedesign gamemechanics skills simulation virtuality
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- The Sims Buy An Electric Renault

'With the Electric Vehicle Pack, the Sims not only get a shiny new electric car but solar panels and a windmill for generating clean electricity. “Electric vehicles are additionally going to appeal to younger, more socially conscious prospects and especially early adopters,” said Stephen Norman, Senior VP of Global Marketing for Renault. “This is the heartland of the Sims 3 community and it thus provides a great innovative way to build the Renault Brand just ahead of the Renault range of affordable electric vehicles themselves.” While Renault says the gasoline bills for Sims families are expected to decrease, we expect that players will also have to remind their Sims to plug in the car.' -- So if the car functions as a status object that allows you to express your sense of virtue to yourself and to others in the virtual world, by purchasing the vehicle there, have you exhausted your sense of virtue such that you'd have little motivation to purchase the 'real' thing in the 'real' world?

thesims virtualworlds virtualgoods advertising statusobjects narrativeobjects objects signalling consumering simulation virtuality thegamingofeverydaylife
may 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- The Cashless Society: Alex Jones on Economics 101

'Syndicated talk radio host and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones joins us on Economics 101 to discuss the cashless society. We discuss the looming reality of the scientific control grid and how people can fruitfully resist it.' -- "Once the cashless grid is in place then the bankers can completely abandon any connection to reality." -- Gold is money and nothing else.

money credit virtuality hologram technocracy panopticon puppetry thematrix AlexJones
april 2010 by adamcrowe

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FT.com -- FT Trading Room: Data centres - the new financial centres?

'When we think of financial centres we think of the City of London and Wall Street. But as Lilia Severine, head of business strategy at Interxion explains, the vast data centres that house traders' algorithmic "black boxes" are the financial centres of the future.' (People will go where the exchange-proximal data centres are. Stockholm, Zurich, and Madrid are growth areas.) -- Video inside

markets trading proximity latency arbitrage algorithms blackboxes virtuality thematrix huntergatherer bots retribalization
april 2010 by adamcrowe

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FUTURESTATES: Play by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman

'Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity. Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. A host of questions emerge: Who are the players? Who are the game designers? What is the purpose of these games? What is the point of winning? Where is it all leading? And if someone wants to stop playing, where in the hell is the escape button?'

thegamingofeverydaylife virtuality hyperreality liminality masks roleplay multitude film
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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HuffPost -- Couple Let Baby Starve To Death While Raising Virtual Baby Online

'Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and Choi Mi-sun, 25, would feed their three-month-old baby only when not at 12-hour-online sessions in a local internet café. The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter. After one such session in September the couple found their daughter dead and called police. An autopsy found the baby died from prolonged malnutrition. "It seems that taking care of their on-line game character erased any sense of guilt they may have had for neglecting their daughter."' -- Push button parenting.

virtualworlds virtuality surrogacy parenting nurturance simulation feedback thegamingofeverydaylife subsistenceclicking
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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YouTube -- Chris Hedges: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

'Journalist Chris Hedges discusses his recent book Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it, he charts the dramatic rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy, and illusion. Hedges argues we now live in two societies: one, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world and can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth; the other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic where serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins.' -- "Things become so grim that there's a retreat into self delusion." -- Excellent summary of progress already made along the road to serfdom, also an urgent warning of the rise of utopian christian fascism. It's a shame he calls for an equally utopian "militant" socialism to fight against it. Violence is violence is violence. Neither the left fist nor right fist can justify it.

america idiocracy delusion popculture culture emotionalism narcissism celebrity infantilism magick mindcontrol propaganda spectacle virtuality psychosis literaryculturevsoralculture fame irrationality
march 2010 by adamcrowe

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The WELL -- Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010

BS to Cory Doctorow: "Okay, you've treated your future as an "unpredictable lurching thing..." and now you're all morose about that... You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of "disruptive innovation," "disintermediation," "offshoring," "small pieces loosely joined," "de-monetization," "plug and play," "the network as a

technoutopianism virtuality deindustrialization theadvertisedlife BruceSterling via:2mm
january 2010 by adamcrowe

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‘Are video games too violent for humans/do they inspire I.R.L. violence?’ -progressive journalism in the 90s

