on Nov 28, 2023 09:37 pm
Subcultures are vulnerable because they form around shared common-knowledge texts (even if the shared text in question comprises nothing more than a particular vocabulary of new urban slang). In Web terms, today’s invisible — to all but the eye of Big Data crunching AI — pattern of preferences is tomorrow’s subcultural small world on the global Interest Graph. And tomorrow’s Interest Graph is next week’s Social Graph.
The day is not far off when Amazon will be able to predict, based on book-sales correlations in a given geography, the formation of a new subculture before the first defining event (say a party where an origin-myth is created) ever takes place. It won’t be long before influence mechanisms emerge, to complement the detection mechanisms.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/01/27/peak-attention-and-the-colonization-of-subcultures/
on Nov 28, 2023 04:38 pm
Each group shared cultural as much as sartorial codes, properly known only to insiders. Which is one reason why the establishment reacted so vehemently in the 1960s, because in being exclusionary style tribes also embodied a threat to those on the outside. These tribes gave their members a sense of identity and of belonging. These tribes were original enough, bold enough and just about big enough – yet niche enough not to be considered mainstream fashion – to help shape their eras. All of which explains why, say, ‘hipster’ is not a style tribe. A shared love of lumberjack shirts and complicated facial hair does not a style tribe make.
And yet style tribes, it would seem, are things of the past. Where are all the new style tribes of the last quarter century? They don’t exist. We live in times in which the formation of new style tribes has become next to impossible. This perhaps explains why we keep harping back to the ones that went before, rather than the ones that should be defining the times now. Why so? If video killed the radio star, it’s the internet that killed the style tribe.
https://www.apetogentleman.com/death-of-style-tribes/
on Nov 28, 2023 11:36 am
France has fraught historical relationships with Asian countries and cultures, and by fraught I also, of course, mean colonial. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other parts of Asia are former French colonies; in my own experiences of Paris, I’d witnessed very little celebration of anything Asian, the sole exception being a longstanding respect for and obsession with Japan’s cultural products—an obsession that, to my eye and to not a few Asian friends’ eyes, can also include notes of appropriation, typecasting, and fetishization.
But this new prominence sounded, perhaps, different. In conversation, Parisians had suggested that this change was a reflection of the times: The more global awareness of millennials and Gen Z’ers, as well as the exposure to other cultures and cuisines on social media, has softened the Parisian stubbornness to keep white France the focus. The change seemed considerable.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/french-asian-paris-ro-kwon
on Nov 27, 2023 12:37 pm
First, there was Mali; then came Burkina Faso. Today, in the epic saga that is the anti-Western revolt sweeping across the Sahel, it is the turn of Niger to play the protagonist — the third country to suffer a coup in just three years.
In the eyes of these countries’ new leaders and their supporters, much of the responsibility for this lies with one villain in particular: France. They are, after all, all former French colonies, part of what used to be known as Françafrique. And more than any other imperial power, France has continued to exercise a huge influence over its former outposts, replacing outright colonial rule with more subtle forms of neocolonial control — first and foremost with currency.
https://unherd.com/2023/08/niger-and-the-collapse-of-frances-empire/
on Nov 27, 2023 11:36 am
As entertaining as an entire community of men bonded together by self-denied orgasms may be, the movement has a darker underbelly. While many NoFap adherents genuinely struggle with porn addiction, loneliness, and a dearth of intimacy, the community has also come under fire for its ties to far-right, fascist, and misogynistic groups. In the last years, numerous articles have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vice, and The New Statesman exposing the overlaps between NoFap and the Proud Boys, who make it a membership requirement to abstain from jerking off and to engage in toxic online campaigns harassing and threatening adult film stars. These campaigns are peppered with calls to “kill all pornographers” and with antisemitic conspiracy theories connecting the pornography industry to the “global cabal,” accusing the nonexistent group of promoting “degeneracy” and “moral decline” in the West.
