your free trial of the internet (inter alia) has expired

After the allure of free congress and enough free samples of everything imaginable, on-line culture is being slowly given a new paradigm that buries much of what the public has become addicted to, casually and without turning back, behind water-marks, clearing-houses, functionality splintered into thousands of idiosyncratic applications, paywalls, subscriptions and compartmentalized by various services that compete rather than communicate with one another, as Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel presents in a brillant essay on this shift in attitudes and accessibility.

Of course, this pushers' modus operandi developed gradually, and having crossed the threshold of this gateway long ago (which the internet was never intended to be but no more and no less than a resource bridging connections among people and ideas), and the engineers maintaining the network, as well as the general public are not really noticing the drabness descending. It's probably beyond the scope of the article and smacks of tinny and misplaced nostalgia or neo-luddism (Luddismus, angst vor dem Neuland), but the trend seems like a metaphor for a lot of other movements and disclaimers draining the wholesomeness and fun out of things, displaced with approximations of safety, convenience and community, like the surveillance state and its litany of justifications or the empowered lobbies that peddle free samples of genetically-modified food and pharmaand general re-packaging and sponsorship that makes it hard to anything without submitting to some inscrutable authority. What do you think? If it is truly something that people are willing to accept, is this drift tolerated in the on-line world necessarily spilling over into everything else?

billow or augmented triad

Who knew that augmented reality (AR) technologies were making advances on the other senses, and in ways that were more than revivals of already-proven techniques—like 3-D movies?
Now one, instead of bi-coloured cardboard and stage-light gel glasses, wears Dr. Strangelove's spectacles, though there has been improvements by tweaks, if not bounds. A researcher at the University of Illinois has teamed up with Disney's imagineering laboratories to create a device, Airreal, that can resonate at specific vibrations and broadcast, project as puffs of air phantom sensations.
I suppose an array could be set up like surround-sound speakers, giving all members of the audience the feeling of being caught in a rainstorm, pelted with snow flakes, over having a bullet wiz by. In closer quarters, the device can toss one a virtual coin, seen through some other means, with the feeling of it landing in one's palm, plus replicating any given tactile sense or texture. That is pretty far-out, and makes me remember the first time that I wore 3-D glasses, which weren't red and blue, was when my family and I visited Epcot Center and saw Michael Jackson in the film Captain EO way back in 1987.

bad bank or off-shoring

While international agreements have framed regulations to persecute and burden smallholders and the domestic business entities and financial houses have employed in order to institution willing to accommodate the routine banking needs of US expatriates or those accidental Yanks, like the Lord Mayor of London, for example, who perhaps has not sufficiently renounced his dual-citizenship (due to being born in America to diplomatic parents) to the satisfaction of the tax-man and competent authorities to be able to forego the reporting requirements, unrequited as they may be, precious little attention has been paid to the lengths and loopholes that they will go to in order to mask their corporate citizenship. Via Boing Boing, here is a very thorough and interactive illustration to show the convoluted network, business apparently not subject to the same kind of scrutiny as the public when it comes to AMT usage or grocery shopping. Maybe a better stress-test (applied to banks operating in the EU exclusively) would be to subject them to a theoretical insolvency and time how long it took to them to make themselves whole, what kind of collateral would take to back up the mortgage against their demur pseudopodia. Such behaviour, faking right and left, is enshrined and even encouraged, not by business culture alone but also by omission on the part of the US government.

green grow the rushes ho, tell us of your GOOG-O

It is already been noted how the mass surveillance and spreading confessionals of intelligence agencies could well have a disastrous chilling effect when it comes to the early adoption of the latest gadgets and our understanding, relationship with mobility and convenience. Though by nature, equally as gimmicky and peripheral to the architecture of the internet, which ought not be co-opted and re-worked as a for-profit enterprise exclusively, I wonder what opportunities and threats will come if the mood of the surveyed is extended further, making seeking out advertising-space and market-intelligence more difficult, if not an anathema, with the public retreating into closed systems, forgoing the ability to triangulate.
If one does not look at them, do they go away?  Certainly the profit-motive and the creation of niche-markets has done much in the name of progress and ease of propagating ideas, even for those panhandlers that collect the crumbs of the advertising industry and including those Great-Souled individuals who expect nothing. What do you think? Targeted ads, when they hit the mark, can be disturbing in their own right, without considering the full dossier that others may have—and considering those tangential commercials that are laughably off-target, one has to wonder what computer-driven assumptions might be conspiring to form one's persona of record.

adult literacy

A happy mutant reader of Boing Boing shares the artwork from an Russian illustrator (a bit risque for workplace viewing, take caution since what is seen cannot be unseen and the art is sort of reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley) active during the 1920s and 1930s which is basically a primer, an alphabet book, to encourage literacy in adults through erotic images by making Cyrillic letters memorable. It reminds me of the exploration of cognition and mind-hacks presented in Moonwalking with Einstein, advising that one of the chief rules of curating one's galleries of memory is with exhibitions too violent and obscene to share with polite company and always illicit at least a blush. Though it is not a hard and fast rule for every constitution, one probably cannot argue with the efficacy of such an approach, however.