How to Keep Someone With You Forever
Really disturbing piece about how to make someone dependent on you…i.e. “creating a sick system”. Here are the four basic rules:
1. Keep them too busy to think.
2. Keep them tired.
3. Keep them emotionally involved.
4. Reward intermittently.
(straight from jkottke)
“USA Robbed in World Cup”
“Each little detail—anything you may remember—is important”
Glitch Noir courtesy of eaubscene.
“A One Track Mind” from Michale Crawford’s “Altered States” series (@New Yorker, h/t jkottke)
I WANT ONE.
Real-Time Hand-Tracking with a Color Glove
joke vid
“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”
Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.
-From In the Singularity Movement, Humans are so Yesterday (NYTimes).
My two cents:
Scientology:Hollywood::Singularity:Silicon Valley.
“Infinite high-fives to artist Irina Dakeva, who illustrated and directed this video with over 2000 watercolor paintings, which is not only time-intensive but crazily inventive…” from FADER via mixblooded)
“Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.
The SOE’s combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.”
My “heck yea” moment was right at 2:26. One of the founders was science advisor for the UI in Minority Report.
from Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - A CONVERSATION WITH ANIRUDDH D. PATEL (NYTimes)
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.”
cover of “Dude Descending a Staircase” (2003) by Apollo 440
This is all to say that there is no shadowy conspiracy at work here. The conspiracy is already fully exposed; it’s all right there, on the surface, and we are all complicit in it. Within Lady Gaga’s simulated reality, there are no shadows; she exists solely in the spotlight of fame, amidst stylized signs evacuated of hidden content.
Lady Gaga’s secret is hidden in plain sight. She reveals that today it is not signs or symbols that rule the world and control our minds. It is style.
- from Jeremy Riles’s “Lady Gaga’s Secret Religion.” (from RD mag, via book4m)