Gestern hatte Julia Ducournaus "Titane" seine Premiere in Cannes und laut Meldungen hat er das Filmfestival "geschockt", man darf seine Erwartungen nach ihrem grandiosen Film-Debut "Raw" noch einmal nach oben schrauben.  “Titane” handelt laut Spiegel Online (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) von "Sex mit Autos, Morden mit Haarnadeln und Brüsten gefüllt mit Motoröl", Indiewire (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) bezeichnet den Film als "the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenbergs 'Crash' and Shinya Tsukamotos 'Tetsuo: The Iron Man'", Nate Jones von Vulture (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) klappern die Zähne. Peter Bradshaw vom Guardian (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) ist dagegen not impressed, das Tomatometer (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) steht trotzdem bei 92% und ich kann es kaum erwarten, den stylishsten Car-Horror seit Maximum Overdrive zu sehen.

Ich lese übrigens derzeit Joe Hills "Vollgas", habe mir die "Mysterious Motoring Stories" von William Pattrick mit Richard Matheson Shortstory "Duel" - die Vorlage zu Stephen Spielbergs erstem Film - und Dennis Shryacks "The Car" zugelegt. Bezüglich Automobil-Horror bin ich für Ducournaus Carsex-Implantat-Serienkiller-Schocker also sehr gut vorbereitet.

Hier der Plot:

Ein junger Mann mit verletztem Gesicht wird auf einem Flughafen von Zollbeamten aufgegriffen. Er behauptet, Adrien Legrand zu sein, der vor zehn Jahren als Kind plötzlich spurlos verschwand. Für Adriens Vater Vincent scheint der Albtraum, nicht zu wissen, wo sein Sohn ist, endlich beendet zu sein und so holt er den jungen Mann zu sich nach Hause.Zur selben Zeit wird die Region von einer grausamen Mordserie in Angst und Schrecken versetzt. Das Model Alexia, die für eine Autoshow arbeitet, gerät als nächstes mögliches Opfer ins Visier des Täters.

Der Film läuft seit gestern in Frankreich, wann der Film in Deutschland anläuft, weiß ich nicht. Can't wait.

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40 Jahre nach den Einstürzenden Neubauten werden Autobahnhohlkörper endlich wieder vernünftig genutzt: "Über 100 Feiernde sollen sich laut Polizei im Hohlraum der A4-Brücke im Schlingenbachtal bei Overath zu einer illegalen Party getroffen haben (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)."

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Scientists across fields are ringing the alarm bell regarding Social Media (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and want to declare the study of the impact of Social Media a "crisis discipline". They compare Social Media to other crisis like climate change or Covid and "Crisis discipline" in that context means largely that it's a "call to arms" for scientists to work interdisciplinary across fields. The argument, put simply, is that the impact of Social Media has grown so large so fast that it threatens humanity on multiple levels, from psychology to politics.

I say they are right to declare Social Media a crisis. I'd argue, underlying all Social Media-caused problems is a *perceptive crisis* that is the main factor in all other issues. With perceptive crisis I mean that by putting human communication into the digital realm, we make social interaction *editable* - we can *edit* communication that was once fixed, we can change how we are perceived with a few clicks, we can curate down to the singular infobit which news we read. Basically, we can edit which world we look at and, important, we can *spread* this "edited perspective". This creates its own rules within the functions of the attention economy.

At the moment those rules are "the most emotional perspective wins the memetic engagement race of the algorithms". But even when we socialice Facebook, totally take away algorithms and make everything a decentralized dream of every internet activist, there still would be the problem of the "fracturized, shareable, digital editable perspectives" in the attention economy. We would still have a dysfunction of mass media and it's main purpose of social synchronisation.

This social synchronisation is now, thanks to Social Media and the web, playable, because it's memetic functions are targetable by everyone, from activists to trolls to politicians to journalists. That is the information war going on out there, and I don't see it going anywhere. This war over attention and perception might very well be a forever war, as long as the digital reigns.

So yeah, those scientists are absolutely right to ring that alarm bell.

