tag > Media
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Thoughts on Generative AI Media
Images generated by OpenAI's DALL·E 2 As the generative AI media train is going into hyper drive, my predictions and thoughts on the space from a few years ago seem more relevant than ever. Personally, I'm happy to have left that scene. If my experiences developing generative systems at startups (CreativeAI) and at giant corporations (Google Research) has thought me anything, it is that despite all the nice words, lofty aspirations and fancy technology, the developers of (creative) ML systems have by and large very little regard and respect for the needs of real people, communities and nature. Nihilistic techno-fetishists and cyber necrophiliacs rambling something about "creativity"...
- Automating Creativity Why? (Samim, 2018)
- Augmentation, Amputation, Dehumanisation - Towards Life Centered Design (Samim, 2019)
- Creative AI: On the Democratisation & Escalation of Creativity (Samim & Pieters, 2016)
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Western Media, as seen from China ("In war, everything not censored is a lie.")
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"Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" is a 2h critical analysis video about NFTs. If the time is to valuable for you to spend on this topic (it should be, go visit a forest instead), here is my short Comment:
In the early 2000s, "P2P" Communities like "BitTorrent" thrived around the vision of making all media and knowledge accessible for everyone for free by removing key barriers and ending (artificial) scarcity. It was a radical departure from the age old philosophy of the dominate power "elites", defined by concepts such as Scarcity, Property, Competition, Surveillance, Policing - and above all, financialization & commercialization of everything.
After years of dirty fights by the "elites" and diverse "middle men" against the P2P, Commons and Open-Source movements, they seemingly have achieved dominance over the narrative once again. The result are things like NFT's, which implement the vision of creating more artificial scarcity by creating more (Intellectual) Property through more technological policing - and above all, more financialization & commercialization of everything. NFT's lead to a plethora of bad outcomes, including opening the (philosophical, cultural) door for all kinds of DRM maximalism nightmares, incl. patents on life.
Members of Hyperledger, indicative of the wider situation Despite the ubiquitous marketing messaging ("Decentralize power!"), unsurprisingly the hidden owners of the Crypto/NFT space are the same criminal gangs and empires of the 0.0001%, that have been running the show for centuries. Never forget rule N.1 of the blockchain: He who owns the biggest (quantum) computer and dominates the (power/fiber) networks, de-facto owns everything.
NFT's represent a massive failure of imagination. In the very moment that creating a post-scarcity, open-source, commons-based economy has become feasible, an entire generation has been enticed to become "wannabe investment bankers" engaged in a giant Ponzi Scheme instead.
More critique of Crypto & NFT's, here, here, here, here, here, here and here
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Allen Ginsberg, Angleton and the ‘Poetics of the CIA’
Yes, Kids, Cookie Monster is a Psyop
Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.
Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”
Aerial combat was the initial use case for this cyborg symbiosis, and in the 1950’s/early 1960s this research was directed towards neuromuscular interfaces with the hardware – humans being literally “wired in” to the computers. By the late 1960s / early 1970s, computer displays + pointing devices (derived from Air Force radar scopes) had become responsive enough that it was possible to use the computer as an interface to display traditional works of art: books, music, animation. This is where it became possible for the user to establish deeper cathexis with the hardware across the full range of human emotions. Control feedback loops became visual / endocrine, not mechanical / muscular. This was the conceptual leap that Engelbart + Kay pulled off at SRI and PARC. It took Steve Jobs another few years to figure out how to commodify that cathexis, and then the Personal Computer Revolution was underway.
Although MK-Ultra was a CIA black operation nominally under the control of Dulles, it was in reality a British intelligence operation run into the United States under the cover of the CIA and the Rand Corporation. Furthermore. the presence of the Office of Naval Intelligence and Air Force Intelligence in the original -Operation Artichoke and MK-Ultra task force. and the subsequent importance of trained operatives of ONI and Air Force Intelligence in the creation of U.S.-based terrorist cults. points to heavy contamination of these agencies in particular by British SIS
The three British intelligence agents heading up MK Ultra as research directors from 1952 on were Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman of the Warburg-owned San doz drug firm (where Hoffman first synthesized LSD in 1943), and Humphrey Osmond, a close Huxley family friend and physician based at the University of London Hospital where he studied schizophrenia.
#Cryptocracy #Media #Culture #HCI #Military #Art #History #Psychedelic
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Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets
Sifting through over 30,000 grants in the company’s database, MintPress can reveal that the Gates Foundation has bankrolled hundreds of media outlets and ventures, to the tune of at least $319 million.
Related: Open Letter to Hobbyists - by Bill Gates (1976)
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": 🤡 "Independent Alternative Media"
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DRM fetishism (aka "Cryptocurrencies") is what you get when you put Lawyers & Accounts in charge.
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The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison
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“There is no truth in news and no news in truth” - Russian Izvestia and Pravda adage
