Category: Technology
-
This metaphor has unexamined implications.
Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: they talk about torturing the data until it confesses. Yet this metaphor contains unexamined implications. Data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear. Franklin Foer. Pattern recognition has become pattern imposition.
-
A way to sell selling itself
VR/AR is ad-tech. Everything built in studios (except for experimental projects from independent artists) is advertising something. That empathy stuff? That’s advertising for nonprofits. But mostly VR is advertising itself. While MTV was advertising musicians, the scale and creative freedom meant that it launched careers for people like Michel Gondry, Antoine Fuqua, David Fincher, Spike…
-
Surveillance and legibility: systems of seeing
“Networks weird people.” Quinn Norton and Ella Saitta explain the yin-yang nature of network effects — and the complicity of hackers and “geek culture” in such — to the Chaos Communications Conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE This is of considerable interest to me, for two reasons. First of all, because legibility is a big part of what my…
-
Positivism will eat itself
They’re mixing the Kool-Aid pretty strong in the Valley these days [via @moonandserpent]: Julien Cuny and Louis-Pierre Pharand, former producers and creative directors at Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed and FarCry, have formed a new development studio named PIXYUL. Their goal: to map our planet at 1:1 scale using drones, and use the resulting 3D recreation…