Paper: Stewardship of global collective behavior (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis discipline.” A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming.The paper argues that our lack of understanding about the collective behavioral effects of new technology is a danger to democracy and scientific progress. For example, the paper says that tech companies have “fumbled their way through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, unable to stem the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation” that has hindered widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines. The authors warn that if left misunderstood and unchecked, we could see unintended consequences of new technology contributing to phenomena such as “election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and war.”It’s a grave warning and call to action by an unusually diverse swath of scholars across disciplines — and their collaboration indicates how concerned they are.

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As scientists want to declare the study of SocMed a crisis discipline to call for interdisciplinary research, Morals & Machines (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) is a brand new interdisciplinary Journal about "the question of how algorithms in general and artificial intelligence (AI) especially change society, the economy and the working world, the media, the healthcare system, technology, language, gender relations, and art and culture in a pluralistic manner. It investigates the questions of which ethical risks arise from general and artificial intelligence, what potential they offer and what challenges they pose to legal systems worldwide in relation to technological applications, robotics and the integration of AI."

The first Paper (which is free to read) is right down my alley: Hybrid Reality: The Rise of Deepfakes and Diverging Truths (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

While the manipulation of media has existed as long as their creation, recent advances in ArtificialIntelligence (AI) have expedited the range of tampering techniques. Pictures, sound and moving images can now be altered and even generated entirely by computation. We argue that this developmentcontributes to a “hybrid reality”, a construct of both human perception and technologically driven fabrications. In using synthetic media involving deep learning, called deepfakes, as one manifestation,we show how this technological progress leads to a distorted marketplace of ideas and truths that necessitates a renegotiation of democratic processes. We synthesize implications and conclude with recommendations for how to reach a new consensus on the construction of reality.

(These new democratized media manipulation techniques are furthering what I call "Editology", the making-editable of perceptions of the world, the democratization of that and it’s cascading effects. Great stuff.)

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My amateurish Internet-Dumbass-Theory of Consciousness goes like this: The sense of self emerges from overlaying patterns of neural activity. Neurons fire in synchronization which generates a pattern, whole brain regions are doing that generating interferences of these patterns. There's an optical version of this called Moiré (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). The Medium in which consciousness emerges from these overlapping patterns would be the electromagnetic field (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Salon has a nice article about our love for fractals (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), which outlines all of this in musical terms and I totally dig that framing of consciousness as a song that emerges from the sound of our brain. Consciousness in that sense is harmony from noise and I love that. Its "order out of chaos" with focus on the process of emerging patterns and structure.

Cognitive fluctuations are unpredictable changes in neural activity in the brain.  Their causes are presently unknown. Neuroscientists have been aware of these fluctuations since the 1930s, but typically averaged them out as "background noise" from other brain activity correlated to conscious thought.Recently, scientists have come to believe that so-called background noise in the brain may be more crucial to consciousness than previously thought. Recent research found that these fluctuations make up 95% of brain activity; conscious thoughts account for merely 5%. Cognitive fluctuations are like the dark matter or "junk" DNA of the brain, in that they make up the most significant part of what's happening but remain mysterious.Neuroscientists such as Georg Northoff, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Stanislas Dehaene have been focusing their research on these fluctuations in the last fifteen years. They have concluded that neural fluctuations are not secondary, but fundamental for consciousness. Using technologies that measure the frequency and strength of large groups of neural fluctuations in the brain, scientists have discovered that brain waves tend to nest into one another, like syncopation in music. At the lowest frequencies, the drums lay down a beat, and the bass plays a rhythm. In between the notes of that rhythm, the guitar plays a melody. The song of consciousness builds up from spontaneous neural fluctuations.

And speaking of neuroscience, consciousness and fractals: Did you know that under the influence of LSD your brain activity develops fractal qualities? --> Serotonergic Psychedelics LSD & Psilocybin Increase the Fractal Dimension of Cortical Brain Activity in Spatial and Temporal Domains  (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

We know shit about ourselves (yet) 🐬 but we can dance!