'Feeling confused. At the beginning of this post, I thought video games were terrible for humanity, but then by the end of my internet research, I determined that there are positive uses for video game simulated technology. I feel like we need to promote human connections, but it would also be acceptable to round up the major threats to society, and allow them to get most of their life experiences in a simulated version of a violent reality. -- Do yall know of any video games that are safe/violent?' -- Hehe

HipsterRunoff gaming violence simulation virtuality
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Onion -- Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

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

TheOnion gaming realism simulation simulacra virtuality militaryentertainmentcomplex boredom lulz satire
november 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Onion -- Obama Trying Out Social Policies In 'Second Life'

'According to White House sources, an increasingly cautious President Obama has begun testing out parts of his executive agenda on the 15 million citizens of the online world known as Second Life. The commander in chief's avatar—an attractive African-American man with two more years of senatorial experience than the president—has already dedicated 3.5 billion Linden dollars to developing sustainable green energy in the virtual community. After moderators confirmed Monday that the virtual world is in no danger of terrorist attack because there is no death in Second Life, former vice president Dick Cheney reportedly canceled his recently opened account.' -- HAHA

virtuality polling lulz
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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CTheory.net -- Media Dopplers

'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.'

* internet networks cybernetics feedback technology temes collectiveintelligence hivemind puppetry culture #storage #ubiquity extensionsofman centralnervoussystem immunesystem themediumisthemassage data information outformation simulation simulacra matrix selfservers avatars bots doppleganger virtuality debt economics financialization hologram via:charlesfrith media
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Google Video -- The Age of Transitions

'Converging technology, transhumanism, and our future in the making. The cutting edge group known as transhumanists see a beautiful future brought about by artificial intelligence, life extension, and cybernetics. What one must realize before getting carried away with such utopian dreams is that transhumanism was born out of the elitist pseudo-science eugenics. This documentary provides vital information on the history of eugenics and its new cutting edge transformation.' -- Transhumanism is a eugenics cult. Well, yeah. The idea is to man-u-facture better slaves. This is what humans lust to do to each other. 'Twas ever thus.

* matrix virtualworlds virtualreality virtuality hivemind cybernetics cyborg performance technology temes technoutopianism singularity cults eugenics transhumanism posthumanism surveillance realityprogramming mindcontrol thoughtcrime precrime dystopia 1984 bravenewworld oligarchy slavery documentaries
september 2009 by adamcrowe

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Core77 -- Ford design researchers experimenting with virtual people

'This woman is fake! Ford is experimenting with a rather novel technique: Designing a car around a fictional but psychologically-fleshed-out avatar named Antonella. ...Ford's goal in using made-up characters is that they will help produce cars that transcend national traits and are instead built around international, psychological archetypes.' -- By designing a brain-dead supermodel??

ford design personas avatars virtuality
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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First Monday -- "You Looked Better on MySpace": Deception and authenticity on Web 2.0

On 'users’ criticism of a popular style of profile picture referred to as “MySpace Angles.” Reactions to this style of portraiture label the display of these photographs “deceptive,” alleging that MySpace Angles fool users into believing that the subject is more attractive than they actually are. ...the MySpace Angle commentary, revealing three main themes in users’ critique of MySpace Angles: 1) users who post these photographs are conforming to a social trend at the expense of their individuality; 2) the presentation of these photographs is narcissistic; and, 3) these photographs purposefully conceal the body. This case study displays a shift in the conception of deception online; on the social Web populated by SNSs, theories of deception and authenticity are called into question as users are increasingly anchored to their bodies and expected to effortlessly present an online self mirroring the offline self.' -- False advertising. Caveat emptor.

psychology myspace socialnetworking socialmedia behaviours representation avatars body appearance identity authenticity self performance masks shame narcissism photography deception virtuality fake theadvertisedlife
july 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Technium -- As If

'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...'

verisimilitude virtuality simulation simulacra fake evocativeobjects liminality liminalobjects relationalobjects objects KevinKelly
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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Techcrunch -- Videos: OTOY In Action. You Have To See This.