Likewise, NoFap ideology has taken root in many “involuntary celibate” (incel) forums. In addition to creating noxious communities of self-loathing, often spilling over into real-life violence, incels have acquired a negative reputation for their hatred of women, female sexual liberation, and feminism—which they interpret as forms of subjugation of men through denial of sex.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-fap-a-cultural-history-of-anti-masturbation/
on Nov 27, 2023 08:36 am
Workers didn’t accept their immiseration meekly. There are many signs of growing popular discontent. But history teaches us that revolutions are not made by the “masses.” Popular immiseration and resulting discontent needs to be channeled against the governing regime, and this requires organization by breakaway elites, so-called “counter-elites”. Without such leaders and organization, non-elite workers have been reduced to voting for populist, anti-systemic politicians, like Donald Trump.
So much for history. What about the future? The rise of intelligent machines will undermine social stability in a far greater way, than previous technological shifts, because now A.I. threatens elite workers—those with advanced degrees. But highly educated people tend to acquire skills and social connections that enable them to organize effectively and challenge the existing power structures. Overproduction of youth with advanced degrees has been the main force driving revolutions from the Springtime of Nations in 1848 to the Arab Spring of 2011.
https://peterturchin.com/when-a-i-comes-for-the-elites/
on Nov 26, 2023 12:37 pm
Researchers — including many women of color — have been saying for years that these systems interact differently with people of color and that the societal effects could be disastrous: that they’re a fun-house-style distorted mirror magnifying biases and stripping out the context from which their information comes; that they’re tested on those without the choice to opt out; and will wipe out the jobs of some marginalized communities.
Gebru and her colleagues have also expressed concern about the exploitation of heavily surveilled and low-wage workers helping support AI systems; content moderators and data annotators are often from poor and underserved communities, like refugees and incarcerated people. Content moderators in Kenya have reported experiencing severe trauma, anxiety, and depression from watching videos of child sexual abuse, murders, rapes, and suicide in order to train ChatGPT on what is explicit content. Some of them take home as little as $1.32 an hour to do so.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/women-warnings-ai-danger-risk-before-chatgpt-1234804367/
on Nov 26, 2023 12:37 pm
Artificial intelligence will likely impact every type of job. But this summer, Hollywood actors and writers have raised substantial concerns about the ways in which generative AI systems may be used to replace aspects of their human craft. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) are currently joined in a dual strike, hoping to make progress on a range of labor grievances with the studios and streaming companies that employ them.
Today’s guest is Justine Bateman, a writer, director, producer, author, and member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the WGA, and SAG-AFTRA. Bateman has been on both sides of the camera for much of her life, and has a particularly sharp perspective on how AI may change the entertainment industry, and why it matters to all workers that the unions are standing up on these issues now.
https://techpolicy.press/justine-bateman-on-ai-labor-and-the-future-of-entertainment/
on Nov 26, 2023 11:36 am
Data work—creating or refining the raw material at the heart of AI— is not new in India. The economy that did so much to turn call centers and garment factories into engines of productivity at the end of the 20th century has quietly been doing the same with data work in the 21st. And, like its predecessors, the industry is once again dominated by labor arbitrage companies, which pay wages close to the legal minimum even as they sell data to foreign clients for a hefty mark-up. The AI data sector, worth over $2 billion globally in 2022, is projected to rise in value to $17 billion by 2030. Little of that money has flowed down to data workers in India, Kenya, and the Philippines.
These conditions may cause harms far beyond the lives of individual workers. “We’re talking about systems that are impacting our whole society, and workers who make those systems more reliable and less biased,” says Jonas Valente, an expert in digital work platforms at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. “If you have workers with basic rights who are more empowered, I believe that the outcome—the technological system—will have a better quality as well.”
https://time.com/6297403/the-workers-behind-ai-rarely-see-its-rewards-this-indian-startup-wants-to-fix-that/
on Nov 26, 2023 10:37 am
What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel
on Nov 26, 2023 09:36 am
Fueled by exports to the first world, China became something different — something not of any of the three worlds. We’re still trying to figure out what that new China is and how it now relates to the world of deprivation — what is now called the Global South, where the majority of human beings alive today reside. But amid that uncertainty, Chinese exports to the Global South now exceed those to the Global North considerably — and they’re growing.
