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Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/29/2024, 10:18:59 AM
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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aTmd9rj2FWIO4wPjjhR8hqPGepPZUhcJh2mzBwVQ2p8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
THRESHOLD: Thank you all for the journey over the last 2 years. Folklore began in August 2019, to gather like-minded folks interested in how the internet is shaping culture around the world. Folklore crowdfunded more than ~20k USD, all of which has been used to commission new essays (8 to be exact), create an proof-of-concept community LLM chatbot called ARK ("Authentic Record of Knowledge", short for Archive), and developing a working onchain-to-RSS feed for collective curation. It has been an incubation hub, experimenting with ideas that will inevitably become common products in many other communities. And like many journeys, they often find a place to pause, and to settle. Gilbert and I will be using the remaining funds to organize the vast set of curated links and digitized books and synthesizing them into a commemorative item (likely digital). In this way, anyone can re-create ARK or continue the curation. Thank you again for your support. Happy New Years 2025. May you be blessed by the awakening algorithmic gods.
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 11/28/2024, 4:43:52 PM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/t5HXb5ryVn0RUzhqQ2WbNld0r4QrR6BFeY2idjILxvA
✨NEW ON FOLKLORE✨ INFRASTRUCTURE AND OSSIFICATION: Sachin Benny reflects on infrastructure as historical object, as political object, as *world*.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/2/2024, 4:23:12 PM
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https://p-dpa.net/in-defense-of-poor-media/
FRUGAL: “ The poverty of poor media should be better called frugality, since it’s characterized by the conscious, serene renunciation of embellishments in favor of accessibility and spread. The spartan look of poor media might not be beautiful, but it’s undoubtedly charming.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/2/2024, 4:06:15 PM
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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
WRETCHED: “Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 11/1/2024, 6:27:54 AM
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https://mirror.xyz/ramonmarc.eth/1G9oLJWblzK1u8rLxIcgqjYO0uULbS3LyBTePqLHmok
NOT FOR US: What’s interesting about this piece, getting some traction over the last days, is how its lite-doomerism makes no mention of blockchains! Only a few years ago blockchains were an essential element in narratives of a network uncaringly optimised for computational agents autonomously redistributing capital. Isn’t it typical of doomerism to underestimate the capacity of humans to mess up even the most perfectly bleak singularity?
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/25/2024, 9:37:51 PM
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https://www.frieze.com/article/mckenzie-wark-politics-cuteness-246?utm_source=FRIEZE&utm_campaign=1bdc721c5d-newsletter-politics-cuteness&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f0ebe20dcf-1bdc721c5d-519502209
ALL CUDDLES AND SNUGGLES: by way of follow-up on the Remilia Quarterly piece posted a few weeks ago, this is McKenzie Wark on the contemporary politics of cuteness. “Cute might also be what the fascist revivalists fear most. Unlike the ‘blue hair and pronouns’ antifa queers, cute can’t be opposed. One is always sliding over its surface, agency and action dissolving in its sticky, furry, shiny embrace.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/24/2024, 2:13:56 PM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/v3KHFm-Fz288fjTIcp5Gd63rXoANBewXqbypQqZesSw
BRANDING AND THE OPEN WORK: It's a year since my piece about headless brands and Folklore’s adoption of the labyrinth as an open-ended icon was published. “Folklore proposes that a contemporary, networked brand be designed not for its human demographics, but for its machine intermediaries. In lieu of finalised assets — iconography, typography, photography — Folklore provides seeds and prompts: inputs for further, generative, creation and mediation.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/19/2024, 4:42:48 PM
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https://pujaohlhaver.substack.com/p/common-knowledge-machines
COMMON KNOWLEDGE POSTS: "...the problem is timing. Community Notes only show up ex-post, after a post has already gone viral and polarization has set in. Many have moved on and miss the correction.If Community Notes is ex-post, is there a way to shift this process ex-ante, before a Post goes viral?"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/19/2024, 4:16:49 PM
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https://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Memetics%20Compendium%205%20February%2009.pdf
MEMETIC COMPENDIUM: "Memes don’t care if they’re true; they just need to be catchy enough to replicate." The Memetics Compendium is 1600 pages FROM 2008! exploring the concept of memes as cultural units of transmission, similar to genes, that replicate and spread ideas, behaviors, and beliefs through societies. It delves into the potential military applications of memetic warfare, particularly in psychological operations, propaganda, and information manipulation to influence adversaries' behavior and morale. The document collects essays and research on how memes evolve, propagate, and can be weaponized for strategic advantage in both conventional and asymmetric warfare contexts​. Compiled By Dr. Robert Finkelstein, President, Robotic Technology Inc.
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/18/2024, 5:35:31 PM
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https://alexanderobenauer.com/think/
ENDURING SKEUOMORPHS: On the calcification of computing metaphors. “Our software interfaces are fiercely rigid; they can’t be meaningfully nudged — in big ways or small — to more closely reflect our mental models or meet our individual needs. We can’t modify the interfaces which render our things, and we can’t bring things together to reflect our thinking.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/15/2024, 12:58:41 PM
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https://www.kabk.nl/en/lectorates/design/understanding-repair-peter-maxwell
A THING THAT COULD BE CARED FOR AND PERPETUATED: This 2012 essay is in resonance with Kei Kreutler’s ‘How to Repair a Spaceport’, recently-published by Folklore. “How much ‘permission’ do I feel I have to tamper with the goods that I have purchased? From what position is that implication of authority directed? Where does the knowledge exist that would let me approach this object on equal terms? WILL IT VOID MY WARRANTY?”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/13/2024, 12:32:40 PM
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https://hipcityreg.substack.com/p/distribution-determined-design
DISTRIBUTION FIRST: There seems to be a renewal of interest in the idea of distribution first design. “I’ve come to believe it is absurdly hard to change channel behavior. In fact, you simply won’t. You either understand how a channel operates and win, you understand how a channel operates and your ego gets in the way and you lose (many such cases), or you don’t understand how a channel operates (also many such cases).”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/13/2024, 12:32:09 PM
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https://hipcityreg.substack.com/p/distribution-determined-design
DISTRIBUTION FIRST: There seems to be a renewal of interest in the idea of distribution first design. “I’ve come to believe it is absurdly hard to change channel behavior. In fact, you simply won’t. You either understand how a channel operates and win, you understand how a channel operates and your ego gets in the way and you lose (many such cases), or you don’t understand how a channel operates (also many such cases).”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/8/2024, 1:14:30 PM
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https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/culture-studies
CULTURE OUTPERFORMS PEDAGOGICAL STRICTURE: On manipulating social hierarchies to seed desirous memes. “If a certain group of kids in — say — a suburb of Nairobi has a culture that makes them learn twice as fast as their peers, how can we help it spread? If a homeschooling community in Austin, Texas has a culture that makes the children uncommonly agentic, how do we isolate what in the web of social relationships gave rise to those norms and values?”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 10/4/2024, 6:05:57 AM
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https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/fashion/do-androids-dream-of-balenciaga-ss29
FUCK POLISHED AESTHETICS: I’d say the trouble with technologists stewarding artistic tools is that they assume polish and lustre to be the goals and so they work to eradicate the uncanny. This six-year old interview with Robbie Barrat on machine learning and image generation has aged relatively well all things considered. But to look on these images is to be reminded of that thrill of glimpsing a version of ourselves in the garbled, strange, alternate image-physics of the computational.
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/26/2024, 6:49:19 AM
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https://archive.org/details/notes_on_network_spirituality
THE NEET SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH: A scan of ‘Let's All Love Remilia: Notes on Network Spirituality' by Bonkle K., from the first Remilia Quarterly. “This love of accelerating digitization (‘the Wired overtaking the Real') stands in contrast to those who would deem the Online inherently ugly, base, or sinful. Here a political divide within acceleration is cast down, do you stand opposed to what the network is doing to you or do you love it?”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/25/2024, 2:11:52 PM
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https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html
SHADOW LIBRARIES: "We can do things that other institutions are not allowed to do. Now, it’s not (often) that we can archive materials that are illegal to preserve elsewhere. No, it’s legal in many places to build an archive with any books, papers, magazines, and so on. But what legal archives often lack is redundancy and longevity. There exist books of which only one copy exists in some physical library somewhere. There exist metadata records guarded by a single corporation. There exist newspapers only preserved on microfilm in a single archive. Libraries can get funding cuts, corporations can go bankrupt, archives can be bombed and burned to the ground."
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/22/2024, 4:07:06 PM
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https://reallifemag.com/take-me-away/
PARASOCIAL WORLDS: On who has been absorbed by who. “In historical critiques, reading was condemned not just as a form of insubordination but as an addictive process that threatened the reader’s ability to come back from fantasy and into reality again.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/18/2024, 2:37:01 PM
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https://thejaymo.net/2024/09/12/milo-2-0/
WHO ARE THEY FOR, AND HOW WILL THEY FIT INTO OUR LIVES? Computerised companions. Will they be ‘designed’ to fulfil emotional needs of human users, or will they exist beyond the scope of design? “They’re being designed by AI startups run by 20-somethings, backed by billions in investment. As we discussed, the key design and ethical concern is connection—should you actively design to pull people into a care loop, creating emotional bonds, or is it more ethical to let that happen organically as a byproduct of the system?”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/16/2024, 8:17:38 AM
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https://aw.network/posts/large-lore-models
LARGE LORE MODELS: there is a very sticky analogy for the fostering of lore in this piece, by part of the team behind this year’s Serpentine Galleries Future Art Ecosystems report. “Here we take the core features of an autonomous knowledge commons to be noncentralized yet formalized access to both the means of narrative creation, linked to a permanent record of events, alongside the right to redeploy, or reseed, the results elsewhere.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/12/2024, 8:39:35 PM
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https://naive-yearly.are.na/alice-yuan-zhang
DIGITAL BELONGING, LOCALLY: Alice Yuan Zhang’s brief primer on bioregional computing. “What if data didn’t have to travel so far, especially when communicating with others around you? What if search algorithms prioritized results that were closer-to-home? What if devices could be locally sourced and re-assembled? What if the traversals of the World Wide Web can also strengthen the affinity of the local web?”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/11/2024, 6:22:37 PM
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https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality-google-pixel-9
UNREAL PIXELS: "the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/11/2024, 6:18:15 PM
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https://www.13101401.studio/research/everything-is-default-fake
EVERYTHING IS DEFAULT FAKE: "Consequently, this heightens the value of presence, devalues videos and pictures because they can be falsified, and thus increases the value of eye-witness accounts when they come from friends, neighbors, people close to us. You're going to trust your friend or your friend’s friend who said “I saw this” versus the “New York Times” or an anon online."
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/9/2024, 2:55:25 PM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/6Lm7xORHWDb-YoVtqv3Vc2G7dT73xiKws5pJBv9ADZE
HOW TO REPAIR A SPACEPORT: In this new essay, commissioned by Folklore, Kei Kreutler reflects on technological heterogeneity through the metaphor of the fictional Spaceport. “For our purposes, we could define protocols as systems that prioritize interoperability over formal standardization, with spaceports acting as their central metaphor. Spaceports take the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) line further, to establish ‘rough consensus and running worlds.’”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/8/2024, 1:02:38 PM
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https://nicksusi.substack.com/p/the-multitudes-of-self
WE, MULTITUDES, RELEASED and SEEN: “ Or perhaps, this is a futile effort. Theravada Buddhism suggests that clinging to the aggregation of our multitudes of self, called Skandhas, causes suffering. It is only through relinquishing the desire for this control and embracing the impermanence of the moment that we can find a state of true happiness.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/6/2024, 3:11:21 PM
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https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/better-living-through-group-chemistry
ARTIFICIAL FAMILIES: "And although the scale and language of their ambitions vary, they all see co-living projects as catalysts for broader shifts in how society is organized. As one group house participant describes in an essay, “Group houses function as ‘planets’ — each has a cultural gravity that selects for a unique orbital community.” Increasingly, the denizens of those planets are thinking about building alliances throughout their solar system."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/6/2024, 3:07:01 PM
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https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2009/12/21/bruce-sterling-gothic-chic-in-the-future-favela/
GOTHIC CHIC IN THE FUTURE FAVELA: From 2009, a seminal influential piece on what the internet has become. Will the predicted duality persist or will we transcend it? "In 2020 children of digital natives will be interested in their analogue grandparents, in our parents. Those living from ’45 to ’89 will be romantic to young people denied that way of life. The digital revolution will have outlived its luster. It won’t be shiny or new but fashionable to count cost and valorize painstaking, beautiful analogue things that belonged to long dead atomic ladies and gentlemen."
