I _love_ my Mockulus Qwest no. 9. I’ve taken to wearing it to bed so I get to earn Zuckbucks whilst I sleep!
[P.S. Palmer Eldritch is a genie, Suckerberg’s man boobs are the digital reincarnation of those of Augustus Caesar, and Peter Teak is a modern Medici (and all-round handsome rake)!]
I would recommend anyone interested in this topic read ‘Dawn of the New Everything’ by Jaron Lanier, which is really quite honest about both the positives and negatives of VR. Having only recently had a chance to try it out, I feel like it’s really just another medium (a rather intense and currently flawed one I find), like other interactive media, with potential for expression, utility, unique communication and imagination, but also for disconnection from reality/escapism, addiction, dystopia, tracking, control etc. A lot of pronouncements in this article and the Wired one feel as overblown and one-sided as the hype is on the other side of the fence…
There are perfectly good use cases for VR/AR whereby we could save on travel/pollution by telepresence collaboration, help people with eg. disabilities, perform remote work in hostile environments, offer therapeutic treatments, experiment with identity etc. or just as another form of daft escapism or art (and a potentially more active one than some at that). Nothing stops people from using it for short periods and then enjoying rich and fulfilling real lives, in the same way that you’ve got couch potatoes vs. people who just enjoy the escapism of occasionally watching a couple of tv shows/playing games etc. …I do find FB’s closed/sign-in etc. subsidised uber-tracking thang is worrying though…
Oh, so they’re ‘rebooting’ it. I wish they would hire a writer with the imagination to do something completely new without all that baggage. …I agree - there’s darkness in Columbo, but it’s much subtler and is tempered by the kindness and charm of Columbo himself. I see why they do it, but the ‘just one more’ episode netflix-thing easily gets tiresome and ends up prolonging some plots/story arcs unnaturally and unsatisfactorily. The little of ‘Discovery’ I watched I felt no engagement with at all - the writing I thought was generic and boring and the characters seemed two-dimensional - but maybe I’m just behind the times: ‘Enterprise’ grew on me a few years down the line (though not the opening theme!)
That’s a really good point: like having a degree of immunity through prolonged exposure! Though couldn’t all that disinformation also mean that they eventually are bludgeoned into believing in whatever version of ‘reality’ has been constantly presented/ represented (or that they just simply ‘switch off’)? …reminds me of the idea of the ‘Overton Window’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
That’s an interesting question. I’m sure as you say that there probably are such operations (…do you have articles/information you can find to link to?), but perhaps they are disguised differently, more effectively countered or perhaps subtler/different in nature? I would guess: firstly the KGB doesn’t exist any more, its successor (for the Russian Federation) is the ‘FSB’, but I would imagine that there’s a lot of crossover between the two in terms of tactics/specialities? (…esp. given the president started his career in the KGB…). Agencies on all ‘sides’ always have used various disinformation campaigns historically at one time or another (ideas of P.R./public relations initially concretized by Edward Bernays?:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays ). You could cite that the CIA would sometimes fund ‘soft power’ media like artists/films/music etc. that perhaps ‘worked’ in different ways, whilst KGB famously planted eg. fake news articles/plants to journalists etc.? The USSR seemed to excel at finding weak points in political/civic culture/society and exploiting those pressure points? Maybe the countering of these types of tactics is part of the idea behind isolating Russia’s internet, as China has more or less effectively done - also this could be an exportable commodity to authoritarian regimes - you can see the attraction perhaps to eg. customers of NSO group …counter to the old quote from Bill Clinton about ‘nailing jello to a wall’. The Russian Federations’ political model differs, perhaps in degree at least, to eg. the U.S.’s in that although a ‘representative democracy’, there is maybe a higher degree of integration, even if that is through networks of money/power/influence/intimidation etc. between the state and media and a higher acceptance of suppression of counter-narratives? The USA/Europe’s strength is partly built on freedom of information/ travel/ diversity/ flow of goods/services I would argue, but that can also be (rather cleverly) used against them in a kind of low-level assymetric ‘warfare’. A lot of ordinary people on both sides have neither the time nor will (and maybe effective education?) to try and separate facts from fiction basically and so these types of ops succeed... So: a difference in operational ‘philosophy’ and a historical/cultural background of different areas of ‘success’ to draw on maybe?
Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.
