I’ve worked at big software companies long enough to know how this would play out as a bug. Users report the issue. Engineers think oh thats a simple fix. However this is Google so it’s likely these tickets are triaged in a way that someone like a project manager has visibility into it before deciding to dedicate time into it.
the project manager asks “is this a bug, though?” not because of homophobia but because they want to know how many users experience this as being an incorrect suggestion vs a valid suggestion. so they call the data scientists in and run some queries, and lo and behold because there’s more straight couples in the world of course the data shows this is only affecting a very small amount of users. this is working fine for most users.
but the engineers and other stakeholders point out why this isnt as simple as what the data days and it’s more of a UX thing. call the project managers in for whoever’s in charge of like, grammar analysis and not just the system that flags it. an epic is created in jira. meetings are scheduled. don’t forget experts in other languages
five weeks later you’re running an A/B test on not correcting users when they write “his husband” to see if DAUs drop when your grammar suggestion engine considers that gay people can be married
Car-to-car communications are developed so that cars can negotiate manoeuvres on the road
Someone (let’s face it: GM) adds a transaction system so that you can pay someone to get out of your lane if you’re in a hurry
Navigation systems are used to implement a stock market trading convenience and speed in real time on the road
People realize that if you cause traffic you can be paid to get out of the way
Grifters form into roving packs that intentionally slow down traffic to extract tolls from cars
As a result, commuters group cars together and pool funds to purchase passage through swarms of grifters at a lower overall cost
Major corridors consisting of large packs moving together become the only viable way to navigate even moderately sized roads and all highways.
Size competition between grifter packs and commuter packs, commuters start scheduling coordinated travel between population centers so that a large enough pack can be formed to outcompete grifters
oops that’s a train
OP, this is a brilliant demonstration of how
a) science fiction writers work out story ideas per Theodore Sturgeon’s edict to “Ask the next question,” and
b) how late-stage capitalism creates cyberpunk dystopias
ALT
The future…is now.
Oh of COURSE it’s a Honda Insight. The legendary hypermiler has found another way to reduce fuel costs: make someone else pay for it!
So just into Just Cause 4 and there’s a settlement created out of shipping containers stuffed into a huge crevasse-spanning bridge
which reminded me of William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (and the Johnny Mnemonic movie, even though the short story was set in the Sprawl trilogy)
and at first I was wondering “wait, is there a real place these were both based off of? I thought Gibson based the bridge on Kowloon Walled City”
And then I realized that Virtual Light predated the game by 25 goddamn years and is old and famous enough to inspire other artworks in its own right
BONUS: the “setting” paragraph from Virtual Light’s wikipedia page:
The setting is California in 2006,[4] part of a dystopian world where the middle class has essentially evaporated leaving only multinational corporations and their exorbitantly rich elite and the poor who are mostly security officers, couriers, or otherwise work in minor service positions. Many of the poor live illegally and entirely outside the normal economy in places like The Bridge engaged in dubious enterprises such as theft, drugs, weapons, gambling, prostitution, and operation of unlicensed restaurants and doctor’s offices. Others pursue livelihood in innocuous yet unregulated commerce such as by running antique shops and barbershops.
It’s literally exactly what it looks like: eighty pages of improperly sourced photos of
Boeing CH-47 Chinook
military transport
helicopters and/or chinstrap penguins, run through a shitty Photoshop edge detection filter to produce a crude facsimile of a colouring book.
I cannot conceive of who this benighted thing’s intended target audience is.
Well, apart from me, apparently. I feel privileged to have a friend who took one look at something so objectively awful and immediately thought “Dave would love that” – because so help me, I do love it. Unironically, even.
I could imagine this being marketed to boys, but not to adults.
The fact that “Chinook” and “chinstrap” are adjacent to each other in an alphabetical list implies to me that this is a procedurally generated coloring book series with thousands of entries.