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Wissenschaftler haben das Gen identifiziert, dass den Romanesco Blumenkohl in fraktalen Mustern wachsen lässt. Dann haben sie das Gen in einer Pflanze namens Acker-Schmalwand eingesetzt, die prompt in fraktalen Mustern blühte. Ich will fraktale Veilchen und psychedelische Kastanienbäume, jetzt!

Science News: How Romanesco cauliflower forms its spiraling fractals (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) via Geoff Manaugh (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Godin and his colleagues knew an Arabidopsis variant could produce small cauliflower-like structures. So the team manipulated the genes of A. thaliana in both computer simulations and growing experiments in the lab. Working with the extensively studied plant (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) helped the researchers simplify their experiments and distill the essential fractal-spawning mechanism (SN: 6/15/21).By altering three genes, the researchers grew a Romanesco-like head on A. thaliana. Two of those genetic tweaks hampered flower growth and triggered runaway shoot growth. In place of a flower, the plant grows a shoot, and on that shoot, it grows another shoot, and so on, says plant biologist François Parcy at CNRS in Paris. “It’s a chain reaction.”

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Doc Searls Weblog · What becomes of journalism when everybody can write or cast? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “What are we now? While remaining no less embodied than we ever were, we are incorporeal inhabitants of a digital world, absent of distance and gravity, where the only preposition that fully applies is with. Unless we aren’t. Ephemerality runs deep, and the Web is a whiteboard.”

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QAnon Ideology Is Infiltrating the Natural Parenting Community (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Rolling Stone: “‘Pastel QAnon’, or elements of QAnon infiltrating the female-driven health, wellness, and lifestyle space.”

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COVID adds to California yoga and wellness QAnon problem (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)- Los Angeles Times: “the conspiracy theory is spreading through yoga, meditation and other wellness circles”

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Oddities: Louis Armstrong tape box collages Pt.1 | DJ Food (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Amazing tape reel boxes, once belonging to Louis Armstrong, now archived in an online museum on his website. There are hundreds of these plus even more pieces of ephemera to see, it looks like someone has gone through every piece of music-related item he ever owned and photographed it with notes for the site.

More at https://virtualexhibits.louisarmstronghouse.org/ (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

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Fans, Not Professional Developers, Will Drive the Hit IPs of the Future - Future (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Vor einigen Jahren, als ich Urheberrecht noch für ein spannendes Thema hielt, war eins meiner Kern-Argumente, dass es kein geistiges Eigentum gäbe, da Kulturgüter durch Gebrauch Teil der körpergebundenen Persönlichkeit des Rezipienten werden, das Kulturgut kopiert sich via Gebrauch in die Gehirnstruktur des Menschen und niemand hat Rechte über die Struktur meines Gehirns.

Der Rezipient besitzt durch das Hören von Musik, das Ansehen von Filmen, das Spielen von Spielen also ohnehin die Gestalt des gesehenen/gehörten/gelesenen Kulturguts und die Inbesitznahme des Kulturguts durch die Persönlichkeit ist nicht zu verhindern. (Forscher haben in den Gehirnen von Pokémon-Fans eine Stelle lokalisiert, in denen die Gestaltungsmuster von Pokémon-Monstern gespeichert werden. No shit! (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) Versuche ein IP-Anwalt, dies zu verhindern, und ich ändere meine Meinung.)

Geistiges Eigentum gibt es daher nicht, erst Recht nicht in einer digital vernetzten Umgebung, in der urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material zum Ausdrucks- und Gestaltungsmittel wird.

Jade Raymond hat nun einen netten Text über die Zukunft von Gaming IPs bei Marc Andreesens neuem Innovations-Magazin Future am Start und dort schreibt er, zusammengefasst, dass Games zu Umgebungen werden, die von Fans selbst gestaltet werden. Fan-Fiction ist laut Raymond nicht mehr ein Randphänomen, sondern wird zum Produkt-Kern.