"OTOY is 100% browser-based, and works is all modern web browsers. All it requires is a broadband connection, and that will give you 720p (HD) graphics, with no plugins and no downloads. There is also a way to get 1080p graphics, though that’s a bit more intensive, obviously. But they key is that this is all done on OTOY’s servers and transmitted down from the cloud to run on whatever client you want, basically instantaneously." -- AMD and EA partnership

gaming cloud realtime 3D virtuality
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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New Scientist -- Virtual body parts take the guesswork out of medicine

'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.'

virtualization virtuality prosthetics body modelling simulation simulacra doppleganger
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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Times Online -- Break free of this world wide delusion

On 'web 2.0': 'The cult is the problem. I know that this article — it always happens — will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it. I will be called a Luddite. It is the cultists who threaten the web. They are the ones encouraging dreams of a utopia of the self. They fail to see that the web is just one more product of the biology, culture and history that make us what we are. In the real world, it is wonderful, certainly, but it is also porn, online brothels, privacy invasions, hucksterism, mindless babble and the vacant gaze that always accompanies the mindless pursuit of the new. The web is human and fallen; it is bestial as much as it is angelic. There are no new worlds. There is only this one.' -- And books still don't bend flat!

internet web technology criticism virtuality utopia
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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io9 -- 4 Ways Virtual Reality Living Could Suck

'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.'

virtualworlds cocooning behaviours simulation simulacra virtuality mirrorworlds
june 2009 by adamcrowe

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CTheory.net -- Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism

'It is from simulation that virtual games emerged, broke loose only to be reintegrated into the assemblages of world capital, as a means of inducing the "flexible personality" demanded by digital work, war and markets. As this hacker innovation was captured by the game factory, it has continued to generate surplus know-how that escapes complete capture in the commodity form. Some commentators see such "autoludic" activity as automatically empowering and democratizing. We, however, insist on what Paolo Virno terms "the ambivalence of the multitude." We ask of digital play what Félix Guattari asked of collective humanity: "how can it find a compass by which to reorient itself?" His response, by "remaking social practices," was grounded in a reading of transformations already underway. To speak of games of multitude is to assert that the possibilities of virtual play exceed its imperial manifestations, and the desires of many gamers surpass marketers' caricatures of them.'

* culture media gaming virtualgoods mmorpg RMT ludocapitalism work seriousgames affectivelabour immateriallabour virtuality simulation play theory praxis activism multitude cognitivesurplus alternativerealitygaming transformation design socialsoftware gamemechanics recuperation ideology hegemony carrierobjects objects militaryentertainmentcomplex hackersvsvectoralists globalization empire thegamingofeverydaylife nickdyerwitheford via:jullandibbell "capitalism"
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- Unknown unknown

'"There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know." - This statement was made at a press briefing given by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 12 2002. -- Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth, the unknown known, that which we don't know or intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values.' -- "What you don't know you know controls you but you don't control it." (The Reality of the Virtual, Zizek)

blackswans risk wrong philosophy epistemology psychoanalysis consciousness unconsciousness reality virtuality repression freud quotes SlavojŽižek unconscious denial memoryhole
may 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- The Messy Future of Memory-Editing Drugs

'It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now. #Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion [than adding memories]. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods. The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously. You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave. We can't trust our memories. But on the other hand, our memories are the basis for most of our decisions. We take it as a given that we can trust them, which is problematic. We have authentic fake memories, in a sense.'

psychology drugs memory editing experience authenticity self perception realityprogramming reality virtuality fake illusion delusion simulation philosophy
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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Flickr -- Lucifron

'As you can see, the screen is dominated by instrumentation.'

dashboard data interface virtuality numbers simulation virtualworlds worldofwarcraft
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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Telegraph -- 'We don't need a Twittericulum'

'"Think of a princess, a beautiful princess locked up in a tower. Think about how she must feel, yearning to escape. Now, imagine you are reading a book about that princess, engrossed in what is to become of her. You feel for her, you care about her, you want her to escape. Yes?" she asks. Ah, yes, I suppose so, I nod, wondering where we are going. "You see," she says flashing her trademark, wide-mouthed smile. "Don't tell me youngsters playing a computer game in which the princess is locked in the tower give a stuff if she gets out or not. They don't. They don't because those sort of computer games aren't about empathising with or understanding her plight. She is just there as a goal. The game is all about getting her out of the tower because that means they win. Game over. It's all so meaningless. In the truest sense of the word," she says shaking her head in exasperation. "It… means… nothing," she says slowly, drumming her red fingernails on her desk to emphasise each word.' -- True

* psychology thegamingofeverydaylife gaming behaviours augmentationistsvsimmersionists immersion imagination empathy emotionalintelligence simulation numbers points continuouspartialattention attention concentration intermittentvariablerewards feedback addiction virtuality reality children learning education socialmedia twitter boredom
april 2009 by adamcrowe

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New York Magazine -- How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street

'I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends. I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds. I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'

economics finance securitization derivatives risk control #complexity prediction software numbers simulation virtuality blackboxes
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Mark Cuban -- Where is the internet when we need it?