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/6/2024, 7:33:35 AM
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http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation
DIGITAL PIRACY AS CONSERVATION: This decade-old piece on ‘shadow libraries’ and the relative lack of profitability of text as an object of copyright enforcement (compared to music and video) has a new resonance in the age of the LLM. “On the one side, an argument is made for unrestricted access to information as a prerequisite to properly deliberative democracy. … The other side offers pragmatic reasoning related to the long-term sustainability of the cultural sphere, which, in order to prosper, must provide proper economic incentives to content creators.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 9/3/2024, 5:00:37 AM
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https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/adam-curtis-on-the-dangers-of-self-expression/
ARTISTIC SELF-EXPRESSION IS CONFORMITY! Adam Curtis, in conversation with Yancey Strickler in 2017: “Computers can see us as large groups, but they’re glum and only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers give great insight into the power of common identity between groups. No one’s using that. What’s sitting with the computers is a way of seeing new groups, new common identities between people.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 8/30/2024, 1:47:02 PM
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https://www.servinglibrary.org/journal/17/a-key
UBIQUITOUS, ENDLESS: The meander, or self-avoiding line, winds its way through time. It traverses Ancient Greek pottery, Zapotec architecture, Imperial Chinese woodwork, and Navajo weaving. It animates surfaces, defines boundaries, fills space. Known variously as a Greek or Chinese key, fret, running dog, or Xicalcoliuhqui, it shows up today on tilework, coffee cups, and clothing — and in art. More than a decorative motif, the meander is metaphor and method, an unstudied artistic generator.
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 8/27/2024, 7:25:57 PM
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https://www.sourcetype.com/editorial/608/adversarial-alphabets-part-1-how-machines-read
TEXT-IMAGE COLLAPSE: The AI service that I’ve been using to summarise and query PDFs just added OCR support, making it possible to upload an image of a book or article and instantaneously interact with it as a textual object. This technical (but accessible) piece on OCR reveals how language is parsed inbetween pictorial and textual states, and elaborates some of the sociological implications of these processes. “If you are reading this online, it’s likely you can select this phrase from your browser, and copy-paste it into some other application. Moving text around digital spaces is engineered to appear seamless to us. However, the information captured by your computer when you make a keystroke has a very different structure from the pixel grid of light and dark your computer renders on the screen.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 8/24/2024, 5:20:48 PM
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https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/cut-and-paste-teen-magazines-and-the-collaged-self
COLLAGE, MONTAGE, AND SCHIZO-AESTHETICS: Parker Ito’s 10,000 oil paintings were the main event in NFTs this week. One pre-history of contemporary schizo-aesthetics is traced in this piece on the visual codes of aughts teen magazines for girls. “For decades, from the birth of Tiger Beat in 1965 to the millions of girls’ scrollable pinterest boards overflowing with images today, collage aesthetics have guided youth culture. The aesthetic’s allowance for metamorphosis and multiplicity shepherds endless cohorts of teens into adulthood, freeing them, for a period of time, from the oppressive imposition to present one True Self.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 8/21/2024, 1:50:47 PM
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https://thebaffler.com/latest/against-slop-caldwell-gervais
IF YOU DIE IN THE GAME, YOU DIE FOR REAL: This is rare published writing from Noah Caldwell-Gervais, producer of epic video essays immersed in the fandom of beloved gaming franchises. In this piece he is teasing out something reflexive, asking how a player’s often fragmentary experience — repetitions, failures, restarts — can be reconciled with the suspension of disbelief that coherent virtual worlds require. “Elden Ring is quite eager to kill you, with a million ways to put a player down. But it is not meanly difficult, or insurmountably difficult. Most importantly, it is not difficult as part of a profit-seeking monetization loop. Instead, the failure states that are so often leveraged to extend playtime and coerce spending in most other games are here used as friction to build atmosphere. The constant starting again is exhausting, often stressful, sometimes infuriating. It is never meaningless, however: it confidently contradicts the worries of other mediums and the too-often-true accusations of slop with its deep understanding of how to create drama within any individual moment. Participating in its loops of death and rebirth as a player is to be fully within the Lands Between.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/20/2024, 12:09:53 PM
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https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
HANDS FEEL THINGS: “Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade. Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat. Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future. To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.”
Signed by  0x6e...1a25  at 8/16/2024, 10:16:30 AM
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https://varia.zone/en/more-than-computational-reflections.html
MORE-THAN-COMPUTATIONAL SCRIPTS: Varia in Rotterdam is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology. This report describes MAGICWORDS, x-dexing, and word2complex, three of their more-than-computational scripts for engaging with the essay as digital and material document. “The scripts take a collective approach (inserting tags and annotations together to complexify the inherent collective life of an essay, as is the case in __MAGICWORDS__), a generative approach (creating a set of proposals for reading across perspectives through a set of essays, as is the case in x-dexing), or a critical stance to machinic forms of reading (performing computational operations —specifically for finding patterns in a set of essays— without using code, as is the case in word2complex).”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/10/2024, 9:41:55 AM
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https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium-and-the-7th-kingdom-of-life
TECHNIUM: “I don't think technology is neutral or a wash of good and bad effects. To be sure it does produce both problems and solutions, but the chief effect of technology is that it produces more possibilities. More options. More freedom, essentially. That's really good. That is the reason why people move to cities — for more choices. They leave beautiful Greek islands and hamlets in Cambodia because cities have more choices. They don't move from the farms — where their communities and traditions are very supportive and comforting — because they hate it; they move because they want more choices. The reason we like choices is that they give us more chances to use all of our talents. We have a greater chance of matching our limited abilities with opportunities to maximize them. We put up with all the inevitable problems in new gadgets, soon to be obsolete, because we are eager to try out the possibilities, hoping that we will have a better chance for unleashing who we are. These opportunities, these freedoms, are a very powerful force. Imagine a great artist like Mozart born before the possibility of a piano, or orchestra — what a loss that would have been. Or if Hitchcock had been born before the technology of film had been invented. Or Van Gogh before cheap oil paints. Undoubtedly those giants would have done their best with whatever they had — perhaps Beethoven on drums, Van Gogh with charcoal. But we honor them in part because in some unfathomable way they were able to realize their true genius by finding a perfect match with their tools — tools that are possibilities and choices manifested.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/9/2024, 8:20:53 AM
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https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html
SACRIFICIAL TIME: "To create anything of value requires some sacrifice. To successfully contract we must measure value. Since we can’t, absent a perfect exchange market, directly measure the economic value of something, we may be able to estimate it indirectly by measuring something else. This something else anchors the performance – it gives the performer an incentive to optimize the measured value. Which measures are the most appropriate anchors of performance? Starting in Europe by the 13th century, that measure was increasingly a measure of the sacrifice needed to create the desired economic value."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/5/2024, 8:30:26 AM
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https://default.blog/p/offline-is-the-new-online
NETWORKED OFFLINE: "We have no choice but to take social media offline if we wish to engage in healthy social lives. Social media, online, will continue to lose relevance for us. Social media, offline, will gain mass appeal. The future of social media is offline and full of immersive art exhibits and live AR experiences. Most of it will take place in speakeasies and pop-ups. This return to private life will be spiritually rewarding for so many of us who were once slaves to the algorithm."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/27/2024, 8:19:59 AM
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https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-influence-of-anxiety/
ANXIOUS ECHOES: "I read the New York Times, I read the Washington Post, I scroll Twitter, I watch the press conferences and listen to the latest podcasts. I step into the larger tide of uncertainty and fear, my anxiety for the world and the future swells, and then that same feeling, that same anxiety, shrinks me into myself—into my petty, personal worries. The concerns of the world quickly transmute into the concerns of the self. What does the pandemic mean for me? Will I get sick? Will I lose my livelihood? Will my inadequacies, my disgraceful flaws and inabilities, be exposed in the harsh light of crisis? What could I have done better to prepare for this catastrophe? What irredeemable mistakes have I already made? What irredeemable mistakes am I still making? How will I get through? How will I concentrate? How will I work? How will I live? How will I manage? What will I lose?"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/24/2024, 8:07:24 AM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/vhHPsUvAcsqlQkG7zEtMJlIbaIQHPAROM85d_B9CuXc
LATENT COMMUNITIES: There is enormous interest in building new movements today. But you don’t have to start anew if you want to change the world. Communities lie on a spectrum in terms of their origins: either they have been created to achieve a goal, or they appear to have been created almost by default; no purpose, they just exist. Who can harness the latent power of those default communities? What power do they have? --- Read the latest Folklore Essay by https://warpcast.com/lsn
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/22/2024, 6:54:36 AM
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https://mercurialminutes.substack.com/p/synthetic-symbols
MAGIKAL SIGILS: "Do you feel the deep resonance with the sigil and cut-up techniques? We take the building blocks of our intent, and through the process of encoding - cutting up/ re-assembling/ re-arranging - we strip the images of their original form, yielding a new representation of our desire. This generative form is then embedded in the mind, with the ability to produce images (thoughts? visions? dreams?) understandable to the unconscious, steering us towards our desire. This runs in a deep parallel to the Synthetic Symbols that can be imprinted into the Latent Space - an encoded image, trained into the diffusion model has the ability to produce an infinite number of representations relating to the original desire. The newly formed images are inherently magickal in that they operate beyond the rational mind’s direct comprehension. They are tuned to the subtler spheres of the psyche, engaging with our unconscious mind."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/19/2024, 11:23:38 AM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/WOjYG3NTHgypFsSRfChIVl_elk3lOp1oBhGM8XFEDYQ
SWARMLORE: On the internet, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, heralds of mutual aid, and representatives of the public will. But this is not our grandparents’ crowd. Swarms are networked tempests of humans and information. Most importantly, they can act collectively without explicit protocols; they are minimally protocolized entities.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 2/11/2024, 7:49:59 PM
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https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/coyote-vs-acme-canceled
MEDIA PROTECTION: “…governments exist (in part) to regulate corporations, in order to stop them from doing things that are deleterious or destructive to the public good and to individuals who work for them. They have the means and motive to step in, whether declaring certain kinds of waste dumping to be illegal, trying to prevent private companies from bribing or otherwise influencing public officials, or mandating that TV networks cannot blast the volume of ads to make them audible to viewers who leave the room during commercial breaks. (Yes, that last thing is real; it’s legislation known as the CALM Act.) They should do something similar for all types of media.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 2/6/2024, 11:45:16 AM
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https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/the-nemesis-guide-to-being-early
SO EARLY, DID WE EVEN BE? “Certain brands give their audiences STATUS: "others see me associated with the brand and are forced to bow down". Others provide UTILITY, which includes financial gain: "this brand serves a purpose to me". Yet others are a closed loop: "this brand provides me with ENTERTAINMENT, and that's that," so what other people think doesn't register too much. But more and more, a (PARA)SOCIAL offering is at play: "this brand brings me together with others, either in theory or in practice. become part of my brand, and you will have friends".