The goal of a game is no longer to be the most buzzworthy topic of conversation at launch; it’s to become the context for buzzworthy conversations. In other words: if the original Assassin’s Creed was gearing up to be the opening night of Hamilton, we want future IPs to be a neighborhood bar where people talk about whatever the latest Hamilton is: the place that is perennially cool, comfortable, and welcoming — because the patrons are driving the conversation and, in fact, are the stars of the show.We are at a turning point in IP development. It’s no longer enough to simply turn the keys to a franchise over to professionals in other media so that game studios closely control the character arc and narrative. Hit franchises of the future need to be designed to ensure quality and canon even when — especially when — we hand over ownership to the fans. Fans will have the creative power to steer the story, shape the game universe, and spur virality from the inside out.

Innovation und Fortschritt aside, habe ich einige Kritiken an Raymonds Paradigma.

1) Illusion von Eigentümerschaft am Produkt

2) Weitere Verschärfung der Fragmentierung von Kognition

3) kapitalistische TopDown-Subversion des Autor-Gedankens durch das Ende des Auteurs, also der individuellen Schaffenskraft. Kreativität wird zum demokratischen, kollektiven Prozess. Ein Verlust in meinen Augen. Kunst ist meines Erachtens vor allem Ergebnis eines tyrannisch-kreativen Prozesses einer singulären Vision, die das Gegenteil von Demokratie ist - think Kubrick. Kollektive Kreativität kann sicher erstaunliches und kunstvolles hervorbringen, ab diese Ergebnisse aber jemals die Exzellenz von singulären Visionen erreichen, erscheint mir zweifelhaft.

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Conspiracy Theories as Stigmatized Knowledge | Cairn International Edition (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Most conspiracy theories exist as part of “stigmatized knowledge” – that is, knowledge claims that have not been accepted by those institutions we rely upon for truth validation. Not uncommonly, believers in conspiracy theories also accept other forms of stigmatized knowledge, such as unorthodox forms of healing and beliefs about Atlantis and UFOs. Rejection by authorities is for them a sign that a belief must be true. However, the linkage of conspiracy theories with stigmatized knowledge has been weakening, because stigmatized knowledge itself is growing more problematic. What was once clearly recognizable as “the fringe” is now beginning to merge with the mainstream. This process of “mainstreaming the fringe” is the result of numerous factors, including the ubiquity of the Internet, the growing suspicion of authority, and the spread of once esoteric themes in popular culture.

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How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “Sometimes, the path to your personal hell is paved with other people’s best intentions”. Tell me about it.

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My Nyan Cat Meme Sold For $590K (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “Nyan Cat’s creator Chris Torres made one of the internet’s best-known memes. Ten years later, he sold it for more than half a million dollars.”

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Skip the Intro? - by Justin E. H. Smith (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Justin E. H. Smith's Hinternet is one of the best Substacks there is, period.

Social media is pure temporality unstructured by narrative. You move from stimuli to lulls to stimuli, from lulls to lulz and back again, but there is no development or progression or conceivable sense of possible completion. In this sense, social media is also the opposite of poetry, again conceived as the condensing of an idea, perhaps an idea with some narrative dimension to it, into a single instant or point. When we zoom out from the stimuli embedded in “content”, whether the likes of social media or the plot conventions of made-for-binging television, what we see is a uniform mass, a homoeomery, something that has neither the atemporal perfection of poetry nor the purposive temporal structure of prose, but only the unstructured lapsing of time — pure purposeless chronophagy.

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Winston Marshall Was 'Bloody Terrified' to Quit Mumford & Sons. He Tells Me Why. (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Common Sense with Bari Weiss

Winston Marshall made the Mistake of reading and recommending and publicly praising a book by a rightwinger. Then all hell broke loose.

I have been in touch with various people who, in the moral frenzy of the past year, have resigned or have been pushed out of their high-profile jobs. These are people who, in private, speak frankly about what happened to them. They are variously in shock, angry, sad and regretful. Often the biggest regret has to do with apologizing. This is the advice PR hacks gave to them: say sorry and all the noise will go away. This is terrible advice because it is untrue. This movement has weaponized apologies, which are among the most intimate and empathetic of human acts. It treats apologies like confessions. And so to apologize to these online mobs is to put blood in the water.