'Its unfortunate, but true. The internet is not a driving force in our economy. Its a stable mature platform on the same level as electricity, phone service and TV. You can’t live without it, but don’t it expect to be a catalyst for the economy. We now argue about whether new companies have a business model and can be profitable and get excited about updates rather than new competitors. Thats the sign of a stable market. Its time to look elsewhere for that “thing” that takes us out of our economic doldrums. These blog posts created a big stir when I originally posted them. They aren’t controversial anymore. If you are young, super-smart and looking to have an impact. The internet is what your mom and dad got excited about. Find something us for all of us to rally around and change our lives. Please.' -- The internet is shit. It is vitally important that we all realize this and move on: http://www.internetisshit.org

atoms bits virtuality technology temes internet utility via:damiano
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Harpers -- Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits by Wendell Berry

"... once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition ... the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable... this credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress. And, necessarily, it must lead to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. That it should finally produce a crowning cult of political limitlessness is only a matter of mad logic." -- Supersize We

* economics debt ponzi criticism consumption consumerism delusion denial insanity virtuality reality freedom friendship ethics trust loyalty empathy communities civility ecology sustainability austerity humanity philosophy religion art life
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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I am thinking about buying a new video game because it looks cool.

"Don’t understand why u would spend hours per day in front of a screen pretending that ur some1 ur not, just to accomplish these arbitrary goals. After u ‘beat’ a video game, do u feel more ‘accomplished’? Do u call ur family and tell them that u ‘won’? I wish I could be a ‘gamer’ and really unite with a network of people who I know in real life and not in ‘real’ life. I wish I could engage in teambuilding experiences. I wish I could share the beauty of gaming with people who are addicted to getting NEW information instantaneously on the internet. If only they could see that there is a value in escaping from ‘the real world.’ Who needs to know everything right away? Who needs to be so connected? I want to be a gamer. I want to take breaks from ‘internet reality’ and accomplish goals and missions in an environment that was created by AZN engineers who work in a free spirited workplace." -- Hehe.

psychology gaming authencity virtuality reality lulz
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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MarketWatch -- The $700 trillion elephant in the room

'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)

economics finance derivatives shadowbankingsystem fake simulacra virtuality hologram quadrillion
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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Marginal Utility -- Theses inspired by Hipster Runoff

Quotable! -- "#2. Social criticism has been resolved into self-expression. #3. Hipsterism consists of its own repudiation. #4. Social networks mandate identity formation on the model of cloud computing ...we now have self as a service. #5. The variables we transfer to the cloud increasingly delimit the field of identity and condition what sorts of data will subsequently be considered relevant or applicable. #6. Existence online... forces on us unremitting self-consciousness. There can be no harmonizing of action and its preconception; no spontaneous authenticity. #9. The collapse of language into abbreviations, arbitrary conditions of brevity, self-enforced infantilism and the like are attempts to import the the inflexible conditions of reality, against which we shape ourselves, to the online world, which lacks such conditions and threatens us with an amorphous and intolerable incontinence of identity." -- Phew!

internet web self identity infantilism criticism selfservers sousveillance feedback criticaldistance precuperation authenticity reality virtuality popculture culture
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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mi2g -- The Four Scenarios: Debt Deflation, Hyperinflation, Quadrillion Play and Muddle Through (15 November 2008)

"Banks and brokers were, in effect, printing their own proprietary issues of "money" via complex securities and as a result their supply of money grew to exceed by at least one order of magnitude the money printed by central banks. ...quadrillion dollar worth private currencies - paper assets - have fuelled the globalisation process, massive and unprecedented world GDP growth, mergers and acquisitions, and large scale industrial / infrastructure projects, until natural boundary conditions kicked in, ie, the earth ran out of raw materials and natural resources in sufficient quantities. -- The power of central bankers may have been permanently eroded given that the centre of gravity has now shifted. It lies with the financial markets and their participators who transact the deflating quadrillion dollar plus paper asset equation of which fiat currency is a much smaller quantum."