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 2/3/2024, 3:24:59 PM
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https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/
THE ENSHITTIFICATION CURE: “So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it. We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit…There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor. To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these…Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 2/3/2024, 12:02:52 PM
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https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/sarah-wambold-and-rem-moore-only
PERPETUAL BEREAVEMENT: “ It is a wholly human desire to bring our companions back, to keep them with us, to honor them. Our machines have extended this impulse by affording us continuous ways of producing digital data and seemingly endless storage capabilities. But, in an even more fundamental way, our machines facilitate digital instantiations of ourselves, ultimately capturing our digital selves within their silicon, mineral and metal frameworks. We become projected-beings, anesthetized by the immaterial space of the internet as François J. Bonnet describes us in After Death, (3) defined solely by the digital (non-)space around us. In other words, we are 'entombed' by machines, as Cade Diehm of the New Design Congress puts it (4), and also by capital.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/28/2024, 4:03:01 PM
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https://open.substack.com/pub/sceneswithsimon/p/the-human-medium-is-the-human-message?r=2o49nr&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
THE HUMAN MEDIUM IS THE HUMAN MESSAGE: “In the future, if we can split media as predominantly human-made or predominantly AI-made, then human-made media will tilt towards being able to point to the humans that made it. In other words, in a divergence like this, the human/s will merge closer with their creations.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/27/2024, 10:41:26 PM
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https://designsciencelab.com/resources/OperatingManual_BF.pdf
OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH: “I’ve often heard people say, ’I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts. I know you are paying attention, but I’m sure you don’t immediately agree and say, ‘Yes, that’s right, I am an astronaut.’ I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically real spaceship our spherical Spaceship Earth.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/27/2024, 9:11:49 PM
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https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-9-udo-the-weird-magic-of-digital
NOCLIP GLITCH: “ The glitch is a revelatory moment that breaks the illusion of control implied in the user-machine relationship. The glitch cracks the smoothness of the user condition - to borrow an expression from Silvio Lorusso - and brings us closer to the multi-layered truths scaffolded into a device. Once the controlled simulation starts to glitch, alternative threads of worldbuilding unfold showing eerie and incomplete environments where the players wander freely.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/26/2024, 8:00:27 AM
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https://philosopherdeveloper.com/posts/modesty-is-a-luxury
LUXURIOUS MODESTY: "The average street performer needs to choose their location wisely to maximize exposure, and the average worker needs to call attention to the work they do. On the other hand, a world-famous celebrity like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift can do very little to promote themselves and still be showered with attention. One way of thinking about this is that not everyone has the same radius. Some individuals have a radius so big, virtually anything that they do will be noticed on a large scale. These individuals don't need a push-based system, because everybody's pulling. They can afford to be modest."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/26/2024, 7:57:59 AM
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https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theory-compliance-violence-and-overachievement-in-society
ACADEMIC UNHAPPINESS: "The more insane someone’s expectations about their own performance, the more they push themselves. The ones who overachieve the most are those who devise the most effective ways to manipulate their own psychology into jumping through ever more inane hoops, no matter the test that’s put in front of them. His follow-on point is that these people are all deeply unhappy. Thus: at scale, on the societal level, selecting for academic performance also selects for unhappiness."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/26/2024, 7:56:57 AM
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https://gestalt.cafe/on-crypto/
CONSPIRACY: "In other words: crypto sees the trust problem the internet created, has noticed that most of our institutions rely on trust networks which can no longer be assumed, and decided the way out was to build new, trustless systems. But after a decade, I think we should confront ourselves to the idea that trustlessness implies ineffectiveness, and we should perhaps try to go the other way and build tools and technologies which help establish trust, instead. Crypto should move away from building tools for activism, and towards building tools for conspiracy."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 1/21/2024, 4:22:54 PM
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https://hd.mirror.xyz/n4Mddar_V1jTpAAxKlwKEzG4iQl-HIW7RN6LBNRDNgM
CENTAUR ART: This process of an artist locating something that already exists in the latent potential of an AI model, and minting it as an artwork, reminded us of the history of Duchamp’s readymades. As such we choose to describe these embedding artworks as readyweights.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/20/2024, 4:17:16 PM
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https://www.decential.io/articles/this-machine-kills-copyright-minting-a-bob-dylan-song-as-a-way-to-resurrect-folk-traditions
THIS MACHINE KILLS COPYRIGHT: “How can we find ways to harness the superpowers of the blockchain – decentralization, immutability and provenance – without harming creators who still rely on copyright to earn money? How can we protect creators’ rights while also embracing the truth that everything is a remix, that genius is a fallacy, and that collective attribution of the folk is a much healthier way to share and celebrate art? As we wrestle with legacy concepts of ownership – as well as a memetic Internet culture that is increasingly at odds with them – and the legal murk web3, we have an opportunity to create new precedence through action – to embrace solutions that redistribute wealth from one folk to many.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/16/2024, 4:54:34 PM
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https://otherinter.net/research/three-body-problem/
CRYPTO’S THREE BODY PROBLEM: Wake up bae, new Other Internet essay has dropped. “Crypto's animating purpose was to develop incorruptible institutions. However, various attempts to embed these structures in a broader social fabric, from DAOs to crypto-network states, have largely failed. We draw from Lawrence Lessig's legal theories to explain why. Protocol designers work with markets and code but frequently ignore the vital institutional functions served by social norms and the law itself. The absence of these regulatory functions considerably limits the forms of pro-social behavior that can be fostered or enforced.” In addition, Folklore members are invited to discuss the essay with the Summer of Protocols researchers at https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/rotw-cryptos-three-body-problem/52
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/15/2024, 2:31:34 PM
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https://nysgs.org/resources/Documents/etc-44-2-literacy-as-deviance-by-christine-nystrom.pdf
LITERACY AS DEVIANCE: “Writing is not the extension of the eye. It is not the extension of the ear. Nor of the hand, or the skin, or of any other organ of sensory perception and experience. Writing is through and through an extension of another part of us altogether- of the abstracted, conceptual, digital, deductive mind . What the alphabet did was separate thought from sensation, knowledge from experience, utterance from context, speech from speaker, and truth from presence, space, and time. Along with the idea of zero and place notation in numbering systems—themselves dependent on forms of writing for their elaboration—alphabetic reading and writing constructed a new meaning of thought and knowledge, a new epistemology, so different from the epistemology of the senses and of sense-based speech that we have only just begun to penetrate how it works. If I seem to belabor the point, it is because our habits of thinking and talking about writing have suffered so monumentally from misdirected analogy. - Nystrom, C. (1987)
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/14/2024, 5:20:25 AM
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https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/towards-decentralized-civic-infrastructure/
MINISTRY OF DIGITAL AFFAIRS: How can web3 technology can be used to build decentralized civic infrastructures? Facing many crises we are having in the world, this series of 3 articles rethinks how we organize society and economy in ways that the future could be more plural, resilient, and sustainable. Article 1: Towards Decentralised Civic Infrastructure; Article 2: Evolving a new public with web3; Article 3: Three pathways towards decentralized civics
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/13/2024, 5:48:11 PM
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https://designingfriction.com/
A CALL FOR FRICTION DESIGN: “Instead of following design ethics that strive to eliminate friction we suggest to not only allow, but embrace friction, facilitate it: design [products with] digital technology in a way that makes space for our humanness. Here friction is a core ingredient. Digital technology should create environments and situations in which we can truly connect with each other, as well as with the unknown, the uncontrolled, with all senses, all elements, all emotions. Create situations that are not calculated beforehand, predicted and measured; situations that result from and amount to the present moment.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/12/2024, 9:29:35 AM
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https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/5962/Silence%252520is%252520a%252520Commons.html?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
SILENT COMMONS: " Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication. The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/11/2024, 4:27:08 PM
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https://trust.support/feed/trust-quests-open-call
TRUST QUEST: "Trust Quests is a program for researchers and practitioners interested in developing a new or existing project at the nexus of AI, blockchain, infrastructural speculation, media art, forensic architecture, electronic music, and organizational design. Throughout the year, participants will receive feedback and support from mentors embedded in a range of fields, in addition to the Trust maintainers, as they develop projects ahead of a demo day presentation at Trust. The program is intended for recent graduates who are looking for a flexible professional and creative development opportunity. Trust Quests also provides participants with 24/7 workspace in Berlin for both project-related and other work."
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/11/2024, 1:53:01 PM
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https://www.artbasel.com/stories/survey-global-collectors-art-basel-professor-andrew-dillon-university-of-texas
COLLIGO, ERGO SUM: In her 1991 paper, ‘Why they Collect: Collectors reveal their Motivations’, Formanek developed a set of themes. Building on that study, respondents were prompted to describe their reasons for collecting at this time covering financial, psycho-social, and cultural motivators. The following outlines these motivators and the general pattern of responses from this year’s sample.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/10/2024, 2:16:10 PM
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https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-techno-pessimist-manifesto
A TECHNO-PESSIMIST MANIFESTO: “The implicit premise of techno-optimism is that technology drives civilization. To fix any and all of the problems of society, just get out of the way of technology. Across history, do we find this premise to be true?…The system is fragile. A mixture of order and disorder is frightening, even in the pockets. It seems unstable—especially when it seems to be disorder that is advancing. The ultimate sign of order is a semiconductor fab, which places atoms with nanometer perfection. A new fab costs ten billion dollars. A five-dollar can of gasoline can burn it down.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/9/2024, 9:06:03 AM
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https://trent.mirror.xyz/GDDRqetgglGR5IYK1uTXxLalwIH6pBF9nulmY9zarUw
COMMON ENCLOSURE: "Software (e.g. Linux, Ethereum) is a Symbiotic Good: Anti-rival: From Nikander et al (2020): “For many digital goods, their real (social) value … increases the more they are used, in stark contrast to material goods, whose value almost always decreases as they are used and consumed.” As a software protocol is more broadly adopted, each user benefits from a wider array of associated services, products, shared local knowledge. As digital artifacts, the cost to produce one additional unit is negligible (i.e. approaches a marginal cost of 0). Non-excludable: Open Source Software (OSS) licensing enables actors external to the production process to use, modify, and suggest changes to the software. Different licenses on this software can create different levels of excludability, but the overall expectation is that others will use and modify the software, and that the code is publicly accessible (aka “source available”)."
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 1/6/2024, 3:46:19 PM
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336884967_The_Environment_Is_Not_A_System/fulltext/638d06cc7d9b40514e152515/The-Environment-Is-Not-A-System.pdf?origin=publication_detail&_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uRG93bmxvYWQiLCJwcmV2aW91c1BhZ2UiOiJwdWJsaWNhdGlvbiJ9fQ
COMPUTING COMPUTES: This paper considers some of the limitations and possibilities of computational models in the context of environmental inquiry, specifically exploring the modes of knowledge production that it mobilizes. As has been argued by authors like Katherine Hayles and Jennifer Gabrys, computation goes beyond just reading and representing the world. As a mode of inquiry it has a powerful world-making capacity, generating new pathways for action and therefore new conditions.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/5/2024, 9:44:21 AM
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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d9e32554234c5224cd16771/t/659206ff44189d1cbbf7791c/1704068874388/8Ball%E2%80%94Live+Players+Pt+2.pdf
STAGNANT REMIX: "We’re addicted to 19th century myths. We presume the present is more alive than the past. Industrialization did cause a break with the past. We called it modernism. We expected the big breakthrough of the 20th century, digitization to have the same explosive, creative effect. Yet, we find our fully digitized culture producing either stasis or churn, not progress. Change still comes but it feels more like a hack, a remix, a mash-up— which in and of itself feels like a return to the eclecticism of the early 21st century hipster."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 1/5/2024, 9:35:38 AM
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https://mirror.xyz/verbsteam.eth/96zSoFfiT_RM2o2P9UbVKxPzVpB_trZqUjzllBE00BE
DYNAMIC: "Dynamic quorum is an upcoming governance change that reduces the tradeoff space between friction and security, making proposals harder to pass the more [token-holders] vote against them." Previously governance has been using mostly static consensus metrics: you need 10% quorum and >51% approval. However, you can make quorum dynamic based on how contentious a vote is. Here we see how the Nouns community designed it. It's likely we're still in the early days of possible digital governance design options.
Signed by  0x10...382c  at 1/2/2024, 9:49:19 AM
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https://walkerart.org/magazine/post-identity-design-brands-politics-and-technological-instability
POST-IDENTITY DESIGN: "As the tactics of branding are widely embraced for corporations, and increasingly individuals as well, even countries have begun to define their identities in marketable terms. Nation branding has become a fertile field for design and advertising agencies around the world. It is common to see symposiums on the topic, and industry experts such as FutureBrand rank the world’s leading country brands."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/25/2023, 11:04:25 AM
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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/01/68478/brand-states-postmodern-power-democratic-pluralism-and-design/
STATED BRANDING: “ A place brand is essentially little more than a first impression. It is the first two, three thoughts people have when they think about a place. To change these assumptions in a more “favorable” direction may require a stylish (or terrible) logo, but it may also consist of more fundamental policy shifts which affect the lives of people: “defining the most realistic, most competitive and most compelling strategic vision for a country, region or city; this vision then has to be fulfilled and communicated,” as the place-branding expert Simon Anholt describes it. What makes place branding slippery in terms of its politics is that it increasingly stands as both a visual practice and a modality of governance.” thank you Gilbert for the suggestion.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/24/2023, 8:12:21 PM
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https://www.e-flux.com/notes/581670/an-essay-on-liberation-breaking-bad
AN IMAGE FOR LIBERATION: "The point (or the essence) of the image, its strange or alien character, is thus not what it shows, but how it shows (or that it is). An image is derealization. But not merely the derealization of the object that it shows, since it is equally the derealization of the world of the one who beholds the image. The image derealizes the object and thereby interrupts or suspends our usual ways of dealing with it. It “de-automatizes,” as Victor Shklovsky describes it, the perception and liberates it from its merely automatic performance." (Thank you to Misha via Trust for the link)
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/23/2023, 7:48:01 AM
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https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/israels-online-front-collapses
PROPAGANDA MACHINES (PART 3): Finally, we look at how John Robb describes the collapse of an online front. When messaging consistency and efficacy ceases to produce a cohesive swarm of support. As described in the article: "Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, is featured in leaked audio (the leak is of indeterminate origin, but it is so on point, it’s hard to dismiss it as a fake) where he acknowledges the loss of support for Israel with younger people and then blames it on TikTok"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/23/2023, 7:45:27 AM
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https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/mind-control-secret-british-government-blueprints-shaping-post-terror-planning
PROPAGANDA MACHINES (PART 2): Here we see "coordinated spontaneity." Here the news describes how: "The British government has prepared for terrorist incidents by pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/23/2023, 7:39:01 AM
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https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information
PROPAGANDA MACHINES (PART 1): It is important to look at how information distribution is coordinated online. Once, again, we delve into this topic gently and encourage everyone at Folklore to understand the waters we swim in. Some content is organic, and some is not. Today we cover three articles. One is the primary linked one, discussing how "invested heavily in shaping the narrative about its war on social media, viewing online discourse as a vital area for maintaining public support." Two additional articles will be shared prompty, one about the UK response to terrorism, and another from John Robb, who specializes in online digital warfare.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/19/2023, 9:07:19 AM
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https://www.bryanlehrer.com/entries/new-internet/
THE NEW INTERNET: "By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideological hold on its early entrepreneurs and workers. It had all the euphoria of a gold rush and all the self esteem of high tech meritocracy. There were suddenly thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of individuals in their twenties who in the span of a few years became multimillionaires this way. They were not multimillionaires in dollars though, at least not yet. They were millionaires in $ETH or their company's native governance token. In order to fully materialize their newfound wealth they had to also internalize a story about their held token's ongoing value. Increasingly this story – one about taking down big banks, liquidity, 'yield farming,' and ‘hodling’ just for the sake of it – grew perpendicular to the original story that engendered many individuals to the ideas of decentralization. Like in so many other industries that started with a small group of purists, the influx of large amounts of capital changed things."
