You Wouldn't Download a Car

The sound of a thousand digital twin insurance companies being born (to protect your real assets from digital vandalism, of course).

Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon

May 2024, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/pokemon-go-players-are-altering-public-map-data-to-catch-rare-pokemon/

This isn't graffiti, but it's like graffiti; defacing public property, or property that's not yours ... Is map data public or private property? The underlying data is sometimes public, or other people's private, but not the company that makes the map. Anyway, graffiti is a form of rebellion against a system that takes things away from you, only to give it back to "everyone", and where "everyone" is really just the people left over who can afford to own things. Who owns the data? 

Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal

May 2025, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/stack-overflow-users-sabotage-their-posts-after-openai-deal/

The words "user hostile" have become rampant on the big wordbox we call the internet. In this case, a website that runs a chat forum about computers decided that the millions of hours worth of users putting really complex computer problems into machine-readable text for other users would be really valuable if we instead gave it to one single company who owns a really big reading machine. The users who did all the work here (value = work) decided nah, let's corrupt the data by changing our posts. Not just deleting their posts, but changing the right answers to completely nonsensical answers so wrong they're dangerous. And that is the future of the internet.

Image credit: AI Art - Holding Hands 5 - 2023

Art Hurts

This man is a genius

Image credit: Oobah Butler w a bottle of Release - Nov 2024

Amazon drivers’ urine packaged as energy drink, sold on Amazon

Nov 2023, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/amazon-drivers-urine-packaged-as-energy-drink-sold-on-amazon/

The drink is called Release, and it's filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.

Release is just marketing for a new documentary called The Great Amazon Heist, which shows how easy it is to bypass Amazon's buying and selling safeguards, but Oobah is a cultural genius.

I fucking love this man - Oobah Butler

See also his fakesploitation of the food reviews market where he created a fake restaurant on top of his garage that won like 4 stars overnight; called the Shed at Dulwich

Arts Squabble

Occupy Wall Street, September 2011. Barricades remained for three years following the protests.

Urinating dog joins Wall Street statue row
May 2017, BBC

The Merrill Lynch 'Charging Bull' is the focus of some public/art controversy, after someone put a sculpture of a 'fearless girl' staring-down the bull, and then someone else put a 'pissing pug,' pissing on the girl. A timeline should help:

1987
Stock market crash.

1989
Artist Arturo Di Modica puts the 7,000-pound bronze bull right there in front of the New York Stock Exchange without telling anyone or getting any permission. (That's called guerilla art). Later that day it gets removed by police, placed in an impound lot, but later reinstalled a couple blocks away. The bull was meant to symbolize financial optimism and prosperity.

March 2017
Kristen Visbal puts Fearless Girl right in front ot the Bull. The Girl was commissioned by State Street Global Advisers for a fund on the market that considers itself gender-diverse. The Bull was paid for by Di Modica, the artist himself. The Girl was paid for by a firm. Di Modica calls it a dis to his bull, an act of commerce, not of altruism. She, the Girl, was commissioned to highlight gender inequality, but she was paid for by a firm that trades on the stock exchange.

May 2017
Alex Gardega makes a little dog sculpture, and has it pissing on the girl. He calls the Girl "corporate nonsense."

Now
It's really hard to argue that the statue of the girl has to do with gender inequality when you look at who commissioned it.

Unfortunately, because gender equality IS an issue, lots of people get lots of pissed when the girl gets dissed. Un-further-fortunately, because income inequality and corporate takeover are an even bigger problem than gender inequality, people are more upset that the symbolic girl is getting pissed on by a dog than they are that we as a society are getting pissed on by the entities that constitute the stock market, for example.

It does seem like a cheap trick, the Girl, that is.

But let's not forget that the Bull was already the voodoo doll of the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011, such that it was protected by barricades for three years following the protest. It represents the thing that has shaken the moral compass of Western society - corporate greed and power.

Personally, I would really, really, really like to see a bronze barricade placed around that bull.

image source: link

Please Hold While We Transfer Your Call

Trump's immigrant crime hotline trolled with calls about aliens and UFOs
May 2017, BBC

On the same day that I read a headline about a hotline that helps women trying to give themselves abortions, I see this one, about an illegal alien hotline that is being trolled by people reporting about actual aliens. Did someone say fake news? How the hell are you supposed to know what's even fake anymore?

So it turns out the abortion hotline, which I thought was a joke meant to draw attention to the lack of women's reproductive services, is real, and it is because - the abortion problem (as a result of lack of reproductive services) is already such a big deal that the hotline is necessary. Yup.

So many women are taking abortions into their own hands that they are dying as a result, and this is an available solution. Right.

But wait, there's more. A real hotline comes out that encourages people to report "criminal aliens" (this is the current terminology used to refer to what used to be called illegal aliens, but I guess now we're trying to specify illegal aliens that have also committed crimes). But like, come on, did you really think the term "criminal aliens" would not be the funniest thing ever to the entire internet? It actually sounds like a joke. Is there nobody up there who's job it is to go - "wait a minute, I know you know what you're talking about, but everyone else is gonna hear "criminal aliens" and just have a field day with this..." Nobody?

Sure enough, the hotline was brought to a standstill by people reciting X-Files episodes and all sorts of jewels from our cultural repository of alien encounters, with criminal aliens, that is.

Anyway, the next time you're reading the news, don't forget, the real news is so much better than the fake stuff.


POST SCRIPT

On the term "aliens" - Prior to 1940ish, the word alien meant foreigner.

Then what happened? HG Wells, that's what. He is the guy who wrote War of the Worlds, the narration of which was broadcast live on the radio, sparking mass hysteria, and ushering in the Little Green Man into the cultural imagination. Since then, the word alien means little green man, not foreigner.

Unfortunately, government moves about as fast as a 20th century spaceship (relatively, this is not very fast, like relative to the speed of light, for example), and so we're still using the word alien to refer to foreigners. Would somebody tell these guys??


see this post from Network Address on where "little green men" come from:

Culture Fail
July 2012, Network Address