Well, of course. Somebody wrote an algorithm to steal photos from Google Image Search and other zero-cost sources, run them through a series of Photoshop filters, and package them up into “coloring books”. They then dumped an alphabetised list of animal names into it and walked away, and human oversight was either too absent or too indifferent to pick up on the fact that all of the top image search results for “chinook” were for aircraft rather than fish – and the result is a shitty colouring book full of deep fried JPEG artifacts with the utterly inexplicable subject matter pairing of cute penguins and military transport helicopters. Like, this is it. This is the inassailable culmination of everything deep-fried memes aspire to be, and it was devised by a brainless machine. We live in the stupidest cyberpunk future, and it is awesome.
checked out of the supermarket today, March Umptyump 2018, and the checkout guy (younger and hipper than me) noticed I had [skincare product] but suggested if that doesn’t work wrap the inner skin of [produce also in my cart] to my flesh and bandage it overnight for three nights
you just speak things into existence now and they come true through the power of like (metal gear rising voice) memes or the cybernetic basilisk or whatever. it is indistinguishable from magic and people are not respecting this power. this, this, the florida arming teachers thing
i know you all wanted shadowrun magic where you get to like shoot energy bolts or do clairvoyance or whatever but this is the shitty cyberpunk future so these are the inscrutable powers we have to work with
Today I walked into the technology repair shopfront that has a beton brut/raw wood esthetic with 80s computers in the waiting area and while the guy replaced my iPhone screen I watched these two guys
Bellied Slav in a neo-tracksuit and balding Korean in floppy Nike style, jeans too long and turned up to show a different color inside
talk with the neo-tinker repair bro, them both Amazon contract workers talking about how now Amazon wouldn’t recognize their lazily jailbroken phones, about all the tricks warehouse and delivery people use to steal packages
the billion dollar app idea is to make a virtual friend you care about more than anything else in the world, then charge you a monthly fee to keep it alive.
If you stop paying, it stops talking to you and makes new friends, then sends you pictures of itself hanging out with them
Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them – “How Privileged Are You?” – asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.
I read this in Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath” and thought “oh my god, ‘Buzzfeed sells mental health information from privilege quizzes to insurance companies’ would be the most horribly believable 2010s internet thing,” but the source he cited was merely an article (see also here, here) saying that Buzzfeed could conceivably do this (of course they can) but there is no evidence they actually are
I can’t share the full extent of this ad cuz it’s animated, but click on it if you see it
is starts with the text “Story of Every Empowered Women of Today!” and goes on to Flash-animate a story of mothers and professional daughters, encouraging you use their site to book flight tickets to visit your mom for International Women’s Day
except the animation is 2003 Newgrounds-level with no sense of timing and the dialogue feels acceptably translated from Cantonese and even the twee ukulele music sounds subpar
Ends with the text
A Big Shout Out to all the Working
Women Across The World
and is the most #2017 #capitalpunk shit I’ve seen yet
So if I told you someone was using century-old hand-crafted artisanal methods to adapt traditional folk tales into a quaintly obsolete art form from the American Golden Age that would sound like the most twee, precious, non-normie thing ever and I just described Disney animation.
Disney’s pretty weird like that. Like, take the parks. They’re combinations of Coney Island and World’s Fairs with this undisguisable midcentury earnestness. These are places that get seriously psyched about the potential of noveltransitmodalities.
And the theming - “Let’s look forward to the wonderful future of space exploration, celebrate our roots in farm towns and the frontier west, AND enjoy the exotic charm of the South Pacific and Old Dixie!”
THERE IS A PAGEANT WHERE ROBOTS PAY TRIBUTE TO EXECUTIVE-DRIVEN WHIG HISTORY.
Oh. Oh. And. “The rides aren’t very thrilling, but your kids will love the chance to explore the worlds of all their favorite authors - A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Mark Twain, AND Lewis Carroll - while you’ll marvel at the exquisite background design.”