* economics debt shadowbankingsystem leverage derivatives securitization ponzi inflation deflation money finance virtuality predictions quadrillion
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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CynicusEconomicus -- The Economic Crisis: The Underlying Cause

"... the emerging economies lent their new found wealth from their increasingly large workforce into the West, and in doing so allowed the emergence of the so called 'service economy', or 'post-industrial economy'. The lending was built on an unfounded belief that, because the West had been economically dominant for so long, it would always be in a position to pay back the lending. The problem with the lending was that there were no productive wealth creating opportunities to soak up the money, (e.g. investment in manufacturing was being directed towards the emerging economies themselves) such that the money pouring into countries like the UK and US was directed into asset price inflation (real estate), consumption and consumer credit, and excessive government borrowing. ... the world economy has been shaped around a perception of growth in wealth in countries like the UK and US, whilst the real growth in wealth has been taking place elsewhere." -- Hollow-gram (Recommended)

* economics malinvestment debt credit bubble multipliereffect consumption GDP growth wealth capital deflation inflation reality virtuality illusion misdirection fake uk america china japan
march 2009 by adamcrowe

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io9 -- Posthumans: Posthumans Go Hollywood! (Maybe.)

"As much as futurists and transhuman pundits would like to insist that the Singularity is coming in our lifetimes, and that the Singularity will turn us posthuman, most posthuman narratives don't really function as predictions about the future at all. Instead, they have two super-important functions: #First, they're metaphors for our current super-rapid progress. We haven't transcended our humanity at all, but we have made huge advances in medicine and improved our life-expectancy massively. #Second, posthuman stories are pure escapism. It's pretty awesome to imagine futures where we can be instantly beautiful, transform our bodies based on our whims, live to be a zillion years old, and vastly expand our mental faculties, etc. In some ways, it's the purest distillation of science fiction's promise: even more than visiting the stars and meeting aliens, getting past our crappy human weaknesses and becoming fully awesome, thanks to science."

technology storytelling tropes metaphor therapy sciencefiction transhumanism posthumanism simulation virtuality singularity utopia
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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"If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" By Philip K. Dick

"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."

storytelling sciencefiction pseudoworlds solipsism consciousness simulacra fake fraud reality virtuality alternativereality memory philosophy religion madness PKD
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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MIT World -- The Inner History of Devices (Video)

'There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.” Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”'

psychology technology relationalobjects evocativeobjects objects relationships emotion rorschach projection transference ambientintimacy intimacy identity self virtuality aliveness sentience nurturance philosophy SherryTurkle
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Virtuality and its Discontents (PDF)

"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?"

psychology virtualworlds MUDs communities authenticity reality virtuality simulation simulacra roleplay self multitude transformation reflexivity SherryTurkle pdf mecosystem
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Multiple Subjectivity and Virtual Community at the End of the Freudian Century (PDF)

"We construct our objects and our objects construct use." -- "Online experiences of playing multiple aspects of self are resonant with theories that imagine the self as a multiple and fragmented, or as a society of selves."-- "Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those with thich people can become actively involved. They tend to be theories that can be 'played' with. So one way to examine the social appropriability of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with, objects that can help theory move beyond intellectual circles. For Freud's work, dreams and slips of the tongue carried ideas... today computational experiences carry ideas."

psychology virtualworlds behaviours identity self multitude simulation virtuality roleplay acting multiplepersonalitydisorder Freud ideas language diffusion theory theoryobjects objects reflexivity subjectivity transformation SherryTurkle pdf mecosystem
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Seeing Through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation (PDF)

"understanding the assumptions that underlie simulation is a key element of political power. People who understand the distortions imposed by simulations are in a position to call for more direct economic and political feedback, new kinds of representation, more channels of information. They demand greater transparency in their simulations (particularly the ones we use to make real-life decisions) make their underlying models more accessible. We come to written text with centuries-long habits of readership. At the very least, we have learned to begin with the journalist's traditional questions: Who wrote these words, what is their message, why were they written, how are they situated in time and place, politically and socially? A central goal for computer education must now be to teach students to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit. The specific questions may be different but the intent is the same: to develop habits or readership appropriate to a culture of simulation."

