When your bots have bots you know the simulation has reached a mature level of recursion. When bots start crafting their own meatspace avatars then backwards recursion is achieved.
Where is Flossaluzitarin when we need them? I think flossy runs a meatspace bot titled steve or something…
That moment when you see Meg Ryan do a convincing fake orgasm and your girlfriend feels emboldened to demonstrate her on demand abilities.
This is double speak from 1984 by George Orwell. A term has a double meaning at the same time . The ministry of information controls the internet and it can be rewritten instantly with non record remaining
I think there’s a couple of distinct problems with fakeness on the internet. The endless torrent of email spam and bot-driven, bot-serving network of nonsense websites serving nonsense ads to nonexistent viewers in a perverse ouroboros of money and back-scratching are certainly one side of the coin. But in a big way, it feels almost completely separate from the other fakeness problem created by the democratization of publishing, followed swiftly by the concentration of a lot of the social and news-related Internet into a handful of sites that give everything from Great Aunt Euphemia* to the New York Times equal visual weight and authenticity (blue checkmarks be damned). Worldwide and generally-speaking, I don’t think people’s media literacy skills were sophisticated enough to handle the explosion from a handful of heavily-vetted institutional national news networks and one or two local/national newspapers to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the planet being able to set up a professional-enough-looking site with Squarespace from which to publish their anti-immigrant propaganda with the same level of visual authenticity as a CNN article.
To some extent, the fallout from the 2016 election has made everyone more suspicious, which is good at first blush, but it probably remains to be seen whether there’s actually any sort of uptick in media literacy, or if it will just result in people retreating ever deeper into their own self-reinforcing bubbles of pseudo-reality. That said, while I know that no generation is a monolith, for the most part I feel like The Kids Are Alright. Observationally, people who have spent more time growing up in this fractured Internet landscape have a somewhat better ability to grasp what’s real and what’s fake.
As someone with a cartoon animal avatar and a consistent online pseudonym that stretches back almost far enough that it could vote on its own in 2020 (jesus…), this Twitter thread about furry networks of trust (which I’m only excerpting) also has a certain resonance:
*Disclaimer: I may or may not have an actual Great Aunt Euphemia; I’m just a dog (well, arctic fox, but who’s counting?) on the Internet, you’ll never know.
Yes, thats the phrase I was fumbling for! What a n00b mistake for me to make! The spam has hit my metaphorical fan…
my dream job
You hush your heretic mouth!
This is not a series of pipes.
Ah I remember that panic fondly.
But then I’m old enough to remember that Usenet was doomed because the amount of content being generated each day was going to exceed what a 9600 baud modem could send when transmitting 24 hours a day…
It’s funny that some folks on Twitter hate drawn avatars. I’ve had folks get mad at me being snarky and mention my use of drawn avatars. Usually, it’s the types that try to pretend to be the suburban dad using a clearly stock photo from a catalog.
Back when Reagan rescinded the fairness doctrine, the web had yet to be conceived. But without that policy change, Fox News as we know it would not have been possible.
On an even longer time scale, weve had centuries of expecting the printed word to have been edited and authenticated by the time we see it, since getting words in print was expensive. But now its not just the printed word thats devalued, photographs being miscaptioned and shopped, and in a broader sense, action movies where guns solve problems, all this has distorted the reality field of so many voters, its warped the legal landscape.
“Post literate” used to be a science fiction term, but I think its becoming a real thing now. You can even become president without knowing how to read!
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