(Sun-dappled Edwardian neoteny and obsessive set decoration. Wes Anderson makes movies like Walt Disney made parks.)
And we’d recognize this all as a weird thing to exist in 2015 if we weren’t just used to it as the background noise of America. Like, I don’t really watch TV so I don’t see commercials much these days.
Oh man, they’re a trip in their own right if you’ve stopped taking them for granted. Like, “oh hey, for the next 30 seconds some of our best artists are going to use all their techniques and leverage all your emotions and desires and every social value in a masterful, unapologetic, and unforgettable bid for you to give us money, and then everyone will move on and no one will acknowledge this even happened.”
But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.
Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.
Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)
And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with prewar small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany.
And as custodians, they curate that narrative - like, we joke about “you know your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess”, and laugh at the people reediting Disney character designs to look like their specific subgroup, but that only works because it’s fucking true, your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess. I’ve worked with Disney Channel casting, and they mix ethnicities with the same care, precision, and scale that Pfizer mixes drugs.
And that robot pageant, the Hall of Presidents? Look at this history. It started out in the ‘70s as a celebration of consensus history and popular triumph, with character actors playing great men and Civil War tensions understood as a challenge to national unity. In 1993 it was reworked by Eric Foner to be narrated by Maya Angelou, use “regular people” unknowns to portray more vulnerable takes on historic figures and re-frame the Civil War in terms of slavery as a moral challenge. In 2009 they redid it again, mostly keeping the changes but bringing back some of the old Hollywood charm and putting Morgan Freeman as the voice of civic authority.
And like, as a representation of how America understands itself and its history, correct. That is absolutely, in every way, 100% correct.
(In the other direction, Walt Disney originally wanted to call it “One Nation Under God”, which yikes)
They say American copyright terms keep getting extended under pressure from Disney who wants to keep hold of all their founding properties, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a corruption of the civic system to just carve out special protections for Disney in recognition of their distinct role in America.
I used to be a lot more libertarian than I am now, and one of their tribal boogiemen, the idea of a “Ministry of Culture” - a government that sees the national culture as its domain, to shape as it will, “as it will” meaning as it always does with governments “through the instrument of bureaucracy” - that still rankles.
But what’s the alternative, though? You think about it and you realize it’s this - the national mythos rests in the hands of a publicly traded corporation.
(And then you maybe start to appreciate WHY having your king as the head of your church once made sense as a symbol of liberty and self-determination.)
I just learned that you can buy your message’s way into a full okcupid mailbox for $1
and the friendly-seedy tone - the offer is a popup saying “with a little bribery we’ll let it slide”
OKCupid is SO GOOD at correctly humanizing life-by-profitseeking-algorithm
has anyone else here read John Varley?
You know I would TOTALLY trust Valve to craft people’s social experience and Facebook to sell them microtransaction games and it’s a shame how that worked out.
There was something on maybe Reddit? the other day asking what the biggest most overhyped disappointment ever was and I was like the Segway? but maybe that’s just because (being the kind of person who reads Reddit today) I was the kind of person who read Slashdot back in the day.
“The Apocalypse”? That’s an evergreen. (You know the Seventh-Day Adventists started out as an 1844 apocalypse cult? Americanreligions are bonkers.)
Then I thought “space exploration”, because I’ve been looking at some ‘70s pop culture lately and it’s just heartbreaking how much they expected everything to be about that by now.
And that’s kind of the last thing that the postwar optimism was invested in, where we went bankrupt, nothing like that since.
I know, I know, I carry a connection to the universal akasha in my pocket now and I should be more in awe of that but it just doesn’t feel grandiose. Maybe it’s cause it came on gradually, maybe because it’s so entwined with the preexisting world. Like, the universal akasha runs on 5V power and credit cards, that’s kind of bullshit.
And then I stopped and thought that if these developments had been scripted as a story, I would have appreciated that detail as gritty realism.
And then I realized OH MY GOD we live in the capitalpunk AU.
ALT
