The Emerging World of Teledildonics
Hey friends, I want to tell you about something awesome: I'm hosting a live journalism event about the Real Future of Romance in Los Angeles on July 8th, produced by performance artist Cara Rose De Fabio and the Fusion team. The program will showcase everything from an investigative report into the workers supplying intimacy online to a micro-documentary on the emerging world of teledildonics. The audience will be encouraged to contribute via their phones during the show. This is going to be unlike any tech event you've ever been to or even heard about. I promise.
You, subscribers, are the only people who know about it right now. Tomorrow, we'll open up tickets to the general public. So, if you want to make sure you get a seat, register here today.
1. A tour of the forgotten parts of our nuclear-weapons legacy.
"Yet elsewhere in the US, the ruins of the Manhattan Project and the arms race that followed remain overlooked. In North Dakota, a pyramid-like anti-missile radar that was built to detect an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviet Union pokes through the prairie grass behind an open fence. In Arizona, a satellite calibration target that was used during the Cold War to help American satellites focus their lenses before spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking lot. And in a suburban Chicago park, where visitors jog and bird watch, nuclear waste from the world's first reactor — developed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi for the Manhattan Project in 1942 — sits buried beneath a sign that reads 'Caution — Do Not Dig.' Collectively, these sites are a visible reminder of America's nuclear history — a time when the threat of doomsday was as much a part of the landscape as the national psyche."
2. Oh, no! If we don't read the comments, we can't read anything really, this guy argues.
"And yet there is something narrow, and basically anachronistic, about this view of 'the comments' as a phenomenon restricted to the unconsecrated ground below the line. Because it is possible to think of the Internet itself, in all its incomprehensible vastness, as an exponentially ramifying network of commentary and metacommentary. It’s comments all the way down. Social media, at any rate, and Twitter in particular, are a continually metastasizing accretion of marginalia. A tweet is a comment implicitly calibrated to provoke further comment, by way of replies or retweets or favorites: it is a form of text produced in order not just to be read but to generate the production of further text. (Almost every time I compose a tweet and click send, I become discomfitingly aware that I just made the Internet slightly longer than it already was, which was way too long in the first place.)"
3. US Navy aircraft carriers will have a "wide range of laser weapons."
"The Navy plans to outfit is new Ford-class aircraft carriers with a wide range of laser weapons to shoot down incoming missiles and eventually provide offensive fire power, senior service official said. With this future in mind, the Ford-class carriers are built with three times the electrical power generating capacity compared to Nimitz-class carriers, Moore said. The USS Ford is able to generate 13,800 volts of electrical power, more than three times the 4,160 volts that a Nimitz-class carrier generates, said Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, Program Executive Officer, Carriers."
4. Interesting visualization dashboard of water levels in the drought-stricken west.
"Zoom and pan the map to move around in it. Click a point to view the water levels for a particular reservoir. Hover over the line graphs to see the levels for a particular month. Use the main map to gain a sense of water in the West. If you're interested in a particular state it's probably better to go directly to that state's page, which also includes data on snow levels."
5. An anthropologist considers Stephen Hawking and the support networks of other very powerful people.
"Where is 'he' then? Paradoxically, I showed that it is because his intellectual competences, his identity, and even his own body, are more distributed, collectivized and materialized than those of any one else, that he is the most singular of all. In other words, the more powerful you become, the more infrastructure you need, and the more infrastructure you get, the more you seem to stand alone. This is the paradox of the 'distributed-centered subject,' as I called him. This is the image of the president framed by the window of the oval office, alone, looking at the distant horizon, after the crowds of advisors have evaporated."
On Fusion: You remember I got that anonymous book satirizing tech culture and Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago? Here's the latest on my investigations into its origins.
1. vice.com | @operation_ryan 2. newyorker.com 3. military.com | @jon_jeckell 4. deanfarr.com 5. epicpeople.org
The Emerging World of Teledildonics