Why Winston Marshall Quit Mumford & Sons (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

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'We Make Mistakes': Twitter's Embrace of the Extreme Far Right (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) | Southern Poverty Law Center:

Long and good analysis of Twitters’ adventures with the online rightwing: "Twitter gave far-right extremists the platform they needed to plan an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and the website, if it maintains its current approach, will likely enable politically motivated violence again in the future.”

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If you want to know more about the dumbass who founded Vice Magazine and the rightwing extremist group Proud Boys than is good for you, now you can: The Secret History of Gavin McInnes (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) | Vanity Fair

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Algorithmic Cinema in “Incomplete” – Music Video by Dalena Tran & Ash Koosha (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) – CreativeApplications.Net

Following their avant-garde approach to media and art, Incomplete is the result of  Tran’s research and studio practice with experimental methods in open-source imaging software and tools such as Blender, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and Image Synthesis. Even with a technical sincerity in mind Dalena’s relationship to the work, having studied film and media arts, is firmly grounded in the cinematic experience.

They don’t explicitly explain how this Music-Video was shot, I guess they fed a Neural Net with images from a CGI-Shortmovie and then regenerated the very same Shortmovie with glitchy images from latent space.

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Digital Distortions: Reflections on Zoom and Body (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): Update on the phenomena formerly known as Snapchat Dysmorphia regarding new distortions of the image of self caused by Zoom. Study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352647521000137 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

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The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Rest of World

Across dozens of short-form video apps available in China, this type of labor content has become widely popular. Produced not only by factory workers, but also traditional craftsmen and agriculturalists, it usually caters to the curiosities of middle-class urbanites, who Wang argues are alienated from the labor that goes into their everyday purchases — whether a cosmetic cream, a pack of tissues, or a new pair of sneakers.

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What Is Shifting On TikTok? This Creepy Trend Encourages Out-Of-Body Experiences (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Katy, an aspiring universe-traveler, uses meditation and lucid dreaming techniques. "I've had some dreams that feel very real, but the difference between that and reality shifting is that the latter is more lucid, where you have the freedom to explore and do what you want while also being in a different universe," she explains. "Your body stays in the same place, but your consciousness goes somewhere else entirely," she adds. If this just sounds like AP imagination to you, know that shifters on TikTok believe that they are traveling to another dimension, at least mentally. “Everyday you’re creating multiple parallel universes,” Jade tells Bustle. “For example, if you think of drinking water or lemonade and you choose water, a parallel universe is created for an instance where you drank lemonade,” she says. That’s part of what makes the videos so entertaining to watch: shifters are so enthusiastic about their sci-fi hobby, you can almost be convinced that you have a clone walking around in another dimension drinking lemonade, getting stains on your favorite shirt, and dating a Weasley.

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Dirt: Instagram for the Tuva-curious (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Beautiful article about the grey mush created by the internet through “information symmetry”, that is: I can know what you can know, in an instant, no barriers, education aside. This has a lot of collateral damage, from obscurity to social game mechanism.

The Internet appears to kill the obscurity game in two ways: by de-gamifying knowledge through leveling information barriers, and also providing the information and platform for the once-obscure to become ordinary.

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Okay, es gibt Sonnenbrillen, deren Gläser mit kleinen Herzchen graviert wurden ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 LOVE LENSES! (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) 💜💙💚💛🧡❤️

The lenses work because of a phenomenon called "diffraction" which is what happens when a source of light meets a barrier. Light passing through creates a unique pattern. Which is why on your glasses are tiny dots with tinier patterns that create a heart-shaped halo around every light in sight!

Die Teile kosten nur 9 Dollar, Versand gratis, auch nach Deutschland. Ich hab' meine Herzchen-Optics grade bestellt, and you should too.