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February 2 · Issue #98 · View online
A newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair collected and written by @poploser.
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HQ Trivia is great and destined for failure. Itās problems are well known and now itās really easy to cheat, which wrecks what fun people were still having. This was always going to end like another Draw Somethingārapid growth, lots of attention and then we all move on to the next shiny thing because, well, we are pretty simple creatures, all things considered. Except HQ didnāt get the $180M payoff. Yet. It did, however, make painfully clear how little I know about US geography.Ā It wasĀ fun, though, right? There was something about the way the app was put together (glitches aside) that makes it really appealing. The games at regular times, the bonus games at irregular times, the seemingly random cash prize amounts, weird guests, the functionally-useless-but-necessary-to-reinforce-this-shit-is-live chat, the way ScottĀ Rogowsky looks ever-so-slightly off camera in a way that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and so on. They didnāt make a game, they made a gameshow, but one we could all play together. Thatās brilliant, if fleeting. Still, would you be surprised to see some version of Jeopardy! coming along and doing similar?Ā Housekeeping: Notice some changes? I dumped MailChimp in favour of Revue to send this thing. MailChimp is great, but I can automate more things with Revue, saving me a lot of time. (Fun fact: Iāve been putting together Pop Loser in HTML and pasting it into MailChimp all this time.) Revue limits features and design, which is very soothing at this point in my life. Otherwise, same old, same old around here.Ā Also: Because itās a two-week issue, itās a bit⦠long. Sorry.Ā
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White Girls Saying [N-Word] on Instagram Is the Black Mirrorest Black Mirror Shit
Social media, the lessons we learn and the inherent shallowness of the world we are creating. This is extreme and cynical and dark, but not necessarily wrong.Ā The lesson people like Natalia take from this is that it is imperative to be better about anonymizing your Instas and Finstas and various other social media accounts, lest you get caught up in something similar. Yes, the underlying behavior is reprehensible and itself should be addressed first and foremost, but few if any are all that interested in seriously understanding or engaging with the behavior, and prefer to condemn the person who said the bad thing and leave it at that.
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the thing with saying everything is like Black Mirror misses the point. Black Mirror reflects our reality; it's not the other way around. https://t.co/Wp4SeD3FCr
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What if a Healthier Facebook Is Just ⦠Instagram?
Last week, Facebook unveiled its latest attempt to rein in its flagship product. In an effort to curb false news, it announced it would be allowing Facebook users to rank news outlets by trustworthiness, and consider those scores when deciding which news stories to display in usersā feeds.Ā But this kind of minor algorithmic knob-fiddling may not be enough. Instead, Facebook should consider using what itās learned with Instagram, which it acquired in 2012, to embark on a gut renovation.
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Is 2018 the Year We Step Away from SocialĀ Media?
Cutting yourself off from social media in at least a limited capacity has become trendy among people who like minimalist plants and TED Talks about feeling. Iām not as doom and gloom as a lot of people about this stuff, but lately I donāt feel so good about it. Like, I close Twitter and I know I feel worse than when I opened it. And then, probably, I open it again within a few seconds. Itās some bad shit. Iām not cutting myself off anytime soon, but I have taken that half-step of limiting the notifications I get from my phone.Ā You donāt need me to tell you how it feels to check Twitter and suddenly feel anxious because our president has tweeted something incendiary or untrue; to have the next hour of your day derailed because somebody is angry with someone else and you decide to follow the thread. As fun as it is to read other peopleās thoughts, itās much less fun to absorb hundreds of peopleās emotions ā especially on sites designed to compel us to absorb as much as possible. The social contract of the internet seems to insist that thereās a nobility in weathering degradation. You can call me oversensitive, but the truth is I got far better than any human being should be at absorbing astonishing cruelty and feeling nothing. Undersensitivity was just another piece of workplace safety gear. The fact that weāve learned to cope doesnāt mean we shouldnāt demand better. Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So, I left. I categorically do not enjoy my own thoughts.Ā
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Everyone Is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now
We have created an amazing and insanely dangerous new technology. Of course its first popular application is porn.Ā A redditor even created an app specifically designed to allow users without a computer science background to create AI-assisted fake porn. All the tools one needs to make these videos are free, readily available, and accompanied with instructions that walk novices through the process. These are developments we and the experts we spoke to warned about in our original article. They have arrived with terrifying speed. Itās a noxious smoothie made of some of todayās worst internet problems. Itās a new frontier for nonconsensual pornography and fake news alike. (Doctored videos of political candidates saying outlandish things in 3, 2⦠.) And worst of all? If you live in the United States and someone does this with your face, the law canāt really help you. Some users in a deepfakes Discord chatroom where enthusiasts were trading tips claimed to be actively creating videos of people they know: women they went to high school with, for example. One user said that they made a āpretty goodā video of a girl they went to high school with, using around 380 pictures scraped from her Instagram and Facebook accounts.