The International Monetary Fund expects Asian countries to account for 70% of growth globally this year. China must “shape a new international system that is conducive to hedging against the negative impacts of the West’s decoupling,” the scholar and former People’s Liberation Army theorist Cheng Yawen wrote recently. That plan starts with Southeast Asia and extends throughout the Global South, a terrain that many Chinese intellectuals see as being on their side in the widening divide between the West and the rest.
https://www.noemamag.com/the-world-china-is-building
on Nov 26, 2023 09:36 am
Privacy is a protean concept: its meaning changes depending on the historical and cultural context. As a seventeenth-century preacher reminded his flock: ‘The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy’ – it is not always considered a social good – but from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century, privacy had come to be thought of as a necessary space free of interference from religious and state authority and the right to retreat from public scrutiny.
By the nineteenth century, privacy was held up as a sacred value required by the modern self. As two Bostonian lawyers, Samuel Warren and John Brandeis, argued in the most famous article in privacy history, ‘The Right to Privacy’, published in the Harvard Law Review. Warren and Brandeis called for ‘a right to be let alone’, to defend the ‘sacred precincts of private and domestic life’ from the invasion of the public world. ‘The intensity of modern life, attendant upon advancing civilisation’, they lamented, ‘have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual.’ The Victorian idea of privacy was tied to the private sphere, which was close to being worshipped.
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-strange-death-of-private-life/
on Nov 26, 2023 09:36 am
Coco Chanel had a code of motifs she integrated into her designs, each bearing personal significance. The story goes she was given her first bouquet of camellias by her lover and muse Boy Capel. Her favourite flower became omnipresent throughout her collections.
She was superstitious and surrounded herself with lucky talismans. It is said, for example, that she kept a small bundle of wheatsheaf, a symbol of prosperity and abundance, in her private quarters at the Ritz Paris as well as in each room of her apartment at 31 Rue Cambon. Both the wheatsheaf and the four-leaf clover appear throughout her collections like lucky charms, along with the lion — a reference to her zodiac sign, Leo.
https://www.christies.com/en/stories/vintage-chanel-guide-b343a28200614b3eb51d9e91e89cf177
on Nov 26, 2023 08:36 am
The first measurement of a futurist is the extent to which he or she believes in a singularity. Broadly speaking a singularity is a moment where technology gets so much better, at such an exponentially increasing rate, that it achieves a fundamental and meaningful technological shift of existence, transcending its original purpose and even nature. In many singularity myths the computer either becomes self-aware and intelligent, possibly in a good way but sometimes in a destructive or even vindictive way. In others humans are connected to machines and together become something new. The larger point is that some futurists believe fervently in a singularity, while others do not.
On our second axis, let’s measure the extent to which a given futurist is worried when they theorize about the future. Are they excited or scared? Cautious or jubilant? The choices futurists make are often driven by their emotions. Utopianists generally focus on all the good that technology can do; they find hope in cool gadgets and the newest AI helpers. Dystopianists are by definition focused on the harm; they consequently think about different aspects of technology altogether. The kinds of technologies these two groups consider are nearly disjoint, and even where they do intersect, the futurists’ takes are diametrically opposed.
https://bostonreview.net/articles/cathy-oneil-know-thy-futurist/
on Nov 25, 2023 08:36 am
“The typical definition is [a] self produced, cheaply-made publication, usually photocopied, and usually stapled down.” That is, historically, what’s made a zine a zine, says Drew Sawyer, a curator of the new exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines at the Brooklyn Museum. For the show itself, though, he and his co-curator Branden Joseph blew the definition wide open. “We really included anything that people called a zine, or that contemporary readers called a zine, when it was made.”
The result is that Copy Machine Manifestos – a first-of-its-kind survey of zines in North America – traces the evolution of the medium over the course of five decades. What emerges is a process of broadening outward, with zine makers reacting to (and at times influencing) the technologies and politics of their age, from the punk scene of the mid-1970s, to the underground feminist and queer movements of the 1980s and their rise to the surface with the riot grrrls of the 90s. Today, Drew notes, “what a zine is is much more expansive and capacious than it was in the 1970s.”
https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/61380/1/underground-uncensored-history-zines-brooklyn-museum-copy-machine-manifestos
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