January 27, 2023

📡 – 2023-01-27

I’ve given you a fair bit of material to peruse in this edition of 📡, and it’s all REALLY good, so I’m gonna keep this top section brief, and simply point out a synergy that exists between the first four pieces in the 📚 section.

On their face, they are variously about tiktok, fancy retail shops, architecture and photography/… life(???) but in a deeper sense I think they’re also about homogenization: of spaces, of media, of cities, of experience.

I wonder, sometimes, if the internet has given us a sense of a “public” that doesn’t really exist - that there is some vague, improperly-imagined us which must be catered to, with the goal of the catering being, effectively, audience development. I wonder if that attitude has leaked into all aspects of contemporary American (at least) life. Why wouldn’t the local grocery also want to be Instagram Famous? Or to spin it the other way: these things are famous on Instagram, how can we capitalize? Chasing these goals leads one down a particular path, and towards a seemingly narrowing set of pursuits and aesthetic conclusions. Such focus threatens, of course, to strand anyone outside the liking, commenting, subscribing masses.

Much of it, as always, is material: landlords and developers and CEOs and &c &c require low costs to guarantee the line goes up, which forces a kind of lowest common denominator. Or if not that, they require a set of Easy Decisions and Obvious Conclusions, so thin resources can be deployed elsewhere. It’s strange, though, when one of the common denominators is … designy … for lack of a better word. The colorful shops, the modernische and fast-casual architecture, the coffee shops that all look like the lobby of ski lodge (even in Brooklyn). To me, it speaks of an anxiety about just-bland-enough palatability: what do we imagine will be popular to most? Of course, pandering has always existed … but there is something in the synthesis of all the pieces below which makes the pursuit feel dire, and diffuse. And maybe most notably: distant.

Though there are endless opportunities to find out what the actual, up-close public (the few) served by some shop, or platform, or building needs or wants or aspires towards, those needs, wants and aspirations are instead imagined from afar, conjured from some cloud of data, capital, surveys and social media feeds (the most).

Ok. On to the stuff I liked.

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Rafael Anton Irisarri makes frequent appearances on my recommended lists - he’s often described as an “ambient” artist, but this does a disservice to the depth, and complexity of his work (as “ambient” often does). Come Feb 1 he’s removing a # of his records from Bandcamp, and many are up now as Pay What You Wish, including $0. Check the community tab on his BC page for more details, but … a great opportunity to grab a bunch of amazing work for very little.

New releases of instrumental works from one of my all time favorites. Highly, highly recommend.

This eye-wateringly long drone release form Kali Malone has been All The Range in the weird-music press the last week. It’s nice, and the contributions of O’Malley and Railton are *chefs kiss*. If you can stomach a long listening session, recommend trying to fit in a couple tracks – or the whole thing! – to get a sense of the pace, and structure of these pieces … which move slowly, but certainly do unfold.

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Longtime field-recording maestro, silence-lover and title-hater fransisco lopez has been on a tear of releasing and re-releasing material on his BC. This one is a collage of material gathered over 5 years in the American West. As always, the recordings are detailed, delicate, intricately mixed and adorned. Highly recommend headphone listening, and a bit of patience. Treat it like a vacation, or a meditation, or a study.

Scott Cazan’s newest can be a bit of a challenge, but it sounds amazing, and covers a lot of fascinating sonic ground over a relatively short span. Superpang says it best: “An album featuring auditory distortion products à la Maryanne Amacher, psychoacoustic experiments, voice synthesis, a small account of a piece by Adam Overton, and improvised electronics.”

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The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | WIRED

Or how, exactly, platforms die.

"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it—that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and "projects" handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

Welcome to the Shoppy Shop

Why Every Boutique Grocer Looks the Same

Why does every store suddenly look the same?

Even though the companies sell different products, some similarities are impossible to ignore. “We need a new term for ‘internet-based small businesses that still use global supply infrastructure,’” said my friend, the culture writer Kyle Chayka, when I told him about this story. “We know these minimalist-ish generic aesthetics are not connected to any true local origin, but we see them as indicative of some kind of authenticity. My current thought is that they don’t feel local to a place, but instead they feel local to the internet, which is, after all, where we all live.”

America, the Bland

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-developments-city-architecture.html

Colloquially, people have referred to 5-over-1s as “gentrification buildings” or “fast-casual architecture.” Not all of them are built the same, however. Some are permanent affordable housing communities, while others hawk luxury urban living. Still, for many people, 5-over-1s have come to symbolize, in tangible form, the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents.

That’s in part why they’re so hated, and why it’s acceptable to hate them.

Reality Disappointment

https://reallifemag.com/new-feelings-reality-disappointment/

I tried to really be present. The effort was strenuous, an attempt to wriggle out into the world as if from a narrow drainpipe. I squinted at the sky, then I squinted at the trees, decided the sky was more impressive then circled back to ogle a quality patch of sumac. I removed my glasses, thinking glass was additional mediation. I put them back on, realizing I couldn’t see anything, which is dangerous on a bike. What I perceived was a distressing feeling of flatness. I couldn’t seem to locate the difference between seeing it all onscreen and seeing it in person.

