Your quotation of Trotsky ITT, surely (the thing about the white heat, Nazi's, etc.)

Isn't this where my stuff about the ad-tech men come in? Not just the capitalists in general, but commercial media specifically, especially in its exploitation of the worst elements of human psychology, which is all the more readily eaten up by idle minds who were probably left to rot in economically declining red districts (I mean, CNN basically made President Trump with all the free airtime right when he announced his candidacy).

In my post just above the one with my half-baked analogy with slavery, I think I pointed out an amusing confluence of advertisers and outright racists. The guy from New York looked like he was posting on /pol or spouting birther theories, but he was just running the first wildly successful penny paper.

Maybe. I dunno. I don't think anybody had to use psychological tricks to make people ****ty. I think that's just who they are. You have a voting public of anxious working class precariat, which elected an administration of anxious billionaires who see the guillotines coming.

Like, you know someone has their panties twisted when billionaire businessmen are taking time off to go work in politics, rather than spending that time making money and bribing politicians, the old fashioned way.

Assuming that Trump is scared of the working class makes his campaign and presidency a more interesting read, at least.

Like Trump's budget, I don't think there are details yet, but he's pledged to include a "sharp increase" in defense spending.

The US already spends an embarrassing and pointless amount of money on national defense. But it's a great jobs program for working class folks, so you definitely can't cut that ****.

Oh, the people spewing the kind of vitriolic stuff in the comments sections of websites weren't forced to be ****ty, no doubt.

The psychological tricks come in when your entire revenue model is based around building a medium that destroys attention spans and encourages inflammatory discussion. Suddenly, people feel like they have an audience for their hate. Anyway, I just thought it was funny that the first wildly successful penny paper also happened to be founded by the kind of loser who would be spamming comments on the WaPo about Obama's birth certificate.

My other contention is that economic decline increases the amount of time (and inclination) angry people have for this kind of activity, since they aren't working. But it's good for somebody's ad-tech business if it generates clicks.

I will completely agree that economics are fundamental. Anything else I can add apart from that is going to be secondary.

But let's not forget that the advertising model for news media would be the thing that would eventually turn the web into a gigantic slot machine. (Helping elect a guy who owns a bunch of actual slot machines.)

I mean it used to be said that education was one of the most important things people needed to receive in order to be well informed about their civic responsibility to the world and even their own interests. I just think that we need to add decent functioning hypermedia to that list, since so many people now are basically having whatever they learned in school wiped out by hearsay, simply because Facebook is one of the worst companies in the world, solely because of the perverse profit incentive built into ad tech.

Correlation doesn't imply causation. The effectiveness of advertising as a business model is distinct from whether advertising is itself effective. Facebook's business model (and Google's, and penny papers') only work because rich people value being heard more than the public values the services they use. It's likely more a condition of rich people having way too much money than anything else.

I've never heard someone change their mind because of ads or news, only to justify their extant beliefs.

The efficacy of the advertising (scam?) itself is not what I'm talking about here. I am talking about the deleterious, higher-order effects that an ad-supported media landscape has on the the content and delivery of news / discussion / entertainment itself (this is literally the takeaway of Tim Wu's book). Including the tendency of click-baity stuff to help



but more importantly, to perpetuate a trivial culture in which racist loud-mouths feel all too at home (or even work as ad-men themselves, like James Gordon Bennett Sr., Joseph Goebbels, Steve Bannon, etc.).

Anyway, I feel like this is turning into an argument, but really all I wanted to do was point out what I saw was an amusingly familiar archetype in James Gordon Bennett, while I was reading Wu's book.

BTW, this is rather incidental, but I am actually convinced that 99.99% of internet arguments could only stand a chance of being resolved if the two parties could meet in person, so that one could use all emphatic channels of human communication (rather than just text), that would be necessary to motivate the person that it would be worth his while to pick up and actually read some obscure book that contains things they don't know yet, rather than try to make sense of the other's remarks in the framework of his existing knowledge.

Somebody name me one time somebody ever agreed to read a book because somebody disagreed with him on Twitter.

Telegrams are a really, really bad way to have a contentious discussion, but almost all of the web is based on it. (But at least Massassi is microscopic enough in population that this isn't made 100x worse by making the convos virtually anonymous and uniformly hostile.)

Technology is horribly disruptive, and only exists in its extremely broken form because it is so useful. There is a reason why people don't send Youtube videos back and forth when all they're trying to do is tweet out a bunch of links. And yet the former mode of communication (face-to-face) used to be the only way that people typically did this! (Even when they were weren't, and were textual, they were carefully edited--newspapers, etc.) Even a phone conversation is better, and that's not even something you did typically to talk to strangers about politics, etc.

New topic.

Honestly, what the **** is this? Immigration officials now test programmers at the border by asking them to answer technical interview questions? Or memorizing the Wikipedia article on binary search trees? And not just terrorist-y looking software engineers either.

WTF??????

Edit: apparently this kind of stuff has been the norm for a while. It looks like it's just a strategy to get people talking, so they give off signs of nervousness in case they are lying about something

How is it not a combination (hybrid or whatever) of both?

I find it very interesting that the debate isn't over whether we're living in a dystopia, it's over which one.

So I was shopping for Nazi uniforms on the internet the other day and when I was comparing the styling to other 30s era clothing it really struck me (because of the drugs) that the Nazis were really kind of the distillation of the late 20s early 30s, with the worst most disgusting back end of it and the most potent iconography. So we are clearly having the same issue now, where how **** the last two decades ish was (social media causing pandemic depression, mexico doing 9/11 via israel, droughts etc. and resulting resource wars) has been distilled into clickbait terrorist organizations and political parties and everyone wears poorly fitting suits with either too small or too large of armholes or dress homeless, and people are so conditioned to 'who knows man it could be a multiverse ****' that the same person will alternately insist we are in the Huxley world and the Orwell one each time insisting that the other one is inaccurate, and later have no recollection of this. It's like the worst parts of both books got synthesized into something more stealthy.