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 12/17/2023, 3:48:55 PM
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https://open.substack.com/pub/sceneswithsimon/p/walkable-blockchains-metaphors-between?r=l1m1r&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
NIMBYs vs YIMBYs (Backyards and Blockchains): “We design cities, yes, but once they are lived in, the relationships define it. Blockchains are the same. They capture relationships and bring together people as if they were a virtual city. Over time, it stores history and relationships. It’s why, in the event of existential attacks against it, blockchains rebuild themselves to save the relationships in it. Cities and blockchains die from years of atrophy that’s not repaired, not from singular events. They sometimes act quite similar and there’s potential for cross-pollination of ideas and metaphors to each other.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 12/16/2023, 11:35:14 AM
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https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-planetary-egregore-passes-you
SUMMON THE EGREGORE: “In my view there are basically two good arguments, or types of argument, for the existence of group minds. The first common argument for group minds is the argument from equivalence. Beyond the argument from equivalence, there’s another argument for group minds. This is the argument from modularity. Modularity is a common hypothesis in cognitive science (and evolutionary psychology), which is essentially that parts of your mind act like mini-minds themselves, and then pass on their results (…) If you ask “Do we have strong scientific evidence that group minds are possible?” the answer is no. But from a ‘Do people in the academic field seriously consider group minds to be a real possibility?’ the answer is a resounding yes.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/15/2023, 3:07:32 PM
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https://joanwestenberg.medium.com/how-social-medias-fading-archives-are-erasing-our-digital-history-cc90c1c4f4ec
LOSS: "The loss of content on existing — albeit dying — platforms such as MySpace is a harsh reality. But there are other challenges in the preservation of our content... To lose an entire platform is to lose huge swathes of our digital culture and shared memories. But for many creators, it’s not just the cultural missing pieces that are concerning; it’s the work itself, calling back from another time in their lives and their careers, work that they might not have maintained in their archives in a pre-cloud storage world where computers still had CD drives."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/12/2023, 2:11:08 PM
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https://iai.tv/articles/misinformation-is-the-symptom-not-the-disease-daniel-walliams-auid-2690
MERCHANT OF DOUBT: "These motivations to embrace biased beliefs cause people to seek out belief-justifying information. The result is a marketplace of rationalisations that rewards the production and dissemination of content that supports favoured narratives in society. We tend to view the super-spreaders of misinformation as master manipulators, orchestrating mass delusion from their keyboards and podcast appearances, but they are often better understood as entrepreneurs who use their rhetorical skills to affirm and justify in-demand beliefs in exchange for social and financial rewards. Beyond Merchants of Doubt they are merchants of affirmation, and for the right price, they'll validate and rationalise anything."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 12/11/2023, 12:04:50 AM
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555191
SEA OF SMALL ACTORS: Building a successful community means governing active populations and limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful institutional designs are unclear.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 12/9/2023, 3:50:31 PM
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https://www.noemamag.com/the-sounds-of-invisible-worlds
SACRED ECOLOGY: Sonics is the optics of the 21st century. Like the microscope, sonic technologies function like a scientific prosthetic — as it extends our sense of hearing, it expands our perceptual and conceptual horizons. We are encountering new soundscapes throughout the cosmos and across the Tree of Life, learning about the universality of acoustic meaning-making and the primordial sensitivity of living organisms to sound. Sonics decenters humanity within the Tree of Life, while connecting us more closely to the cosmos.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/7/2023, 11:26:34 AM
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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d9e32554234c5224cd16771/t/65690a4963663c7d4b8dfb8e/1701382734495/8Ball%E2%80%94Live+Players+Pt+1.pdf
BED ROTTER: "We thought the Internet was a decisive break with last century’s passive broadcast culture. Online culture was supposed to be active and participatory—but the image of the teenager has changed less in the last thirty years than we would like to think. The couch potatoes of 1993 have become the bed rotters of 2023. Both spend the evening scrambling their circadian rhythm with blue light. The only differences being the size of the screen, and whether Comcast or TikTok is curating your content for the night."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/7/2023, 11:20:42 AM
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https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2023/03/25/llm-end-user-programming
MALLEABLE SOFTWARE: "LLMs will represent a step change in tool support for end-user programming: the ability of normal people to fully harness the general power of computers without resorting to the complexity of normal programming. Until now, that vision has been bottlenecked on turning fuzzy informal intent into formal, executable code; now that bottleneck is rapidly opening up thanks to LLMs."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 12/3/2023, 6:37:41 PM
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https://www.are.na/blog/on-motivation
THE SLOW BLADE PENETRATES THE SHIELD: "It often feels like Are.na itself has its own needs and desires—that Are.na has its own personal intuition. And that we (you and I) are figuring out what it wants to be together. We (the organization that works on Are.na) have a very defined sense of how things should be done and why building Are.na is important, but we try not to be overly dogmatic about what exactly it should evolve into. Instead we try to listen to how we all talk about Are.na, pay attention to how changes to the platform bring about new needs and ideas, and recognize the times when we (you and I) have strong urges to do something on Are.na, but can’t. These are the times when we know how to make Are.na more complete."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 12/3/2023, 12:03:47 PM
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https://www.collaborationcookbook.com/
HOW TO COOK CREATIVITY: The collaboration cookbook is a living resource that includes recipes for real creative projects. Each recipe is an instruction for an activity, initiative, or experiment that is the products of people working together in creative partnership.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 12/2/2023, 1:09:32 PM
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https://open.substack.com/pub/subconscious/p/ritual-technology?r=l1m1r&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
RITUAL TECHNOLOGY: “We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use. Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds, loot boxes, compulsion loops, gang gang yes yes yes ice cream so good. You’re caught in a feedback loop with the algorithm, and you are the squishiest part of that loop. Ritual technology operates on a different timescale. Underneath the fast twitch of compulsion loops is the slow thrum of ritual. Elder feedback systems. An antidote to algorithmic engagement addiction?
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/30/2023, 10:48:40 AM
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https://lolsos.substack.com/p/what-you-feel-in-the-void-is-kenopsia
A VOID: What do we feel when we lurk within the abandoned gathering spaces online? … the Discord server of that once burgeoning community, remembering those memes and the friends you made? There are echoes, and the empty spaces may remind us of other spaces: the abandoned mall, the empty offices waiting on remote workers, the ghosts at 3:30am at the “busy” intersection of our home town.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/27/2023, 9:24:29 AM
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https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf
THE LIBRARY: "This much is known: For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency. (I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the palm of one's hand .... They will acknowledge that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning. That argument, as we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/26/2023, 8:36:14 PM
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https://titles.xyz/collect/zora/0xb7c1854274107becae1015c0c6d613365e3fe80d
CONGRATS ARON: Please join me in congratulating @aronshelton in winning the latest Folklore Contest. The award of 0.11 ETH (~$225 USD) has been disbursed and here is the artwork that each of you can collect. Personally, I believe the combination of themes of the labyrinth with the fingerprint, as well as the hand and connections created a spooky X-Files vibe — exactly the type of “x-Ray” that Folklore is doing on digital culture. Hopefully @aronshelton will be kind enough to do a short guest post, sharing their experience at Folklore to date and their vision for an interconnected and human experience online. >>>>> IMPORTANT: We are looking for guest posts from Folklore readers, writers, and members to showcase their stories, ideas, art, and work (non-fiction and fiction welcome). Please send DM me (@rafathebuilder) a message to coordinate.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 11/26/2023, 12:24:15 AM
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https://www.noemamag.com/planetary-sapience/
PLANETARY SAPIENCE: “Planetary-scale computation is an example of what may be called, after the great Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, an “epistemological technology.” The most important social impact of some technologies is not just in what they allow people to do, but in what they reveal about how the world works. This can lead to trouble. While anxiety about technology is expressed in accounts of its pernicious effects, that unease is sometimes rooted in what technology uncovers that was always there all along. Microscopes did not conjure microbes into being, but once we knew they were there, we could never see surfaces the same way again.” Benjamin Bratton⋱ Antikythera ⋱ Berggruen Institute ⋱ Federico Pérez Villoro + Christopher Hamamoto ⋱ rafa
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/25/2023, 7:37:08 AM
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https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
WRONG METAPHOR, LIMITED DESIGN: “ The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies. Instead, we need to develop new interface paradigms based on the structure of computer systems and the tasks users really have to perform, rather than paradigms that enshrine outmoded technology. The way to advance the interface is not to develop ever-more-faithful imitations of the desktop, but instead to escape the limitations of the desktop especially as computers themselves become ubiquitous [21] and are used away from the desk.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/23/2023, 12:03:25 PM
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https://walkerart.org/magazine/post-identity-design-brands-politics-and-technological-instability
IDENTITY AS PRACTICE OF SPECULATION: "With entrepreneurism increasingly tending toward immaterial labor and attention economies, design becomes key in strengthening figurative value. Visual identities are rarely accurate images of entities, but rather manipulations of how these entities want to be perceived by their presumed markets. Identity design is not a practice of representation, but of speculation—it is not about visualizing manifested identities but about codifying subjective predictions, and aspirations, in graphic form."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/22/2023, 10:06:03 AM
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https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/11/what-type-of-lurker-are-you
LIVE, LAUGH, LURK: “ If you lurk IRL, people can see you lurking and people know when and by whom they are being seen–the context is almost entirely visible to all parties involved. Online, there is no such exchange, you can only see what I show you and if I use the right tools, you won’t even know I’m there.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/20/2023, 1:36:40 PM
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https://www.yondonfu.com/p/under-the-hood-of-community-notes
MODERATION MATH: “ While crowdsourced content moderation is not a new idea with various implementations deployed on other platforms (i.e. Wikipedia, Reddit), Community Notes uses a unique implementation that attempts to only surface notes if they are rated positively by users with diverse viewpoints (i.e. on the political spectrum).”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/20/2023, 1:34:47 PM
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https://archive.is/muwUp
DRAMA EATS THE WORLD: “With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 11/18/2023, 2:06:01 PM
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https://centaur.radardao.xyz/
A PROTOPIC CENTAUR FUTURE: The most recent report by RADAR co-instigated by one of Folklore’s very own, @keels223, “yields a blueprint for action that challenges the idea that we’re but passengers on someone else’s ride into the future. When you leave this report, that’s what you’ll have: our start at a protopian blueprint for a Centaur Future that is, indeed, a better future. And an invitation to continue the journey with us.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/17/2023, 8:22:37 AM
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https://www.aiweirdness.com/when-algorithms-surprise-us-18-04-13/amp/
MACHINE CREATIVITY: “When machine learning solves problems, it can come up with solutions that range from clever to downright uncanny. Biological evolution works this way, too - as any biologist will tell you, living organisms find the strangest solutions to problems, and the strangest energy sources to exploit. Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a computer simulation is that if we were, some microbe would have learned to exploit its flaws.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/14/2023, 5:22:42 AM
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https://issues.org/arpa-catalyze-diffusion-paschkewitz-patt/
NOT JUST DISCOVERY, DIFFUSION: “ At DARPA we viewed innovation competition through the lens of evolving, complex adaptive ecosystems, examining the critical role of knowledge diffusion, feedback loops, and adaptations to accelerate learning, exploit opportunities, and spread innovations for competitive advantage. From this vantage point, a country’s diffusion capacitydetermines its competitiveness. Political scientist Jeffrey Ding has shown that diffusion capacity, even more than the ability to achieve breakthroughs, is essential for sustaining economic growth and productivity gains.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/13/2023, 8:21:27 AM
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https://anthology.rhizome.org/starrynight
ART AS INTERFACE: “In StarryNight, each email in the archive was represented by a glowing point of light against a dark background, which would increase in brightness each time its corresponding message was accessed in the archive. Users could navigate among them by selecting assigned keywords, which would draw “constellations” connecting related emails in the database.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/12/2023, 9:31:29 AM
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https://bonner.jp/posts/digital-sincerity.html
SINCERITY IS SCARCE, THEREFOR VALUABLE, UNTIL IT IS NOT: "There’s a certain slanted similarity to how a social media feel full of garbage content is more valuable, to a select, trusted group of friends, than whatever beautifully posed shots make it to the public-facing feed. The value is not in the actual “quality” of the content. (What does quality even mean, anyway? Production quality? How cunningly the picture was framed and filtered?) The value is in the content’s level of authenticity. Because authenticity, not quality, is the scarce resource on social media."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/11/2023, 11:22:29 AM
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https://river.maxbittker.com/
CLEANS THY EYES: Use this website to find explore a gentle stream of visuals and find new aesthetic inspirations. Enjoy the Saturday and remember to submit your remixed visuals on Source. Deadline is tomorrow evening!