criticism psychology politics simulation education learning literacy interface transparency opacity reality virtuality realityprogramming representation reflexivity ideology hegemony power thegamingofeverydaylife SherryTurkle pdf
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Sex, Lies, and Avatars (PDF)

'What is real? What is virtual? What is living? What is nonliving? Of the many selves I am, who is he real me?' -- 'Computing would offer [Turkle] endless moments of sweet epiphany when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest. Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for terms of Lacan's manifesto: computing is constructed as a set of languages; language (the relationship of terms to each other) is the structure that forms computing; the boundaries between data and execution are blurred; and so forth. What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism–decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)–is rendered clear at last.'

psychology psychoanalysis Freud postmodernism simulation culture bricolage language reflexivity Lacan theory theoryobjects objects existentialism reality virtuality identity multitude self selfobjects liminality media computers metaphysics virtualworlds MUDs avatars roleplay improvisation performance transformation SherryTurkle pdf improv
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Harvard Business Review -- Technology and Human Vulnerability: A Conversation with MIT's Sherry Turkle (PDF)

'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."'

psychology relationships robots replicants toys toyfriends nurturance relationalobjects objects simulation simulacra reality virtuality authenticity humanity cyborg aliveness emotion projection transference philosophy rorschach identity play reflexivity transformation technology productnarratives SherryTurkle pdf
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Who Am We? (PDF)

'... we "project ourselves into our own drama, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star... computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual."' -- '... once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibility? And even more basic: who and what am I? What is the connection between my physical and virtual bodies? And is it different in different cyberspaces? These questions are equally central for thinking about community. What is the nature of our social ties? What kind of accountability do we have for our actions in real life and in cyberspace? What kind of society or societies are we creating, bot on and off the screen?'

psychology virtualworlds simulation transformation roleplay self multitude identity reflexivity reality virtuality liminality philosophy psychoanalysis Freud SherryTurkle pdf mecosystem
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Atlantic -- The Autumn of the Multitaskers by Walter Kirn

A commonsense: 'Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. -- The Multitasking Crash. The Attention-Deficit Recession. -- Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free. This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. ...What has the madness of multitasking cost us? (Six hundred and fifty billion dollars...) The better question might be: What hasn’t it?' -- Hehe. NO BAILOUTS FOR THE ATTENTION ECONOMY!

psychology cognition multitasking contextswitching continuouspartialattention attention ADHD attentiondeficithyperactivedisorder productivity currency fake virtuality reality delusion hypnotism ponzi
february 2009 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in MUDs (PDF)

'"This is more real than my real life." says a character who turns out to be a man playing a woman who pretending to be a man. In this game the rules of social interaction are built not received. Traditional role playing prompts reflection on personal and interpersonal issues, but in games that take place in ongoing virtual societies such as MUDs, the focus is on larger social and cultural themes as well. The networked computer serves as an "evocative object" for thinking about community. Additionally, people playing in the MUDs struggle towards a new, still tentative discourse about the nature of a social world that is populated both by people and by programs. In this, life in the MUD may serve as a harbinger of what is to come in the social spaces that we still contrast with the virtual by calling the "real."'

psychology virtualworlds roleplay MUDs simulation therapy reflexivity transformation intimacy virtuality reality self identity distributed multitude rorschach relationalobjects objects turingtest emotionalintelligence empathy replicants SherryTurkle pdf mecosystem
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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Forbes -- Can You Hear Me Now? (PDF)

'We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.' -- '"Being put on pause" is how one of my students describes the feeling of walking down the street with a friend who has just taken a call on his cell. "I mean I can't go anywhere; I can't just pull out some work. I've just been stopped in midsentence and am expected to remember, to hold the thread of conversation until he wants to pick it up again."

psychology tethered distributed self multitude relationalobjects objects extensionsofman centralnervoussystem brain mind themediumisthemassage ambientimmediacy ambientintacy attention continuouspartialattention intermitentvariablerewards presence telepresence virtuality technology behaviours mobile SherryTurkle pdf media
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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CynicusEconomicus -- The Banking System: Synthetic Economics

"The whole system relies on confidence. That confidence relies on the belief that the banks have invested the money that they hold wisely, and that the value of the assets that they hold has retained sufficient value for the money deposited to be returned. The good side of the system is that it allows for rapid economic expansion, but the downside is that there is a fragility, and that the fragility is built upon the foundations of the system - confidence. The whole system is no more real than the confidence in the Linden Dollar, and the economy of the world is no more real than the economy of Second Life. It is all built upon belief in the value of currencies that have no real value, except what we subjectively give them."