This is so messed up. If you’re reading this and are in this ‘business’, or associated with it/supporting it, please, for the sake of yourself, your families, humanity and the planet we live on, get out if you have any choice! It’s been bad enough with state actors, lobbyists etc etc. for years anyhow - don’t make it worse for the sake of a quick buck!
Fiction (/well-written fiction at least) is an artform, like music or, um, art, or even design you know? It’s a communication medium meant (amongst other things) to convey something of the human experience that is perhaps intangible or illogical. Fiction is normally very honest and open about not being factual. I take your point though that when people take fictions as truth, whether through the reader’s ignorance, or the writer’s misrepresentation, that can be extremely problematic - that is not the fault of fiction I would argue though, but rather of the context/audience that receives it/the manner in which they interpret it (I suppose there are exceptions like parodies/eg. ‘War Of The Worlds’ or something?). I currently read much less fiction than I used to when I was a kid (my mum was an English teacher), but I can assure you that my brain is almost always perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two on some level. I may choose to suspend my disbelief or feel feelings prompted by the material, but am simultaneously aware that this is not objective reality. I agree with your point though that much fiction/fictionalised material that has been interpreted as real has caused much damage - people really like stories (isn’t this an inherent part of our psychology?) and tend to inevitably construct them around even the most dispassionate material (in the same way we tend to anthropomorphise stuff I guess?). Trick is we need some training to help us ‘read’ media with a questioning/‘between the lines’ sort of rationale/focussed attention/looking for bias/manipulation/being self-aware etc etc…
Do you think? …impressive technology perhaps, but it still just looks like really poor pastiche to me… I don’t really understand why putting artists out of work is a useful boon to society/focus of research? Is it mainly to do with having easy access to large datasets to rip off/mulch?
Ok - please forgive/correct/help me out here if I’ve got the sticky end of the stick, but both the premise and conclusion, very clumsily put, seem to me to be: ‘formal or classical systems of logic are more limited/not as rigorous/less useful/less challenging than some people believe them to be, especially when applied to
Aristotelean/Thomist philosophy/conceptions, because of their ‘merely’ relational syntax/nature and because they cannot adequately express/encapsulate concepts/‘things’ that the author holds to be true or self-evident features of his perceived reality/received wisdom/everyday utility/a priori metaphysics. The author concedes its usefulness in certain contexts: particularly when combined/in conjunction with his favoured philosophical ideas, or used in support of them, but that it does not present a challenge/undermine the author’s ideas/beliefs in ways that presumably some prior/present critics might suggest.’
Good point: perhaps I have an unrealistic, dumb, ill-educated or otherwise malformed ideal/view that philosophers should somehow be constantly challenging their own ideas, using their writing/discourse as an instrument to help them reach better conclusions through statement/contradiction (something like constructing an academic essay using thesis/antithesis/synthesis I guess?) and disputing them internally… Actually, as you suggest, the ‘correct’ approach to philosophy, or at least the only realistically possible approach, is to repeatedly state prior beliefs in the most persuasive way possible and then presumably to defend your a priori views from any challenges by others - only ‘testing’ those ideas in reaction by engaging in external debate rather than an internal one… I wonder though, doesn’t the outcome/process of that debate have to register internally somehow, for one side at least, for it to have any point? …for an evolution of the thinkers involved’s ideas to take place, is it not necessary for one/both sides in a debate to have at least a somewhat open mind, even as they strongly debate their particular ‘side’? …to allow one side to change its mind when the arguments put forward by the opposition are significantly strong - otherwise the debate would inevitably become stale, never-changing and circular? If one side is fixed in its beliefs, why would the other side bother debating them at all? If they were interested in adopting those ideas they should merely ‘receive’ them, rather than engage in an inevitably fruitless debate? I suppose if you have an unshakable belief that there exists an eternal and ever-present truth that you are inalterably sure of, and others who don’t agree with you are simply less enlightened, then you may feel that you should never have cause to change your mind - why should you, as you are already privy to the ultimate truth? Your task then, if you are communicative/evangelical/missionary in some way at least, is only to expound that truth to others? Your writing becomes a vehicle to promote your ‘truth’ - truth informed by mystically or intuitively received wisdom, never conjecture… Your debate/writing etc. is not a way to clarify your own ideas, but rather to show others the folly of contrary thoughts?