Digital Celebrities, Trolls, Virtual Embodiment, and Fortnite
Thoughtful Net #60: curated links from the past few weeks
Just one short month since the last issue… I’m getting back up to speed as the weather returns to some kind of normal. I gained a few new readers since the email version was listed on InYourInbox, which curates useful and interesting newsletters; if you’re after more to read, I can recommend many of my catalogue companions.
There’s a lot of really good writing in this issue; I struggled really hard to choose a single best. If you ever skim through the stories for a lack of time — and I completely understand if you do — then I’d ask you to please, just this once, give these stories a little more consideration and find a little more time to explore them.
The Best
The Tech Backlash We Really Need
The recent backlash against ‘big tech’ will eventually falter because it doesn’t question the system itself, L.M. Sacasas argues. I thought I was done talking about the tech backlash, but this is a useful piece.
In an earlier age, people turned to their machines to outsource physical labor. In the digital age, we can also outsource our cognitive, emotional, and ethical labor to our devices and apps. Our digital tools promise to monitor and manage, among other things, our relationships, our health, our moods, and our finances.
Reality and celebrity
Everything to Know About Digital Celebrities and How They Could Change the World
Michael Dempsey has written a useful primer on the new category of celebrities: those that don’t exist. This is really interesting; I’m starting to consider my own avatar already.
With digital celebrities, no longer can you age out of your demographic. You can freeze time, fast forward, or rewind, creating both a more relatable character as well as a much more in-depth storytelling mechanism where history, present, and future are all available for creation.
For Whom The Computer Graphics
Sjef van Gaalen on reality, fakes, manipulation, and combat magic art activism.
Representation needn’t always be 100% lifelike in order to be effective. Sure there’s a sliding scale of reality according to available computing resources, but crossing the uncanny valley isn’t a problem if it has already been completely filled with junk.
Freedom and abuse
Don’t Feed the Trolls, and Other Hideous Lies
‘Film Crit Hulk’ addresses the internet axiom that propagates and protects online abuse.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are now so large that they are considered “unmoderatable” communities. We like to pretend this was a pure facet of their size, but it is inescapably a part of their ethos. They are platforms forged in the fires of troll culture, founded and operated by techno-libertarians who didn’t understand why they had to care about any of this. They set out with no intention to moderate at all.
The Free Speech Panic: How the Right Concocted a Crisis
William Davies on the concocted ‘free speech crisis’, the ‘intellectual dark web’, the internet expanding the public sphere, and the media’s response.
On the one hand, the rise of YouTube, Facebook and podcasts involves an obvious democratisation of the power to speak and write publicly. Nobody can really be silenced if they possess a smartphone and a social media account. But at the same time, the power to be listened to remains very unevenly distributed.
Virtual realities
Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?
Joshua Rothman explores virtual embodiment — using VR to experience other lives and bodies — and the consequences of the technology on our perceptions of ourselves.
On the instrument panel, there is a light with a label that says “Pilot Present.” When the light is on, we are self-conscious; we experience being in the cockpit and monitoring the instruments. It’s easy to assume that, while you’re awake, this light is always on. In fact, it’s frequently off — during daydreams, during much of our mental life, which is largely automatic and unconscious — and the plane still flies.
Peripheral Visions
Ambient intelligence systems, such as the internet of things and emotion recognition, are subtly transforming the world around us. Does virtual reality offer a space for sensory freedom? By Paul Roquet.
Much like how VR is used to experience and examine architectural projects before they are physically realized, virtual space might serve as a place to learn how to live in a world of context-aware environmental media — to learn how to effectively manipulate it, but also to learn how it can manipulate you.
Video games
The Most Important Video Game on the Planet
Brian Feldman has written a genuinely curious, non-judgemental piece about the video gaming phenomenon and the people who play it.
Fortnite is a candy-colored video game populated by friends and celebrities, with quantified metrics for success tucked into every corner, constantly updated, highly social, usable anywhere, dopamine-releasing, and extremely competitive. In other words, the way to think about Fortnite isn’t Halo, but Instagram.
The Video Games of Ecuadorean Fishing Village Santa Marianita
Kimberly Koenig looks at how technology has reached the lives of poor fishermen in a remote Ecuadorian village. I’m a sucker for ethnographic pieces like this.
The internet isn’t fast enough to play online, much less apply updates — if he wants to do that, he has to drive 20 minutes to Manta and pay an electronics store for the trouble. But that doesn’t matter. Neighbors, fellow fishermen and relatives alike come over to his house, turning it into a village gaming hub.
The Twitch Streamers who Spend Years Broadcasting to No One
A revealing look at a group of people who I’d never really considered: those who stream to no audience. By Patricia Hernandez.
One streamer I spoke to who spent three months without an audience says that they kept live streaming games with zero viewers because they saw it as a form of self-improvement. “It has helped make me feel more comfortable being myself, and by virtue of that has made me be more myself, more often, even outside of the stream.”
Emotions and algorithms
The Quantified Heart
Polina Aronson and Judith Duportail on ‘artificial emotional intelligence’, the emotional behaviours programmed into, or learned by, computer systems.
The most dynamic field of AI research at the moment is known as ‘machine learning’, where algorithms pick up patterns by training themselves on large data sets. But because these algorithms learn from the most statistically relevant bits of data, they tend to reproduce what’s going around the most, not what’s true or useful or beautiful.
Big Brother’s Blind Spot
From an anecdote about Netflix’ classification of her viewing habits, Joanne McNeil spins out a darker story of the dangers of bias, privacy, and surveillance.
Netflix is an accessible example of the gap between an algorithmically generated consumer profile and the untidy bundle of our lived experiences and preferences.
The Thoughtful Net is an occasional (less than weekly, more than monthly) publication collecting great writing about the internet and technology, culture, information, society, science, and philosophy. If you prefer to receive it in your inbox you can follow this publication or subscribe to the email newsletter.