economics currency virtualworlds virtualgoods property intellectualproperty mmorpg gamemechanics thegamingofeverydaylife virtuality work play fractionalreserve banking fiat money scarcity value
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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SBIR/STTR -- Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members

'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*

militaryentertainmentcomplex avatars simulacra simulation virtuality telepresence aliveness halflife death psychology
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Atlantic -- The Fears of a Clown

"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."

ego self authenticity fraud fake existentialism philosophy metaphysics reality virtuality simulacra sousveillance paranoia acting archetypes fool JimCarey video
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Atlantic -- The Existential Clown

"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.)

ego self authenticity fraud fake solipsism existentialism philosophy metaphysics reality virtuality simulacra sousveillance paranoia acting archetypes fool JimCarey
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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The Atlantic -- The Existential Clown

"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."

* ego self authenticity fraud fake solipsism existentialism philosophy metaphysics reality virtuality simulacra sousveillance paranoia acting archetypes fool JimCarey
january 2009 by adamcrowe

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Silicon Valley Radio -- Transcript of Sherry Turkle Interview

"[I discovered] someone online called Dr. Sherry, who advertised herself as a cyberpsychologist who was doing interviews and studying people in this virtual environment. And I hadn't created Dr. Sherry. This was a character created by other people. And the question was, what is my relationship with this character created by other people who had in a sense used my name as a trademark? Or a mnemonic, a kind of cultural mnemonic for being a cybershrink, in brief? I think that each of us is a persona. Each of us has spent a lifetime creating a persona. And how do we really feel about its potential appropriation in virtual space by other people? There was no intent to hurt me. And as a matter of fact it turned out the intent was to flatter me, by taking my name in a kind of virtual appropriation, as though I were a trademark for Cybershrink. I think those kinds of questions about your identity and how much you can protect it are going to become very salient."

reflexivity identity psychology virtualworlds avatar impersonation persona doppleganger appropriation multipleusename virtuality roleplay self simulation fraud fake SherryTurkle
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Google Video -- Adam Curtis: The Living Dead 2/3: You Have Used Me as a Fish Long Enough

'In this episode, the history of brainwashing and mind control [is] examined. The angle pursued by Curtis [is] the way in which psychiatry pursued tabula rasa theories of the mind, initially in order to set people free from traumatic memories and then later as a potential instrument of social control.'

psychology memory neuroscience WilderPenfield therapy brainwashing mind control misinformation paranoia hysteria reality alternatereality realityprogramming artificialintelligence simulation virtuality militaryentertainmentcomplex weapons war documentaries AdamCurtis psychohistory cognitivescience psyops mindcontrol MK espionage
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- Who Am We?

"People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use. Without a deep understanding of the many selves that we express in the virtual, we cannot use our experiences there to enrich the real. If we cultivate our awareness of what stands behind our screen personae, we are more likely to succeed in using virtual experience for personal transformation."

psychology virtualworlds simulation transformation roleplay self identity reflexivity reality virtuality liminality SherryTurkle
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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Cracked.com -- 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives: The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it. #2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either: The problem is that peacefully dealing with incompatible people is crucial to living in a society. In fact, if you think about it, peacefully dealing with people you can't stand is society. #4. Online company only makes us lonelier: When someone speaks to you face-to-face, what percentage of the meaning is actually in the words, as opposed to the body language and tone of voice? ... in Text World, all that is stripped away... absent a sense of the other person's mood, every line we read gets filtered through our own mood instead. #5. We don't get criticized enough. #7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less: There's one advantage to having mostly online friends, and it's one that nobody ever talks about: They demand less from you.'