Post-Cringe: Forspoken and the Self-Sabotage of the Smirking Protagonist

Post-Cringe: Forspoken and the Self-Sabotage of the Smirking Protagonist

If you're on Twitter or frequent gaming forums, you have probably been unable to escape clips of Forspoken (Square-Enix studio Luminous' new open world action RPG) today. Just in case you spend your time better than me, though, here's a small collection of them: I present to you actual dialogue

But when the protagonist rolls her eyes and laughs at one of these characters like she's faced with the clichés of yet-another-stock-standard-fantasy-world, it makes me doubt that the world does have anything unique to offer, and makes me instead wonder if I was wrong to ever imagine that it did.

The Crime Wave That Wasn’t

The Crime Wave That Wasn’t | Katya Schwenk

In 2020, Burlington, Vermont, voted to slash its police department. Then came the backlash.

In this vacuum, Burlington’s mayor, Miro Weinberger, a Democrat (the right-wing party in Burlington city politics, which is divided between Democrats and Progressives), and police chief, Jon Murad, began to stoke fear. Soon, the police department began churning out press releases at a rapid clip (far more than the agency had ever sent out before, according to a 2021 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont) that told of gun battles, shootings, assaults, and murders downtown, of gang members taking buses up from Massachusetts—despite the fact that overall violent incidents were lower than in previous years. The local press was happy to parrot these taking points: “Weekend shooting incidents in Burlington raise new concerns over police staffing,” warned WCAX-TV, the local CBS affiliate, as the station rehashed police tales of “crime sprees.” “Don’t let crime epidemic spread from Burlington,” advised a column in the Vermont Daily Chronicle. It was no wonder, then, that unease began to stir among some in the city. The department had lost officers, but it could still deputize the press.

Life as a 21st-Century Trucker

Life as a 21st-Century Trucker | WIRED

Technology, corporate greed, and supply-chain chaos are transforming life behind the wheel of a big rig. I went on the road to find exactly how.

What’s behind that shortage? And how exactly is technology altering life inside the cab? I want to know why 90 percent of the people who enter this profession quit within the first year; why a red-pilled faction of its members—affronted by a vaccine mandate that was, one senses, only the last in a litany of grievances—formed the Freedom Convoy and People’s Convoy last winter and spring, blocking border crossings between the US and Canada. I hope to understand, too, how the relatively few truckers who stick around sustain themselves: the myths they live on and the shrines to which they come, parched, to be replenished and raised up.

Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content

Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content - The Verge

Getty Images claims Stability AI ‘unlawfully’ scraped millions of images from its site. It’s a significant escalation in the developing legal battles between generative AI firms and content creators.

The lawsuit marks an escalation in the developing legal battle between AI firms and content creators for credit, profit, and the future direction of the creative industries. AI art tools like Stable Diffusion rely on human-created images for training data, which companies scrape from the web, often without their creators’ knowledge or consent. AI firms claim this practice is covered by laws like the US fair use doctrine, but many rights holders disagree and say it constitutes copyright violation. Legal experts are divided on the issue but agree that such questions will have to be decided for certain in the courts. (This past weekend, a trio of artists launched the first major lawsuit against AI firms, including Stability AI itself.)

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.459733/gov.uscourts.nyed.459733.54.0.pdf

It turns out crimes are still crimes even if they employ speech! If you want some background on this, you can read it here. But then, I cannot recommend highly enough clicking through and reading the memo directly. It is … incredible.

The Government brings a single-count indictment (Dkt. 8) (the "Indictment") against Defendant Douglass Mackey under 18 U.S.C. § 241. The Indictment relates to Defendant Mackey's alleged participation in an online conspiracy to injure certain Twitter users' right to vote by spreading disinformation during the 2016 Presidential election. (See Comp!. (Dkt. 1) (the "Complaint") 'l 3; Indictment.) Pending before the court is Defendant Mackey's Motion to Dismiss the Indictment for lack of venue, violation of due process, and an "as applied" First Amendment violation. (Mot. (Dkt. 43); see also Gov't Resp. in Opp. (Dkt. 45) (the "Opp.").) The court held oral argument at the request of the parties on October 26, 2022. (See Oct. 27, 2022 Minute Entry.) The court DENIES Defendant Mackey's motion for the following reasons.

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Shot:

Chaser:

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My pal Bijan Stephen made a text adventure game about being alone on a spaceship (but, yknow, also a lot more than that) called Turn Out the Lights. You should definitely play it. Bijan is an extremely talented writer, and storyteller, and he pulled together an all-star cast of collaborators for this. And while you’re on a Bijan kick, he also made this video about video games you should watch.

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The Fun City crew released their second Brindlewood Bay episode, Cozy City 2: Marooned at Sea. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or directly on Simplecast! If you missed the first ep, it’s right here and I think it’s 1) fun and 2) hilarious.

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That’s all, folks. See you in a couple weeks. In the interim, say hi on Twitter or IG. Hope you liked this edition of 📡 enough, and if you liked enough of it, consider sharing it w/ your pals: