Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/14/algorithmic-society.html
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The Training Commission: an email newsletter from the future, after a civil war and digital blackout
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The project features a weekly newsletter, and also clues, context, and Easter eggs scattered across the web.
Are these time-consuming user-engagement features necessary to understanding or appreciating the story? Or is it still good if I just read the newsletters?
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This is obviously an AI front operation to gather identities of humans who may have enough awareness to interdict in an AI takeover.
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The fact that the story is in the form of an architecture critic’s memoir calls to mind the secret diaries of Albert Speer. I have no idea if the comparison is apt, but it does give me a little frisson which motivates me to read this work.
I have always really been fascinated by Speer’s diaries (really memoir) because it provides a look from deep within the Third Reich but quite separated from the biographies and experiences of the politicians and soldiers which are more familiar. Speer - an architect- was deeply involved in the implementation of the civic theory of Nazism, and gives a path to insight into how people interacted with that worldview independent from the militarism cult which is one of the few dimensions along which we habitually understand Nazism. Given it’s almost incomprehensible resurgence in our time it behooves us to look at it from unfamiliar vantages if we are to understand it enough to fight against it effectively.
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Agreed. Supposedly, there are entire “alternate-reality games” set up as marketing ploys for many movies or other events. Michael Bay’s “Transformers” supposedly had a whole set of decrypted “Sector 7 Classified” video-files likewise ‘hidden’ online; the jury’s out on whether watching them really enhances enjiyment of the story of the movie. “Tron: Legacy” took it to something of an extreme, in that the fans participating in the ‘alternate reality game’ activities could claim responsibility for the pager message that triggered the main story of the movie. And don’t even start looking into how practically every “Matrix” branded product for most of that decade tied into the overarching storyline… Unless you truly want to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes… 
I understand how good it feels to join in ‘secret activities’ about which the general public might never know until well after the fact. It’s just difficult for me to understand how the studios justify the expense of setting up such things when the fanbase with sufficient dedication to play them represents such a minimal return on the investment… Especially when those things by definition cannot be accessible later.
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