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Googleās Arts and Culture App and the Damaging Bias of Technology
Technology influences culture, but it also comes from culture, which is problematic for a few reasons.Ā Amidst the chatter, however, visible minority users quickly discovered that the app did a poor job matching them. East Asian users were matched with caricatures or generic Asian faces, while others found no match at all, prompting criticism that the app was, if not exactly racist, then at least biased. Here again, the choices made in designing a technology had led to some people being able to revel in seeing themselves, but left others to look into a mirror and see no reflection. It highlights a growing issue in which the increasing importance of technology in our lives is also accompanied by a troubling set of blind spots and biases that manifest through how tech is designed.
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Will Tech Giants Move on From the Internet, Now We've All Been Harvested?
On the other hand, being nice to users ā giving them free funky features to find art that matches their faces, as Google has recently done with its Arts & Culture app ā still pays off, as it helps to fine tune existing AI. But for how long will tech firms need us to train them? The economics of data extractivism suggests that it wonāt continue forever ā it will stop once AI, trained with all that extracted data, works well enough. The future, in other words, belongs to the stingy, fee-charging Google of Cloud AutoML, not the generous, fee-waving Google of Arts & Culture.
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Learning to Fool Our Algorithmic Spies
If computers end up destroying us, itāll be because of some algorithm doing something to us we couldnāt possibly have predicted. Maybe knowing that weāre being monitored by judgmental algorithms could affect our behavior, too. If this is the case ā if awareness of mechanical all-seeing eyes changes how we see and comport ourselves ā then, well, how? I started thinking about a version of this question a few months ago, recording small instances where I could. What I ended up with was a list not of behavioral improvements or of flashes of self-aware accountability but of tiny, neurotic evasions.
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How Much for That Pepe? Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction
So you can apparently make digital art rare because blockchain or something? Somewhere Walter Benjamin weeps.Ā Just as you can share reproductions of the Mona Lisa, someone could still copy and paste the image, but the provenance and price history of the original are accessible to all. The original of these works is identifiable and cannot be replicated, which is why they are called āprovably rare.ā
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Apple's iPad Media Experiment Cost Its Partners Years
Remember The Daily or The Magazine? Or, more recently, Star Touch?Ā Remember all those other things publishers tried to do with the iPad? That went well.Ā In hindsight, it was a waste, and Jobs led them all on a costly detour. While the publishing companies focused on the iPad, people were slowly starting to embrace smartphones. About 300 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2010, according to research firm IDC, and Apple sold 7.5 million iPads in the first few months the device was for sale. Last year, Apple sold 44 million iPads, and people bought about 1.5 billion smartphones. The iPad is important, but it never became the ubiquitous, world-changing computer that Jobs pitched in 2010.Ā
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Bad Faith Backlash: Arguing Online With Everyone and No One
We open Twitter, the hellfire burns our dry winter skin like paper, and see that a short story and a trilogyās middle installment have triggered a reactionary sensibility; we stand up for them with a quickly manufactured consensus.
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How Radio Show "Brave New Waves" Helped Build Canadaās Underground Scene
Brave New WavesĀ was so good and I have no idea what a version of it doesnāt currently exist on CBC radio.
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Kodakās Dubious Cryptocurrency Gamble
āIt feels like a publicly traded company issuing a token to raise its stock price from the grave,ā said Kyle Samani, a partner at the cryptocurrency trading firm Multicoin Capital.
āI would not be sleeping very well if I was involved in this,ā said Jill Carlson, a blockchain consultant.
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Trailer for HBO's "Andre the Giant"
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š± Die With Me is a chat app that only works when your phoneās battery is below 5% š§ The story behind Darudeās ā Sandstormā š„ 34 articles about design and Hawaiiās missile alertĀ
š How Futura landed on the moon
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The Follower Factory
Everyone wants to be popular online.Ā Some even pay for it.Ā Inside social mediaās black market.
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It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
At a time when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, we should be living in a utopia of public discourse. Weāre not.
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The Apple Watch Wants to Alter Your Behavior
What happens when you try to change behavior without behavioral science?
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My Woody Allen Problem
Even if he wanted to, he canāt unwatch his movies, our critic writes. The relationship between filmmaker and viewer is as complicated as the one between art and artist.
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Christopher Priest Made Black Panther Cool, Then Disappeared
Christopher Priest broke the color barrier at Marvel and reinvented a classic character. Why was he nearly written out of comics history?
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What Consent Means in the Age of #MeToo
The notion that sex is fraught with ambiguity has made some kinds of assault difficult to describe and confront.
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The Trippy, High-Speed World of Drone Racing
There is no slacker component to the new generation of talented young pilots who like to fool around with quadcopters.
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Save This Magazine
Hey guys! Thisāa magazine that does amazing work and is only questionable in that they let me write for themāis getting absolutely fucked overĀ by a funding delay. Theyāve been around for 52 years and this sucks. Help them out with a donation or a subscription!
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