five-by-five

personæ: one’s choice of avatars conveys a lot about one’s real personality

apocalypse cow: televangelist reports on bovine harbinger of the End Times

cyrus virus: begging to be noticed is ruining everything authentic

PR’s PR award: Sigmund Freud’s nephew invented marketing, calling it propaganda

coöp: there is a small collectivist community in Andalusia described as a peaceful utopia

maybe that’s the cave plato warned us about

The excellent Quartz Magazine presents a very delving article that demonstrates, I think, with great lucidity one of the consequences of forsaking so called net neutrality—an idea generally portrayed as something nebulous and complex, not that the motives underlying the argument are straightforward, by the mainstream medium to inspire defeatists attitudes. Much of that same estate serves gentle reminders, usually when those dominant institutions are thinking of doing something underhanded, that in fact the internet is not a search-engine, which checks both detractors and opponents of the change. The West, I think, is taking this rhetorical device for granted, however, especially vis-a-vis the magnanimity of one social network, which would provide free access for all. Businesses are not meant to be surrogates for free and democratic principles and people ought to be wise to ulterior motives, but the charity and outreach of the media empire, as outlined in the feature, does not in fact give the Third World an outlook on equal-footing with the First World counterparts. Instead of encountering that brutal, rough but independent world-wide web, the young generation in Africa, Asia and India are received into the refined and gated environment of that social network.

A not insignificant portion of ascribers don’t even realise that this service is even just a selective mask for that cyber substrate that’s walled off and out of their price-range. Maybe some believe that the messy, unknown internet they’ve heard of is a playground of privilege and can make do with what they’re filtered—after all, all their friends and family are famous here, whereas the wider internet takes no notice of them. Maybe it is better than having no foothold and people may eventually discover all things behind the scenes or as expounded rather eloquently, maybe we all just become serfs and sharecroppers for a single magnate and mogul. One only knows what one is exposed to, especially during the impressionable onset, and ideas, policy, and credibility—not only fashion and commerce—fall prostrate to what’s liked.

hindsight bias or temporal paradox

Back in late 2000, a man calling himself John Titor, claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036, began appearing in chat-rooms and on-line forums, presenting the world with a litany of the terrible things to come—which certainly seems to violate the popular understanding about causality but sometimes the timeline and canon is disdained for lesser things. Though we are living in a sort of post-skeptical world where most agree that perpetuating future-fraud would be quickly smacked down and the internet is not a hiding-place, I still feel a little cheated for not knowing about this fantastically fun and possibly didactic anecdote. Though Titor’s stop in the year 2000 was just a detour, an authorized-delay, after accomplishing his main mission of retrieving a piece of legacy hardware from a quarter of a century earlier, which was reportedly had the needed fix to inoculate computer systems of his time against a fatal programming bug that had ravaged the contemporary technological landscape, he did make a nostalgic appearance online to entertain questions and issue some dire warnings—one being that one ought to avoid eating beef since, owing to the decades’ long incubation period, mad-cow disease would not present in the human population until Titor’s day and age.
Another, more timely announcement—which most have seemed dismissibly distant back then but probably inversely interesting since the internet was new and fresh and we were innocent and curious about what it might mean to have the world shrink through the sharing of ideas and experiences rather than finding that that shrinkage can also lead to things like compartmentalization and ennui that there’s less unique about us than we’d like to admit (Titor, if there’s even an internet for humans in the future, could have been prescient about that too I suppose)—was that there would be an atomic exchange between the US and Russia in the year 2015 that would be known as World War III.  These pronouncements are quite different than the predictions of Nostradamus, not vague by design but maybe a little evasive, and not just because they claim the authority of experience but also in that if anything does not unfold as Titor said (like the civil wars that were to occur in 2006 and 2012 that was to split the United States up into five separate countries), it still cannot be refuted as wrong, since his time-travel affected the future, as planned. The engagement ended abruptly after four months, and though there has not, I think, been a continual following—bits and pieces of this strange story resurface now and again and spark a resurgence that’s not only in the dismantling and maybe the desire to find resolution, since those interrupted mysteries are the ones that haunt.

neunundneunzig

The Berlinale film festival happening now is also a showcase for new mini-series for the small-screen. Among the new premiers is a spy drama set in a divided Germany (EN/DE) called “Deutschland 83,” which will be simulcast for American audiences on the Sundance cable network as one of the first German television shows to be distributed in this manner. The series takes place in the year 1983, when Cold War tensions were at their height over the Strategic Defense Initiative and the same year that performer Nena sang her cross-over protest hit, 99 Red Balloons. It might be fun to follow this trans-Atlantic thriller together. 

platitudnal

Via the inestimably great wonder-source Boing Boing comes this collection of motivational posters inspired from unflinching world-view of film director Werner Herzog Stipetić. Check out the link for more unabashed truisms snatched from bleak but resounding dialogue.