I'd tell you to go read Neil Postman's 1985 (hint) book to find out why, but all the copies at my local library are checked out.

Or for Gen Y, you can just read the executive summary on Wikipedia, I guess?

The only only satisfying way to use the medium of hypertext: a joke to diffuse tension without resolving the reason it exists, but then a reference to a book to do so.

If I seem unhinged, chalk it up to self-loathing and try to forget about it. I'll just say that Neil Postman didn't like technology, mocking things like the internet and automatic car windows.

P.S. that cartoon was banned by Postman's estate (but I quite ironically found it on 4chan one day).

Well I'm not sure how funny it is when you made the joke for us, but: yeah, because of the drugs.

lol, Bush wasn't Mexican

Reading this a second time, I actually think this might somehow be brilliant satire, and I am just too dense to realize it.

I mean I know it's meant as a joke, but I feel like there is a deeper joke as well. Am I the target?

Well maybe this concern answers his question then. We're living in a trivial culture.

The Medium is the Massage

you know what they say; 'you are what you read twice a day'

I was still holding out hope that somebody would be schooling me here, that there would be a lesson, but I'll concede. You are Pee-wee Herman.

I jerk off in adult theaters.

He might be, I can't imagine how you'd be able to tell though.

Am I being gaslighted, or did you really just interpret that literally? Or maybe there's a joke I'm missing?

You must know by now that half of the content I post here is mostly impressionistic.

At the risk of ruining a joke by explaining it, some background: Paul Reubens said that Pee-wee's Playhouse was never educational. It was all just craziness.

Which is what Spook's posts look like to me, but I wanted to be sure I wasn't being had, e.g. with the deeper meaning of his posts somehow meant as a satirical take on myself or the like.

I have to admit, most of the misunderstanding I perpetuate `round these parts probably stems from what on some level can only be called an asinine assumption on my part that divining some obscure half-assed idea of mine is a decent exercise to be left to the reader. But in my own head, I'm actually a genius, you know? So why isn't it a reasonable assumption that we'd converge to whatever Platonic reality I've supposedly 'discovered' in a daydream?

I mean, it works for math, so why not also for inchoate ramblings about everything else?

Self-deprecating aside, I still blame the medium for this.

You blame language?

I blame the constraints imposed by the medium that doesn't exist in face-to-face communication.

How good would a David Lynch film be if you were restricted to reading the screenplay rather than attending a screening?

C'mon. Spook's posts are way more abstract and off-putting.

Heh. Well at any rate, I was more referring to some of my own more opaquely expressed ramblings.

As for Spook's post, like I tried to convey, I have no ****ing clue what's going on.

Does he write screenplays for most of his films? I'm sure he did for The Elephant Man and probably Dune (ick) but surely not for Inland Empire.

Would you agree that all of the problems you ascribe to text are present in that whole spectrum of channels of human communication but that it only gets problematic at a certain point of transmission speed, importance of the topic etc. Because the kinds of arguments you are talking about seem like all of the real life ones I have ever seen, with the biggest difference being that people who are forced to interact with eachother outside of the discussion are more likely to change the topic to the weather or what is for lunch. This of course breaks down once you have a vegan and a fundamentalist christian across the table from eachother, in which case the discussion will likely closely resemble a twitter exchange (short thoughts, low information density, ideological posturing, talking past eachother because of totally different a priori assumptions about both weather and lunch) and so we can deduce:

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvOoR8m0oms

Mulholland Dr. was incredible. The Elephant Man made me very upset.

I think that text has way too much staying power.

Not everything that can be electronically recorded is worth saving for eternity, let alone the time it takes to read it, especially when I am deprived of knowing anything more about the circumstances or agent producing said text, and the burden is on me to try to divine not only the meaning, but the deeper purpose, and hopefully not waste the other person's time when I continue the cycle by replying in kind.

And yes, there are plenty of circumstances in which people waste the bandwidth afforded by face-to-face communication. But usually they recognize this, and act accordingly. And I'm not saying we don't suffer fools IRL, but it would be silly to blame the medium for that.

Actually, Mulholland Dr. made me very upset. (Maybe that is what makes it great art, though? I dunno.)

Then again, that's probably because I had just watched Barry Lyndon, which was made by a director who likes to make very literal films (and also shies away from punking his audience).

Mulholland Dr. was upsetting, yeah, less directly than the Elephant Man was; watching it was like that pre-flu feeling you have in your stomach. I still feel that diner scene is one of the best terror/scary scene ever filmed and it's not even a scary movie. And the scenes with the cowboy are perfectly dreamlike and surreal. Of course the key is, after getting the basic underlying "story" of film, to treat it as an anti-cerebral emotional trip rather than a cohesive narrative.

I prefer to read The Elephant Man as a criticism of the bourgeoise elite who parade him as much as a critique of the proletariat who abuse him. Well, it doesn't really critique the proles, because they're a sort of comic, hyperbolic evil, no criticism is necessary. But the elite society still uses him to project their own status as good people, but if you notice the last scene where everyone applauds him is virtually no different than the scenes where he's put on display at a zoo, other than it's applause rather than jeering; although in some ways more pleasant he's still not fully treated as a human being, he's defined by his grotesque appearance to the very end, even by the people who are nicest to him. Which means I really hope the movie is saying "sometimes the world is completely ****ed up with nothing redeeming about it" rather than "charitable cultured elites are good".