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 11/7/2023, 9:15:11 PM
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https://aw.network/posts/how-to-fall-in-love-with-a-system
WHOLESOME SYSTEMS: In a digital realm akin to a warm, inviting café, Maggie Appleton's "cozy web" concept stands out, offering a nurturing space for gaming communities to thrive away from the starkness of mainstream platforms. The article from Autonomous Worlds highlights how these "wholesome" games encourage players to engage with complex systems lovingly, fostering digital environments where one can cultivate and cherish the growth of a living, breathing world.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/6/2023, 6:32:06 PM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/v3KHFm-Fz288fjTIcp5Gd63rXoANBewXqbypQqZesSw
SEEDCRAFT: In this commissioned essay we explore what the future of branding might look like in digital spaces which are decentralized and shared with AI capabilities. Moreso, we test out the theory with Folklore itself. “ Folklore proposes that a contemporary, networked brand be designed not for its human demographics, but for its machine intermediaries. In lieu of finalised assets — iconography, typography, photography — Folklore provides seeds and prompts: inputs for further, generative, creation and mediation. These seeds can be thought of as descendants of artist Harun Farocki’s concept of the ‘operational image’. With this term, Farocki theorised a genre of images not meant for human attention. Images produced by one machine for another to process in the course of a computational operation; be it identification, navigation, or something inscrutable. Operational images are neither outputs nor inputs; they are throughputs.” Read the essay, and take a moment to compete — there’s a $200 USD equivalent award for the best remixed visual submission.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 11/4/2023, 1:50:15 PM
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https://joshuacitarella.substack.com/p/platform-wars-part-4-a-public-option
STATEBOOK: Part IV of Joshua Citarella’s Platform Wars series is a provocation around a public option for social media. A joke? Implausible? Maybe, but despite these affirmations, this essay exposes how the essentials for this public utility are relatively simple to design and provides the imagination a healthy look at the implications for regulatory control, user privacy, and democratic consensus that could emerge from this digital communications infrastructure.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/3/2023, 2:03:18 PM
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https://nautil.us/how-designers-engineer-luck-into-video-games-236363/
LUCKY PLAY: "If play is the way in which human beings rehearse life, it follows that we require our games to be filled with uncertainties, moments of caprice to which we must adapt our position and strategy. But we’ve grown more demanding about the luck that games serve to us—not too much, not too little. What remains constant is our interest in the nature of the luck that we experience. “When we experience luck in a game we feel a deep sense of attunement and alignment, almost like we’ve found the pattern, and predicted it,” Schüll says."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 11/3/2023, 1:58:48 PM
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/687312148854210619/1164907790561705985/rules_of_play_game_design_fundamentals.pdf
GAMES, not GAMIFICATION: "Meaningful play occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game. Creating meaningful play is the goal of successful game design... Too often, game designers forget that they are creating, above all, an experience of play. It is not enough to tell a story. It is not enough to create pretty pictures or use dazzling technology. A game designer creates an interactive system, a set of choices, an activity. When you are making a game, ask yourself fundamental questions: What is the player actually doing from moment to moment in the game? How are these moments connected in a larger trajectory of experience? How does the experience of play become meaningful? What, above all, is the play of the game? Although there are no easy answers to these questions focusing on the play of a game's core mechanic is a good starting point for designing powerful player experiences."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/31/2023, 8:07:28 AM
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia
DEEP FICTION: Misinformation can be other than a propaganda ad or conspiracy. In this article we learn about deeply networked fictions inside the Wikipedia behemoth. Some might say a work of art given the complex and detailed approach to create such a vast networked of fictional content. Thank you to @ NilsEdison (on X), via opentab.supply for finding this article.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/31/2023, 7:52:23 AM
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia
DEEP FICTION: Misinformation can be other than a propaganda ad or conspiracy. In this article we learn about deeply networked fictions inside the Wikipedia behemoth. Some might say a work of art given the complex and detailed approach to create such a vast networked of fictional content. Thank you to @ NilsEdison (on X), via opentab.supply for finding this article.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/31/2023, 6:57:53 AM
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia
DEEP FICTION: Misinformation can be other than a propaganda ad or conspiracy. In this article we learn about deeply networked fictions inside the Wikipedia behemoth. Some might say a work of art given the complex and detailed approach to create such a vast networked of fictional content.
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 10/30/2023, 1:54:48 PM
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https://brettscott.substack.com/p/tech-doesnt-make-our-lives-easier
FEELING IMPATIENT? We don’t just live in any economy. We live in a mega-scale corporate capitalist economy, and in such a setting technology is never used to save time. It’s used to speed up production and consumption in order to expand the system. The basic rule is this: technology doesn't make our lives easier. It makes them faster and more crammed with stuff.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/27/2023, 6:41:35 AM
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https://open.substack.com/pub/countercraft/p/yall-wanna-see-a-death-of-the-author
AUTHOR DEATH: “ The problem here is perhaps less in the interpretation of old art than it is in the creation of new art. The author’s duty is now to guard against every possible misreading or bad faith reading. It’s a defensive posture that can only produce bland art. If you’re always guarding against your worst reader, you’ll never create work that appeals to your best reader.” 💀
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/25/2023, 6:38:26 AM
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https://www.theverge.com/23929233/lawrence-lessig-free-speech-first-amendment-ai-content-moderation-decoder-interview
USER CAPTURE: "Montana has basically passed a law to ban TikTok. Immediately, TikTok filed a suit challenging it, bringing a whole bunch of artists forward who said that their whole livelihood was TikTok, so therefore, it’s the core of First Amendment protection. I think it’s going to be hard under the First Amendment. I actually volunteered to help Montana defend their law, but I think it’s going to be hard. Even if you solve the foreign influence problem, you still haven’t solved the business model problem because, even if you know that China is not intentionally trying to screw with the elections, you still have a platform that’s trying to figure out how do you make people spend more time on the platform?"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/24/2023, 10:04:28 AM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/YBIKcVZkEi-KiL836LK40O6ZBC1yaSt0-yuUkPvdMgo
BABELIFICATION: In this essay, commissioned by Folklore, Ruby and Rue explore the diverging tongues of our digital terrain. "In these digital enclaves, languages mutate and new semiotics emerge. The issue? These 'languages' are almost unintelligible outside their community. We no longer speak a common digital tongue." We encourage you to collect this essay (see link) and join our membership (pinned message) -- In this way, we can fund a perpetual media machine exploring the online realms.
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 10/22/2023, 11:36:48 PM
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https://flatjournal.com/work/the-arcology-mode/
ARCOLOGIES IN FICTION AND REALITY: The article delves into the cultural and social implications of arcologies, both as architectural projects and as represented in simulation games. It discusses how these megastructures often reflect societal ideologies and fears, such as the dystopian corporate arcologies in William Gibson's "Neuromancer." The article also considers how games like "Dwarf Fortress" allow for a complex and nuanced understanding of social relations and community building.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 10/21/2023, 2:39:31 PM
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https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/10/10/heather-ford-is-the-web-eating-itself-llms-versus-verifiability/
WIKIPOCALYPSE: What happens if Wikipedia starts ingesting itself through generative AI? Wikipedia is one of the most important sources for training generative AIs. Will we experience model collapse, where models trained on their own data degrade in performance? Will projects like Wikipedia collapse under the weight of unverifiable information?
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/19/2023, 8:04:14 AM
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https://www.404media.co/twitter-verified-osint-accounts-are-destroying-the-israel-palestine-information-ecosystem/
“VERIFIED” :: How open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts are wreaking havoc on modern warfare. “What exists now is a profit and engagement driven ecosystem of non-experts who in some cases may be spreading videos for the clout and cash, rather than to inform readers about what is actually true. One respected OSINT expert, known as Obretix, told 404 Media that Twitter now is “self promoting aggregators, posting thousands of tweets to get some revenue share from Elon.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/16/2023, 2:43:33 PM
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https://walrus-flower-cnxs.squarespace.com/new-page
PRICE AND VALUE: "Rennekamp’s perspective on liquidity in markets indicates that art often operates in a realm of low liquidity, especially when new ideas and practices have not yet achieved widespread understanding or agreement. This dynamic creates a large potential “spread” between the valuation of artworks, challenging the dichotomy of “good art” versus “bad art.” His observation highlights that art’s value is not solely determined by financial metrics but is influenced by a complex interplay of factors. Rennekamp posits that while the established definitions of value may be accurate, they are limited in scope. He highlights the liquidity, or the lack thereof, in art markets, arguing that art thrives in the bounds of low liquidity, leaving ample room for varied valuation. The central dichotomy has shifted from questioning the authenticity of art to its qualitative value and its economic worth — stressing the tension between the subjective value of art and its market price."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/15/2023, 12:04:32 PM
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https://subpixel.space/entries/american-psychology/
MIND MATTERS: “ If my suspicions are right, all this spiritual entrepreneurship I’ve been documenting is playing the role of competitive evolution towards a new synthesis, a new way of making sense of mental health in the West. We may be surprised at what happens in the coming decades; we may end up with concepts of wellness and illness that do not exist today.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 10/14/2023, 11:17:48 AM
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https://longnow.org/ideas/the-lasting-whole-earth-catalog/
MYTHIC TURNED REAL: “The open-ended design of the Whole Earth Index is intended as a sort of provocation towards future works — a message and invitation in the spirit of the original catalog’s epochal claim that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The tens of thousands of scanned pages will live on the servers of the Internet Archive — as good a place as any to try and stave off a Digital Dark Age — but the ideas of the Whole Earth Catalog and its heirs will always live among those of us who read it and access its tools. What will you do with them?”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/14/2023, 6:56:18 AM
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https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/145/2/476/6356504?login=false
DIGITAL CONTAGION: “ We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness that in contrast to all previously reported episodes is spread solely via social media. Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/12/2023, 2:57:13 PM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/mXUdGyFMkotAOEJvJY4ecwMUi3ze-uZ_3s8IQ3UpD3g
New from Folklore's Community ::: OBJECT HISTORIES ::: "What conversation would you want to have with every person who will one day be in the exact same location as you? What puzzles or riddles would you gift them?"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/11/2023, 10:41:26 AM
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https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the-jagged
CENTAURS AND CYBORGS: "Centaur work has a clear line between person and machine, like the clear line between the human torso and horse body of the mythical centaur. Centaurs have a strategic division of labor, switching between AI and human tasks, allocating responsibilities based on the strengths and capabilities of each entity... On the other hand, Cyborgs blend machine and person, integrating the two deeply. Cyborgs don't just delegate tasks; they intertwine their efforts with AI, moving back and forth over the jagged frontier. Bits of tasks get handed to the AI, such as initiating a sentence for the AI to complete, so that Cyborgs find themselves working in tandem with the AI."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/10/2023, 9:10:38 AM
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https://phys.org/news/2011-08-internet-architecture-hourglass-future.html
THE HOURGLASS PINCH: "A new computer model that describes the evolution of the Internet's architecture suggests something similar has happened among the layers of protocols that have survived -- and become extinct -- on the worldwide network."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/8/2023, 6:08:52 PM
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https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2014/05/liquid-modernity.html?m=1
LIQUID MODERNITY: “What all these features of fluids amount to, in simple language, is that liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it ; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but 'for a moment'. (LC 311)”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 10/7/2023, 1:08:14 PM
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https://youtu.be/imZu4sY0kr0?si=fsKkXuW1E4JVCyp2
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF SOLARPUNK/BLOCKCHAINS: In this talk, Paul Graham Raven contextualizes solarpunk futures and the promises of blockchains within the frame of utopias and challenges the enthusiasts to come to terms with (or at minimum acknowledge) the invisible infrastructures that underpin every optimistic utterance and hope-inducing extrapolation.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/5/2023, 10:00:53 AM
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https://www.13101401.studio/research/the-crisis-of-legibility
CULTURAL RADIATION: "A cultural product with a "high half-life" would be one that endures over a considerable period, retaining its influence, recognizability, or relevance. Such long-lasting impact could be attributed to various factors, such as deep aesthetic resonance, legibility, or the establishment of a dedicated community that continues to engage with it."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 10/3/2023, 8:19:10 AM
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https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/fear-of-oozification
OOZE OOZE OOZE: "Ironically, fear of oozification, and the temptation to respond in these ways, is strongest in those who most evangelize progress, innovation, change, and endless economic growth... No, the paradox has to do with the fundamental nature of change: change carried far enough necessarily changes the changer. There is no such thing as “sustainable progress” because any pattern of sustained change will eventually oozify the defining certainties of the identities that thought it was a good idea in the first place, and pursued it."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 10/2/2023, 1:14:23 PM
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https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2019/02/book-review-computers-as-theatre.php
DIGITAL THEATRE OF THE MIND: "Computers as Theatre" serves as a seminal text for understanding the psychological and emotional dimensions of UX design. It argues that by adopting a theatrical approach, designers can tap into the innate human desire for narrative and emotional engagement, elevating UX design from mere functionality to an art form.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 9/30/2023, 12:31:34 PM
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https://open.substack.com/pub/donotresearch/p/ruby-thelot-a-eulogy-for-checkpoints?r=l1m1r&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
A EULOGY FOR CHECKPOINTS: An emergent digital behavior, one that originated in the comment section of a YouTube video, the story of Checkpoints reminds us to be fully aware of the infrastructure we use in community building in digital realms. Are the structures sturdy? Who controls them? Who is responsible for archiving or providing additional fault tolerance in the community’s memory system?