* truisms psychology melancholy control emotionalintelligence emotion mood bodylanguage relationships friendship empathy sympathy sociology civility manners tolerance individualism existentialism self identity feedback #diversity #specialization internet virtuality reality evolutionarypsychology communication work life
december 2008 by adamcrowe

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NoahBrier.com -- Baudrillard, Economics and the Death of Reality

"Baudrillard walks through the four phases of image transformation: #1. It is the reflection of a basic reality. #2. It masks and perverts a basic reality. #3. It masks the absence of a basic reality. #4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum. -- Now mapped against my simple understanding of economic history: #1. Trade: It is the reflection (or formalization) of a basic reality (give something, get something). #2. Money: It masks and perverts a basic reality (trade). #3. Credit: It masks the absence of a basic reality (money). #4. Collatorized Debt Obligations (or any similar complex financial products): It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum." -- ;^) -- ('01. There is a double spooking the world, the double of abstraction' -- A Hacker Manifesto)

economics debt fraud hacks usevaluevssignvalue abstraction reality virtuality simulation simulacra fake thegamingofeverydaylife JeanBaudrillard
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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vanityfair.com -- Wall Street Lays Another Egg: Politics & Power by Niall Ferguson

"This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth... On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships."

economics debt fraud history finance property junkbonds leverage inflation risk hedging wealth value psychology fear greed trust delusion denial depression numbers myopia herd conformity groupthink doublethink reality virtuality ponzi simulacra fake NiallFerguson recession
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wired -- The Unreal Estate Boom

"... scarcity has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Sure, people like the big, graphics-based chat arenas such as the Palace, where talk was the only real commodity, and that commodity was, as usual, cheap. But the worlds they actually want to be in - bad enough to pay an entrance fee - are the ones that make the digital goods hard to get to and even harder to copy. The addictive appeal of online role-playing games suggests that people will choose the constraining and challenging world over the one that sets them free."

* JulianDibbell gaming thegamingofeverydaylife work mmorpg economics virtualgoods virtualworlds digital scarcity immateriallabour virtuality
november 2008 by adamcrowe

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Wikipedia -- The Matrix (series)

"The Matrix series has also inspired a new religious movement called Matrixism: The path of the One. The religion was conceived by an anonymous group in mid-2004 and by November 2004 it claimed to have attracted upwards of 300 members. Current reports indicate that there are now approximately 16,000 followers of Matrixism worldwide. Even though Matrixism has grown substantially and its Geocities website (username: matrixism2069) has received significant attention in the media some still debate whether Matrixists are serious about their beliefs."

matrix religion transmedia narrativeacts virtuality
october 2008 by adamcrowe

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Alt Text -- Stash Cash in These Uniquely Geeky Investments

"#Online Money: American markets aren't looking so great, and the rest of the world is eyeing us like a hiker trying to discern a dead tree branch from a live wolverine. It's not inconceivable that all government currencies in the entire world could simultaneously devalue to the point where people are trying to figure out if $1,000 bills are compostable. However, there are plenty of other forms of money. The upcoming World of Warcraft expansion will no doubt energize the Azerothian gold piece. And no matter how bad things get, 500 Wii Points will buy a copy of Clu Clu Land. Just convert all your cash and holdings to electronic money and wait out the storm."

funny money virtualworlds virtualgoods virtuality
october 2008 by adamcrowe

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The Long Now Blog -- Avatar Afterlife

"Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life.... A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife."

avatars virtuality distributed self selfservers aliveness life death afterlife ghost ghostinthemachine #storage
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Sherry Turkle -- After several generations of living in the computer culture, simulation will become fully naturalized. Authenticity in the traditional sense loses its value, a vestige of another time.

'For these children, in this context, aliveness seems to have no intrinsic value. Rather, it is useful only if needed for a specific purpose. "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive?'

reality virtuality simulacra simulation aliveness relationships relationalobjects objects projection nurturance psychology children technology toys robots symbiosis intimacy support synaptics kinesthetic SherryTurkle
august 2008 by adamcrowe

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Brainstorms -- Rheingold Interviews Turkle

"... women who experiment with playing men routinely comment on how little help they are offered... [they] may go on to reflect on how "help" has shaped them: has its availability made them more likely to see themselves as people who needed it?"

SherryTurkle gender simulation roleplay identity reality virtuality reflexivity self
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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Dark Roasted Blend -- Three Tips for Hacking Reality

'"I always look like a dork when I'm actually running a hack stack," laughs Bruder.'

hacking information magic reality virtuality realityprogramming alternativereality
july 2008 by adamcrowe

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IOL -- Paralysed man takes a walk in virtual world

"In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking." -- The brain freed from the body.

virtualworlds neuroscience brainwaves interface design virtuality
june 2008 by adamcrowe

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