19
Jul
rkhs put up a link to this (on Twitter). I suspect it will irritate almost everyone reading this, but it’s worth pushing past that. Even the irritation has significance. The world it introduces, of Internet-era marketing culture, is of self-evident importance to anyone seeking to understand our times — and what they’re tilting into.
Attention Economics is a thing. Wikipedia is (of course) itself a remarkable node in the new economy of attention, packaging information in a way that adapts it to a continuous current of distraction. Its indispensable specialism is low-concentration research resources. Whatever its failings, it’s already all-but impossible to imagine the world working without it.
On Attention Economics, Wikipedia quotes a precursor essay by Herbert A. Simon (1971): “…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Attention is the social reciprocal of information, and arguably merits an equally-intense investigative engagement. Insofar as information has become a dominating socio-historical category, attention has also been (at least implicitly) foregrounded.
Attention Economics is inescapably practical, or micro-pragmatic. Anyone reading this is already dealing with it. The information explosion is an invasion of attention. Those hunting for zones of crisis can easily find them here, cutting to the quick of their own lives.
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18
Jul
Only a few months ago, I had never heard of Poe’s Law. Now it’s a rare day in which it doesn’t crop up several times. Invocations of the Zeitgeist are inherently improbable, but if there were to be a persuasive illustration of the phenomenon, it would be something like this.
According to the succinct Wikipedia entry (already linked), Poe’s Law is less than a decade old. Among it’s precursors, also relatively recent, a 2001 Usenet comment by Alan Morgan most closely anticipates it: “Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.” In other words, between a sincere intellectual position and its satirization, no secure distinction can be made. (There is nothing about this thesis that restricts it to ‘extreme’ opinion, although that is how it is usually understood.)
The latest opportunity for raising this topic is, of course, @Salondotcom. (There’s an entertaining interview with the pranksters behind it here.) The offense of this account, which led to it being suspended by Twitter last week, was clear beyond any reasonable doubt. Quite simply, it was nearly indistinguishable from the original, a fact that has itself been explicitly noted (and tweeted about) innumerable times. Parody Salon slugs, so ludicrously over-the-top that they had @Salondotcom readers in stitches, were funny precisely because they were such plausible mimics of Salon‘s own. Readers were laughing through @Salondotcom, at Salon. This is almost certainly why the account was suspended.
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14
Jul
An utterly compelling tangle of arguments at The Center for Evolutionary Psychology, where the intersection of science and society is ripped open by controversy over Kevin MacDonald and his relation to Darwinian biorealism. Evo Psych star John Tooby makes some important points about the politics of denunciation, bringing the distinct spectra of political allegiance and sociological genetics into complex collision. Where do the implications of Hamiltonian inclusive fitness lead? (HBD doesn’t quite come into focus, but it haunts the discussion from the edges.)
For a sense of how murky this gets:
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13
Jul
So weekly Chaos Patches are still happening for the time being (in case you hadn’t noticed).
Zizek! (Plagiarism exposed, tormented by Steve Sailer, publicly humiliated in Newsweek and The American Spectator, ‘apologizes‘ by blaming a ‘friend’ … plenty of mileage left in this, I believe.) Despite the brutal Schadenfreude, this blog has a soft spot for Zizek, partly because of the whole CIA agent thing.
Automatically generate Tumblr ‘arguments‘.
How to get suspended from Twitter.
Interstellar Decopunk.
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26
Jun
More scrutiny and discussion needed — but this diagram looks highly reliable (and extremely valuable) upon preliminary inspection.
(I can’t reproduce it here because its connective links get lost in the darkness — torture.)
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24
Jun
Gary Oldman, neoreactionary hero:
PLAYBOY: What’s your view of the future? Are you optimistic about where society is heading?
OLDMAN: [Pauses] You’re asking Gary?
PLAYBOY: Yes.
OLDMAN: I think we’re up shit creek without a paddle or a compass.
PLAYBOY: How so?
OLDMAN: Culturally, politically, everywhere you look. I look at the world, I look at our leadership and I look at every aspect of our culture and wonder what will make it better. I have no idea. Any night of the week you only need to turn on one of these news channels and watch for half an hour. Read the newspaper. Go online. Our world has gone to hell.
ADDED: The punishment begins (and comment from Radix).
ADDED: “Oldman also said that if you didn’t vote for ’12 Years a Slave’ at the Oscars, you were considered racist.” (A transparently preposterous claim, apparently.)
19
Jun
A synthetic slogan this time, integrating a suggestion from Ex-Pat in Oz and Mai La Dreapta (here) with a discovery by Alrenous (here) to produce something singular.
Winter Is Coming
333
Envisaging a dark camo background, which would match both of these intersecting sign-lines. Fusional pop-culture crypsis is the way forward. Everywhere, yet unseen.
(It would take the fake-archaism “Winter ’tis Coming” or ominous Teutonism “Winter Ist Coming” to get the numbers to work out perfectly.)
27
May
Scott Alexander shows an acute appreciation for Nydwracu’s Fnord hunting (my own was far too cursory). It’s rare to see the innovation of a method (with a purpose), and it’s something more noteworthy than any but the most exceptional idea.
Someone with the requisite technical skills should implement this method in convenient software. As a quick-and-dirty way to excavate real messages, it’s hard to beat.
24
May
One thing has to be granted to Pein’s sub-adolescent article (casually dismissed here) — it has triggered some interesting anguish. This interpretation of (techno-commercial) Neoreaction as Bond villainy is especially notable. Unlike Pein, Izabella Kaminska demonstrates at least a little genuine wit. More importantly, she latches onto Silicon Valley Secessionism as a (scary) cryptopolitical project, of real significance. Her references are excellent (the story is built around a number of slides extracted from this landmark talk, by Balaji Srinivasan, entitled Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit).
The elegance of this project rests upon its combination of simplicity and radicality, captured in its essentials by the formula E > V (Exit over Voice). It advances the prospect, already in motion, of a destruction of (voice-based) politics through the techno-commercial innovation of exit mechanisms. It is beginning to drive progressives insane.
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19
May
Among all the attractive features of liberalism, there’s nothing quite so adorable as the shredded, bleeding schizophrenia:
As Miriam Greenberg wrote in her 2008 book Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World, in order to combat the growing loss of film production to Hollywood, in 1966, then-Mayor John Lindsay overhauled the city’s film agency in 1966, and streamlined the permit process for major motion pictures to be shot in New York. This brought much-needed revenues into the city, but the arrival of all of those additional film shoots, thanks to the change in policy by the perilously liberal Mayor Lindsay, documented the effects of all of the other changes in policy the Lindsay era was ushering in. The inadvertent result was a series of films documenting the horrors of the last years of Lindsay’s administration and its successors, Abe Beame and Ed Koch: The Panic in Needle Park, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Taxi Driver, and Death Wish among them.