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/28/2023, 7:07:49 AM
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https://aw.network/posts/the-case-for-autonomous-worlds
WORLD AUTONOMY: "Worlds with a blockchain substrate are maximally autonomous: anybody can enforce the introduction rule, without damaging its objectivity. The disappearance or betrayal of any particular individual does not hurt the world: its diegetic boundary remains as hard as ever. Such worlds can be nearly on par with systems like the English language, or physics itself. Of course, autonomy is something you can only measure in retrospect. Before an actual existential threat faces the world, autonomy is often performative. Sometimes, a credible path towards autonomy is what allows worlds to be seen as autonomous."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/26/2023, 9:01:20 AM
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/fkxmd0lpbqocehg/ZINE%20%E2%80%A2%20WEB3%20EDITORIAL%20STYLE%20GUIDE.pdf?dl=0
STYLE GUIDE: Zora Zine's Open-Source Style Guide. Great insight into writing online, and an excellent resource to think about style with all the neologisms that we're engulfed in.
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 9/25/2023, 2:29:49 AM
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https://jessykate.medium.com/coordi-nations-a-new-institutional-structure-for-global-cooperation-3ef38d6e2cfa
INTERWEAVING COMMUNITIES: By emphasizing bottom-up supersidiarity, adaptability, and interconnectedness, coordi-nations allow for the creation of new layers of sovereignties that operate independently of existing nation states, yet nonetheless maintain an interface and symbiotic relationship with the existing state system.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 9/23/2023, 7:02:16 PM
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https://medium.com/@annaharrisonlathrop/introducing-the-archive-of-punk-technologies-5707e166e01d
ARCHIVE OF PUNK TECHNOLOGIES: Punk technologies are those that have been deliberately designed as a mode of resistance against the mainstream. It serves the same role in technology as punk rock did in music: social resistance and subterfuge against the imposition and oppression of mainstream systems that dictate a particular set of values or ways of living and being.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/23/2023, 8:16:14 AM
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https://zeeprime.capital/the-future-of-owny-fans
TRIBE ERA: “ As influencers became brands themselves they were able to launch white-labeled products top-down - dumping merch on their followers. As explained above, the brands’ way into cultural relevance was via influencer partnerships and memes. But what if we could own the memes collectively? Enter the era of tribesmen.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/21/2023, 8:21:53 AM
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http://www.berylgraham.com/serious/other/bgessay.htm
INTER-ACTION: “ Another potential pleasure offered by interactivity is that of 'control' -- control being on a dangerously sliding scale which could also result in displeasure for an audience. 'Control', like 'choice' depends on degree -- is the artist giving a token degree of control which is ultimately frustrating, or giving the audience full control, in which case what is the artist there for?”
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 9/18/2023, 1:29:36 AM
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https://rifters.com/real/shorts/TheScorchedEarthSociety-transcript.pdf
HERE'S A WILD THOUGHT: don't just offer data protection, especially when you can't guarantee it. Offer data destruction. Not BrinWorld, where everyone knows everything and lions lie down with lambs; a more hard-edged place where, when the lions come calling, we burn down our chunk of the veldt rather than hand it over. Forget the Transparent Society. Let's call this the Scorched-Earth society.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 9/16/2023, 1:13:22 PM
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https://perell.com/essay/expression-is-compression/
COMPRESSION PROGRESS: A simple principle explains essential aspects of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, art, science, music, jokes. This David Perell essay serves as a bit of a compressed appetizer, but the seminal 2008 Cornell paper is linked out for those who want the whole meal.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/15/2023, 7:59:09 AM
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https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-firm-2a800b3aa2e7
FORK IT: “ Moloch DAO always leaves a door open. Every time there is a vote, one can decide to exit (“ragequit”), turning non-transferable voting shares into transferable “loot tokens”. If you destroy your loot tokens, you can exit with your proportional amount of the organization’s resources (“treasury”).”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/14/2023, 1:02:13 PM
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https://medium.com/@simondlr/a-bonded-curation-community-247f14a6de04
BONDED: “Tokens are algorithmically minted and then used to deposit it against participants in the community that curate and foster the shared goals of the community. These participants can then use their standing (proportional backing) in the community to curate any information in this community. Anyone, at any point in time can become a curator. It is dynamic. The deposits can be shifted around to other curators as desired.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/10/2023, 7:47:07 PM
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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/08/30/passionate-kisses-the-soundtrack-at-cvs/
AUSTERITY-CORE: “ The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.”
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 9/9/2023, 1:34:04 PM
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https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS? “In what follows I shall offer outlines and illustrations of two ways in which artifacts can contain political properties. First are instances in which the invention, design, or arrangement of a specific technical device or system becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community. Seen in the proper light, examples of this kind are fairly straightforward and easily understood. Second are cases of what can be called inherently political technologies, man-made systems that appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships. Arguments about cases of this kind are much more troublesome and closer to the heart of the matter. By "politics," I mean arrangements of power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements…My intention is not to settle any of the issues here once and for all, but to indicate their general dimensions and significance.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/8/2023, 9:49:01 AM
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https://davidphelps.substack.com/p/the-proto-app-thesis
PROTO-APP THESIS: “ And here we arrive at the moral of our little tale, that according to The Social App Thesis, we’ve simply reached saturation ::::: Now. —— It would be hard to say The Social App Thesis is wrong, exactly—within the terms of this tale, it seems fairly irrefutable. But it’s telling that The Social App Thesis neglects the fact that a major new app has ascended for the first time in nearly a decade. Yet so game-changing is this app that you might not even notice it’s an app at all. I’m referring, of course, to Chat-GPT.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/7/2023, 7:37:57 AM
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https://skventures.substack.com/p/societys-technical-debt-and-softwares
TIME FOR WASTE: "The collapse of CPU prices led us directly from mainframes to the personal computer era; the collapse of storage prices (of all kinds) led inevitably to more personal computers with useful local storage, which helped spark databases and spreadsheets, then led to web services, and then to cloud services. And, most recently, the collapse of network transit costs (as bandwidth exploded) led directly to the modern Internet, streaming video, and mobile apps... Each beneficiary of a collapse requires one or more core technologies' price to drop and performance to soar. This, in turn, opens up new opportunities to “waste” them in service of things that previously seemed impossible, prohibitively expensive, or both... AI as the Next Collapse Dynamic in Technology"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/6/2023, 12:56:52 PM
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https://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
INDUSTRIAL STUPOR: “ The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset. It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/4/2023, 6:56:04 PM
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https://www.theverge.com/23846048/google-search-memes-images-pagerank-altavista-seo-keywords
CONTENT DISTORTION: “ Sullivan says PageRank’s algorithm is a lot simpler than most people assume it is. At the beginning, most of the tips and tricks people were sharing were largely pointless for SEO. The subject of SEO is still rife with superstition. There are a lot of different ideas that people have about exactly how to get a prominent spot on Google’s results, Sullivan acknowledges. But most of the stuff you’ll find by, well, googling “SEO tricks” isn’t very accurate… And here is where you get into the circular nature of his argument against Google’s influence. Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?”
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 9/3/2023, 5:15:39 PM
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https://offset.labr.io/
CAPITALISM VS. CLIMATE ACTION: Offset is not your typical carbon credits platform. It's a radical initiative that aims to quantify the climate benefits of direct actions and industrial sabotage. This platform invites public submissions for case studies and even assembles an expert panel to scrutinize its innovative methodology. While traditional carbon offset markets perpetuate the status quo, Offset seeks to disrupt it by focusing on political actions that genuinely affect carbon flows.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/2/2023, 5:26:11 PM
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https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14134/13983
INTO THE DEPTH OF /b/: “ Our first study uses a large dataset of more than five million posts to quantify ephemerality in /b/. We find that most threads spend just five seconds on the first page and less than five minutes on the site before expiring. Our second study is an analysis of identity signals on 4chan, finding that over 90% of posts are made by fully anonymous users, with other identity signals adopted and discarded at will. We describe alternative mechanisms that /b/ participants use to establish status and frame their interactions.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 9/1/2023, 7:39:59 AM
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https://folklore.institute
BEGINNINGS EVERMORE. Today, we say farewell to many beloved kindred. It is September 1st, a day that will live in infamy as The First Culling. —::—::— Arise now, arise, Journeykin of Folklore! Dire deeds awake: dark is the forest. Let the dreams emerge, words engrave in stone! Forth Cybernauts! Arise now, arise, Journeykin of Folklore! Delays have dangerous ends: Think and Mint! Paper shall crumple, keyboards split, A pen-day, an ink day, ere the sun rises! Read now, write now! Learn for all! —::—::— Thank you again to all the Season 1 supporters. This channel will remain public and the forum eligibility has been updated. Our gratitude for your tributes as we continue the steady path of curation, commission, and community. For those interested in continuing the journey alongside the mid-season members and S2 members, just visit folklore.institute. The membership link should be open for a few more weeks. May you be blessed by the algorithms, Folklore
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/30/2023, 7:40:30 PM
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https://www.johnhagel.com/paper_pushpull.pdf
FROM PUSH TO PULL: “In the past decade, we have seen early signs of a new model for mobilizing resources. Rather than "push", this new approach focuses on "pull" - creating platforms that help people to mobilize appropriate resources when the need arises. In lean manufacturing, early elements of a pull model began to emerge from Toyota in the early 1950's. As we will discuss below, however, lean manufacturing represents a hybrid between push and pull models - it still contains significant elements of push models.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/29/2023, 5:35:12 PM
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https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/bridging-the-ask-vs-guess-culture
ASK CULTURE vs. GUESS CULTURE: "If you’re more of a guess-culture person, asking people for help without knowing their circumstances can feel rude or intrusive. Broadcasting publicly your need for help can feel awkward and vulnerable. If you’re more of an ask-culture person, the guess-culture example of juggling everyone’s specific scenarios and the historical context of favors probably seems exhausting. Dropping hints in the hopes that you won’t even have to make your request can feel extra passive and manipulative."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 8/28/2023, 2:02:20 AM
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https://www.popsci.com/technology/shared-data-a-short-story-from-an-alternate-future/
A TALE OF RESILIENT FUTURES: Shared Data presents itself as a short story with a subsequent breakdown commentary: Shared Data exists as an eco-futurist hypothesis of a world existing and persisting throughout climate disasters that have now become commonplace and woven into the fabric of the characters’ everyday lives. But this story isn’t just about climate change — at the heart of Shared Data is a hypothesis of a future project and cooperative that could have numerous benefits for consumers- a shared data hub and cooperative that provides real time data, insights, and social interaction spaces for communities to provide mutual aid in real time.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 8/26/2023, 11:14:16 AM
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https://www.radicalxchange.org/media/blog/secret-societies-network-states-burning-man-zuzalu-and-more/
A TAXONOMY OF NEW COMMUNITIES: “Building new communities is hard. Doing it in a way that is responsible, honest, and productive for participants and the broader society is even harder. “ In this short, thought-provoking essay the author introduces a taxonomy of three kinds of “new community” advocates, situates them in relation to social progress, shares some observations about what makes communities coherent and attractive, and concludes with a few concrete proposals for experimentation that flow from the analysis.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 8/25/2023, 8:01:22 PM
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https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/111218/Lucas8_BlurryVisionBias.pdf
THE BLURRY VISION BIAS: On the power of vivid detail and the difference between communicating visions of the future with image-based rhetoric vs. nebulous, abstract language. Like meeting a person IRL rather than only interacting with them online, there's a depth of connection and a difference in empathy that comes from getting visceral. Seems like yet another feather in the cap for worldbuilding and its increasing importance in communicating effectively today and tomorrow.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/24/2023, 1:25:28 PM
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https://files.theseedsofscience.org/2023/We_See_The_Sacred_From_Afar__To_See_It_The_Same.pdf
SACRED: “Humans have long treated some especially important things in a distinctive special “sacred” way. For example, the following are widely seen as at least somewhat sacred: family, love, charity, courage, honesty, liberty, school, art, music, dance, fiction, innovation, epiphanies, inquiry, religion, spirits, sky, space, nature, sport, talk, friendship, health, medicine, children, democracy, law, sex, death, war, royalty, and nation. While we see wide variation in who treats what as how sacred, almost all of us treat some of these in a similar substantially-sacred way. Yes, we have many good reasons to value such things, but why value them in this special “sacred” way?”
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 8/21/2023, 2:52:17 PM
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https://aw.network/posts/three-eras-of-world-generation
WORLD GENERATION: Building on Folklore conversation from the last week, this piece breaks down "worldbuilding" into three different eras, each leading to where we are today. "We are entering an age where the audience, again, can transform the underlying structures and narrative logics of the worlds they inhabit. Real-time rendering engines have offered a first glance into these worlds; onchain autonomy will slam their gates open."
Signed by  0x14...9f15  at 8/21/2023, 1:59:50 PM
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https://flatjournal.com/work/the-game-engine-as-transhumanist-sandbox/
TRANSHUMANISM IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD: "Game engines as transhumanist sandboxes blur human-machine lines. This article explores their role as gateways to a new existence."
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 8/19/2023, 12:42:42 PM
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https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/radicle-civics-building-proofs-of-possibilities-for-a-civic-economy-and-society-ee28baeeec70
RADICLE CIVICS: Civics starts with the most elemental of our social relationships: our mutual interdependencies from which forms of social organisation emerge. What would our civic infrastructure look like if we shifted our view from objects to agents, from externalities to entanglements, and from public-private to commoning? Consider these proofs of possibilities.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 8/18/2023, 10:49:32 PM
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https://dirt.fyi/article/2023/08/introducing-lifestyle
WHAT IS LIFESTYLE? In which Daisy Alioto explores the past and present of lifestyle as a sociological and economic concept
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/17/2023, 5:30:48 AM
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/
COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY: “ Another way of putting this is to say that collective intentionality is irreducible to individual intentionality (though this is generally accepted only insofar as individual intentionality is narrowly understood). It is only in virtue of its irreducibility that the intentional state in question can be attributed to the participants as a group.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/16/2023, 8:48:21 AM
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_7trBzF5ba3EllBMIj_hZOLqgrrNQRDu/view?usp=sharing
NETWORKED PUBLICS: "Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/15/2023, 6:29:36 PM
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https://www.cjr.org/opinion/micropayments-subscription-pay-by-article.php
MICROPAYMENT DISCOURSE: "If an outlet wanted to try to start itself up on a pay-per-article model, it might work—but the price point would likely be much higher than the handful of cents we generally discuss. That gets trickier, Haile says, because information is fundamentally different from other arenas... Gaming is perhaps the greatest triumph of micropayments. But in games, you know what you’re buying in advance—three extra lives, a hundred coins, whatever. For a journalistic article, you’ll only know whether you enjoyed it after you’ve finished it."
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 8/12/2023, 1:07:44 PM
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https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
THE PARADOX OF SLACK: “In the esoteric teachings, total competition is called Moloch, and total absence of competition is called Slack. Slack gets short shrift. If you think of it as “some people try to win competitions, other people don’t care about winning competitions and slack off and go to the beach”, you’re misunderstanding it. Think of slack as a paradox – the Taoist art of winning competitions by not trying too hard at them. Moloch and Slack are opposites and complements, like yin and yang. Neither is stronger than the other, but their interplay creates the ten thousand things.” (Note to any fellow slackers: this isn’t a tldr, but my favorite section was IV example 7 thru conclusion, if ya want to jump ahead and maybe rewind later)
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 8/11/2023, 10:23:26 PM
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https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-toxic-welcome-to-the-metabolic-era/
OUR METABOLIC ERA: Is this subconsciously why we're all obsessed with rotting right now? On considering nonhuman metaphors for radical breakdown in an age of toxic growth. "As Boots Riley put it in a recent interview, “Culture is what we do to make our survival normal.” ... What might it look like to embrace our role as part of a massive and massively weird ecological and metabolic system, and to experiment with the creative and expressive potential of digestion?"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/10/2023, 8:14:33 AM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/Kaj9PzlkPxSg3fMd1BL4Nx3GWKHtBkHQzLq5QHw-aj8
SEASON 2 is OPEN: Thank you everyone for such an exciting year. We're well on our way to creating a calm and meaningful space of learning and exploration. As of yesterday, Folklore has opened 150 membership spots for the upcoming year(ish). Funds will be used to commission writing, build our own 'situated software' and (hopefully) host a few meetups! Membership passes are available in this link, alongside a community update. If you have a mid-season pass, you do not need to purchase a new membership. Season 1 access to the Forum will be removed in September.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/10/2023, 8:08:29 AM
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https://swardley.medium.com/how-organisations-are-changing-cf80f3e2300
NEXT-GEN ORGS: "Teams will often swarm around problems, leadership is transient in nature and leaders will arise to fit the problem... Outcome not output matters... To train people, the company used scenarios and gameplay, usually online. The idea of Eve online being a training tool is not an alien concept."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/9/2023, 9:15:36 AM
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q0Nn62sm401JV49eX0VFYVbs0vmqCBUE/view?usp=drive_link
RUMORS, GOSSIP, URBAN LEGENDS: "Classic rumor differs from gossip and urban legend, though these differences often blur. Gossip is evaluative idle talk about individuals – usually not present – often shared for amusement, to communicate social mores, and to exclude someone from a social group... when we object 'That’s a rumor!' we mean that it is unverified... Rumor is a morsel of food in an information famine; gossip is a tasty juicy treat at a cocktail party... Urban legends are narratives – they have a story-like structure – of unusual, humorous, or horrible events that contain modern themes and moral implications."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/6/2023, 7:47:38 PM
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https://www.youtube.com/live/tK5xI7PiCSY?feature=share&t=18305
DEEP ATTENTION: In this presentation, Charles Broskoski (founder of are.na), talks about content, curation, and how it's the orientation towards what we desire that makes us who we are. Take some time to give Charles your true attention, and listen to deep, hard-won wisdom.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 8/5/2023, 2:27:02 PM
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https://hackernoon.com/warm-data-9f0fcd2a828c
CONTEXT IS QUEEN: Borrowed that phrase from Metalabel, but this piece about exploring new forms of information from Nora Bateson, Gregory Bateson’s daughter. “To address our socio-economic and ecological crisis now requires a level of contextual comprehension, wiggly though it may be to grok the inconsistencies and paradoxes of interrelational process. Far from solving these dilemmas or resolving the conflicting patterns, Warm Data utilizes these characteristics as its most important resources of inquiry.”
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 8/4/2023, 8:58:17 PM
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https://archive.ph/R7vqP
WEB2'S SELF-LOATHING ERA: X is just the latest in a long line of bewildering rebrands among web2 companies. So what gives? Here, Ted Gioia identifies rebranding as a signifier of shame and self-loathing; a decidedly different energy from the optimism, excitement, and promise we typically associate with Internet Companies. There's a chicken & the egg situation — is the self-loathing driven by waning consumer interest and excitement? Or is increasing consumer distrust and distaste for the same platforms driven by the lack of direction, clarity, and frankly fun, inherent in the trajectory of these rebrands? And no matter the answer, what does it all say about what comes next?
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/3/2023, 3:59:19 PM
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https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/
ADS DONT WORK THAT WAY: "Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product."
Signed by  0x10...382c  at 8/2/2023, 10:40:18 PM
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https://www.projecthorseshoe.com/reports/featured/ph19r7.htm
PROSOCIAL DESIGN: “Multiplayer games can help build a player’s social support network. What would game design look like if our goals included reducing loneliness, decreasing toxicity and boosting a player’s positive connections with others? This paper looks at how we might use economics, an often dehumanizing and antisocial discipline, to support prosocial design goals.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 8/1/2023, 3:47:10 PM
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https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
PROTOCOLS, NOT PLATFORMS: “ Moving to protocols, not platforms, is an approach for free speech in the twenty-first century. Rather than relying on a “marketplace of ideas” within an individual platform—which can be hijacked by those with malicious intent—protocols could lead to a marketplace of ideals, where competition occurs to provide better services that minimize the impact of those with malicious intent, without cutting off their ability to speak entirely.”
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 7/31/2023, 8:00:14 PM
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https://pilgrimsinthemachine.substack.com/p/spirit-in-the-technopolis?utm_medium=ios
SPIRIT IN THE TECHNOPOLIS: This essay offers an exploration of the emergence of the Technopolis, where technology and reason become absolutes, dominating our lives. It vividly compares the airport, a microcosm of this Technopolis, to our future technological civilization. The author's insights into the potential consequences of this trajectory are thought-provoking, urging us to consider the balance between Reason, Religion, and Technology in shaping our future. By delving into the essence of humanity and advocating for disruptive spiritual practices rooted in sacrificial love, the essay encourages us to ponder our role in shaping a better alignment for the world.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 7/29/2023, 1:32:21 PM
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https://www.dezeen.com/2020/02/11/lo-tek-design-radical-indigenism-julia-watson-indigenous-technologies/
A NEW MYTHOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY: In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. Extending the grounds of typical design, Lo—TEK is a movement that investigates lesser-known local technologies, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), indigenous cultural practices, and mythologies passed down as songs or stories. In contrast to the homogeneity of the modern world, indigeneity is reframed as an evolutionary extension of life in symbiosis with nature. Lo—TEK orients us towards a different mythology of technology. One that evolves humanism with radical indigenism.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 7/28/2023, 7:51:57 PM
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/generative-ai-human-culture-philosophy/674165/
A HUMANIST RENAISSANCE?: This piece in The Atlantic explores the question of what a philosophical and cultural counter-movement to AI might look like and how it might take shape. One answer among countless, it raises a host of interesting questions and makes one stop to consider what role they have to play in the unsettled shape of the future: "We would be wise to rectify the errors of the recent past, but also to anticipate—and proactively shape—what the far more radical technology now emerging will mean for our lives, and how it will come to remake our civilization."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/28/2023, 3:16:40 PM
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https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/anonymity_as_culture__treatise
WORLD OF ANONS: What is "a-culture"? "More significantly, A-culture offers a place for discussion of A-culture. Because the community is so autonomous from the real world, there is great opportunity to continually redefine one’s role in it and even redefine the nature of the community itself. A-culture is a space for playing with unrestricted notions of identity and affiliation and for the establishment of a private set of in-jokes and references that come to constitute a collective memory."
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/26/2023, 12:47:21 PM
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https://manifold.umn.edu/read/metagaming/section/212ed2b3-a2f0-4696-8949-f176553c5bcb
META-MARIO: Social Seriality, Metagamming, and Community in our Digital World. “Videogames operate as an ideal medium for expressing as well as critiquing the serial structures that define both the digital repetitions of software and the quotidian repetitions that conduct the rhythm of daily life. In the twenty-first century, the figure of the man in a gray flannel suit, holding a newspaper while waiting for the bus or train, has been at least partially replaced by the contemporary commuter fiddling with a laptop, smartphone, e-reader, or handheld videogame console.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/25/2023, 11:44:34 AM
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https://archive.is/zlIVp#selection-2827.0-2827.416
LORE OF THE WELL: "A large part of the attraction was that The Well offered the freedom of projecting whatever personality you wished, along with the intriguing possibility of highlighting subtle variations of your character. Users adhered to Brand's true-names rule, but at the same time most people created an electronic persona that was, to use MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle's term, "coextensive" with their physically embodied one."
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 7/24/2023, 6:56:14 PM
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https://renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/the-silent-theology-of-islamic-art
Art can speak to the soul. Reading this in the context of explorations around the role of media, this piece provokes thought around the ways that art (and media broadly) provokes beauty and shapes our understanding of values in a given community or society. Media having its own "silent theology" has been the idea keeping me up at night.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 7/22/2023, 11:26:15 AM
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis
THE GENESIS OF SCHISM: Schismogenesis literally means "creation of division". The term derives from the Greek words σχίσμα skhisma "cleft" (borrowed into English as schism, "division into opposing factions"), and γένεσις genesis "generation, creation" (deriving in turn from gignesthai "be born or produced, creation, a coming into being"). Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind describes the two forms of schismogenesis (complementary and symmetrical) and proposes that both forms are self-destructive to the parties involved. He goes on to suggest that researchers look into methods that one or both parties may employ to stop a schismogenesis before it reaches its destructive stage.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 7/21/2023, 8:41:40 PM
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https://archive.ph/ouiRi
ON DAYDREAMING WITH TECHNOLOGY: Returning to the theme of technology's impact on our collective imagination (and increasing lack thereof), an old favorite from Astra Mag on the state of daydreaming. Much in the same way that Christopher Butler's piece from last week (on Personal Machines and Portable Worlds) explored the way modern personal devices remove the magic of exploring the unknown, this essay unpacks the ways today's internet has changed the terms of our daydreaming. Granting our daydreams fodder, but also taking away their breathing room. It fills in too many gaps. What does tech look like that makes space for imagined alternatives?
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/21/2023, 6:40:22 AM
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https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/japans-cynical-romantics
JAPANESE ANCESTORS: “ The young users of 2Chan were simultaneously obsessive consumers of media and animated by a deep animosity toward the press. The Japanese cynical romanticists loathed the media, yet were incapable of shutting up about it.”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/19/2023, 6:45:10 PM
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https://frankchimero.com/blog/2013/what-screens-want/
WHAT SCREENS WANT: We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another. And we probably need to steal these words from places like animation, theater, puppetry, dance, and choreography. Words matter. They are abstractions, too—an interface to thought and understanding by communication. The words we use mold our perception of our work and the world around us. They become a frame, just like the interfaces we design.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/18/2023, 10:56:23 AM
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https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/discourse-emily-dickinson-apple-computer-house
"Walking through Dickinson’s real-yet-reconstituted house, I trailed my fingers over the shiny sofas. The psychedelically patterned floral wallpaper looked new and garish, like something onscreen. The house began to feel less like the home of a real dead woman than a hallucination produced by a TV show, or a palimpsest of dying media forms"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/16/2023, 3:56:39 PM
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https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_future_lea.html
HEIRLOOM MARKETING: You can't buy into class but people will try anyway, so the watch gets the nouveaux and nouveauxing rich as close to this lifestyle as they will ever get. Not only is it a visible symbol of their success but it broadcasts (as per the ad) that they are the kind of person that reflectively considers the next generation, what they will pass on to them, their legacy.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 7/15/2023, 12:29:54 PM
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https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation/release/1
The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping the systems that interact with other forces, ideas, events and other designers. This essay is an exploration of what it means to participate.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 7/14/2023, 3:26:12 PM
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https://www.chrbutler.com/personal-machines-and-portable-worlds
PERSONAL MACHINES & PORTABLE WORLDS: In this essay, Christopher Butler explores the world of personal devices — and the very different feel they gave than internet-connected devices of today, which, despite their efforts to feel hyper-personal, often feel anything but. On this older era of devices, he writes: "To be personal it has to be a certain kind of device — the kind that balances access to another world with the kinds of limits and boundaries that make a thing private....The most magical of personal devices are those which offer access to the experience of infinitude without measuring it for you. The unknown is the stuff of imagination." This one's worth pairing with the NotBoring essay from a few months back, 'The Happiness Hypothesis' https://www.notboring.co/p/the-happiness-hypothesis. If, as Packy writes, "the purpose of technology is to increase the potential for happiness, but most people don’t feel like technology makes them much happier" — maybe getting back to personal portals that unlock imagination is the key.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/13/2023, 7:26:46 AM
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https://craigmod.com/journal/subcompact_publishing/
SUBCOMPACT PUBLISHING: “One of the great benefits of being part of the emergent publishing world is that you don’t have multiple mediums to publish across. You can and probably should focus squarely on digital. Perhaps later — contingent on market demand and content quality — you can consider publishing a print anthology to give your publication a stronger literal edge. So what are these so called ‘indigenous’ qualities of digital?”
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/12/2023, 10:18:30 AM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOFNJzp1yng
OUR INTERFACE SHAPES OUR ACTIONS: In this 1980 video called "Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" William H. Whyte and their team explore how urban design, like seating, shade and trees, influence the behaviors of crowds.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/11/2023, 5:42:55 AM
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https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf
Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: In this prescient paper from 1996 we learn about the different types of human organizations, their characteristics, and how they interact with each other.
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 7/10/2023, 12:39:46 PM
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https://outland.art/generative-ai-and-technical-images/
This essay explores the history and implications of images and their relationship with humans, delving into the philosophical perspectives of Aristotle and Kant regarding the mimetic nature of images and their emotional impact on viewers. It also discusses the cultural aversion to images, iconoclasm, and how certain religions and early Christians discouraged their use. The author then explores a future where AI-generated images dominate, questioning the authorship and authenticity of images as machines become creators in their own right. The conclusion is fascinating, and much of this conversation is relevant to the curation and publishing work we're doing at Folklore.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/9/2023, 7:00:40 AM
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https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline
TWITTER's END - Eugene outlines in detail how Twitter has reached the end of its days. In a compelling and emotional essay, we learn about the lifecycle of Twitter. We explore how they stumbled upon (then destroyed) the interest-graph, its key innovation, moat, and differentiator in the hyper-competitive world of social media.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 7/8/2023, 12:55:17 PM
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1104698788830003301/1119001038406561852/internet_geographies.pdf
Most research on digital divides and inequalities has focused on social differences within nations, such as divides between socioeconomic groups. This chapter takes a global perspective, focusing on how the production of content is distributed around the world and setting out to comprehensively uncover: (1) where Internet content is being created; (2) whether the amount of content created in different places is changing over time; and (3) the ways in which landscapes of content are structured and formed. Mapping the geographic diversity and concentration of a broad variety of sources of online content is ultimately crucial to developing more informed strategies to combat digital divides and ultimately benefit those who are left out of flows of information.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 7/7/2023, 1:47:56 PM
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https://civiclaboratory.nl/2021/01/03/collabrary-a-methodological-experiment-for-reading-with-reciprocity/
READING WITH RECIPROCITY: Getting meta on this Friday with a read unpacks how we might shift our reading mindset from one of extraction to one of reciprocity. "Reciprocity of thinking requires us to pay attention to who else is speaking alongside us. It also positions us, first and foremost, as citizens embedded in dynamic legal orders and systems of relations that require us to work constantly and thoughtfully across the myriad systems of thinking, acting, and governance within which we find ourselves enmeshed"
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/6/2023, 9:31:34 AM
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https://folklore.mirror.xyz/nQ30ZabiOnn4BEtvGf1jPAjMYMCtMoFALDeo8wh4yQM
PROPHETS & PROFITS: An exploration of entanglements between technology, capital, and spirituality, with particular emphasis on the reshaping of maps & territories by would-be empires and their self-appointed messiahs ------------------- Welcome to Folklore's first externally commissioned essay. We are joined today by Wassim, a brilliant researcher looking at online cultures. In this article, Wassim explores the depths of Bitcoin and crypto cultures, asking the hard questions around the role of evangelism and the consequences of BELIEF in the development of our new charter cities and network states. -------------- Please support Folklore by collecting this article. Funds are split equally between Wassim and Folklore to support further commissions.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/5/2023, 5:48:37 AM
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https://www.documentjournal.com/2022/12/raw-eggs-pink-pills-and-embodied-identity-online-communities-create-their-own-proof-in-a-vacuum-of-truth/
OUR OWN TRUTH. In the absence of trustworthy institutions, society has retreated into self-validating rubrics of meaning-making. We now attempt to posit anti-conspiratorial truth in a vacuum of credibility.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 7/4/2023, 8:15:47 AM
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https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
REVISITING THE WEB 2.0 VISION: “If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0... The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence” Web 2.0 was the intersection of Hyperlinking, Aggregation, Curation, Reviews, Markets, Wikis, Tagging, Sharing, and Peer Production.
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 7/3/2023, 12:35:56 PM
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https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/07/07/the-garden-of-forking-memes/
Bringing this gem back. In light of Twitter's rate limiting, "infinite content" re: luxury media, and experiments here at Folklore with "public radio" and community-crafted feeds, a discussion of time in our digital spaces feels necessary. Aaron argues that we're transitioning from a world of linear narratives and time lines to a "garden of forking memes" that we’re free to explore and tend to. The gardening games with the richest soil, the deepest roots, and the most interesting characters will attract the most people. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blind to the natural cycles that shaped us and continue to sustain us.
Signed by  0x1b...5ddD  at 7/1/2023, 1:14:31 PM
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https://sceneswithsimon.com/p/belonging-and-understanding-through
Inside all of us is a desire to feel like we belong (shallow context + broad understanding), but we also have a desire to be understood (deep context + niche). What matters to each person: whether they want to belong or be understood, differs. To me, belonging and understanding is a venn diagram. They are both premised on the desire to connect without discussion. However: Belonging is a group desire for a less uncertain future. It’s forward looking and about one’s affiliation to a group and the ease and comfort it brings when we share similarities. Understanding is an individual desire to have one’s past be known. It’s backwards looking and it’s about sharing a past with specific people. It’s about feelings and lived experiences and the inability for language to convey them.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 6/30/2023, 3:12:54 PM
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https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-objective-data/
THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY: On why nothing's really objective — and why it doesn't really matter in the first place. What we see is determined by what we know, and that context is powerful when used for good. More: https://sanenewworld.substack.com/p/what-we-see-and-what-we-know?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 6/29/2023, 6:03:18 PM
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Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 6/29/2023, 3:47:57 PM
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https://broadcast.mirror.xyz/wi3V5CmA4JW3S1u1Ta9pzA9PO0dIyjtH0DrVA3_RfFc
LUXURY MEDIA: A framework for the economic sustainability of internet-native media. It's a return to patronage – we are not paying for utility, but rather are funding the story, the taste, the culture, and its proliferation.
Signed by  0xe6...A32E  at 6/29/2023, 3:41:03 PM
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https://broadcast.mirror.xyz/wi3V5CmA4JW3S1u1Ta9pzA9PO0dIyjtH0DrVA3_RfFc
LUXURY MEDIA: A framework for the economic sustainability of internet-native media. It's a return to patronage – we are not paying for utility, but rather are funding the story, the taste, the culture, and its proliferation.
Signed by  0x70...63e3  at 6/29/2023, 3:23:02 PM
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https://broadcast.mirror.xyz/wi3V5CmA4JW3S1u1Ta9pzA9PO0dIyjtH0DrVA3_RfFc
Luxury Media is a framework for the economic sustainability of internet-native media. It's a return to patronage – we are not paying for utility, but rather are funding the story, the taste, the culture, and its proliferation.
Signed by  0xFd...fB4b  at 6/29/2023, 2:35:40 PM
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https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-myth-of-objective-data/
THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVITY: On why nothing's really objective — and why it doesn't really matter in the first place. What we see is determined by what we know, and that context is powerful when used for good. More: https://sanenewworld.substack.com/p/what-we-see-and-what-we-know
Signed by  0x6F...c387  at 6/28/2023, 11:00:55 AM
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https://libred.org/
Daemons -- daemons everywhere...
build c80375 by libre daemon