June 16, 2023

📡 – 2023-06-16

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CW: Discussion of websites which depict gore, murder and mass shootings

LiveLeak went offline in 2017. If you never had the displeasure, LiveLeak was the last “““great””” shock site: a place you go would go see horrible videos and images of death, gore, violence, and so on. Since its closure, nothing has arisen to take its place except … the rest of the internet. 

There may not be any more shock sites1 but if one wants to see something horrible one doesn’t have to go far. Twitter recently made headlines when their search auto-complete blacklist was disabled, and those who searched for “cats” were suggested “cats in a blender”, e.g. Equally easily located are videos depicting the harassment of and violence towards protected and marginalized groups; even truly horrific footage of war – the up close documents of death which made LiveLeak et al famous on the early www – are easily found on the larger, and ostensibly much more purposefully moderated and sanitized platforms.

If the appetite for such horrific depictions still exists … why did the shock sites shutter? One negating force was increasing regulation of the internet. Decency and privacy laws in the UK, Europe and the US left those sites vulnerable to legal action. Though popular, they were run by small teams or individuals with marginal resources. I imagine the Cease and Desists alone where a lot to keep up with, before the threat of civil and federal litigation.

There was also a growing reluctance to be a dumping ground for the worst of the worst. LiveLeak – to its credit – removed video of the Christchurch shooters rampage, and refused to rehost it, saying they had no interest in providing exactly the attention desired. They arrived at similar conclusions regarding ISIS beheading videos (which they also did not want to appear to support.)

When asked by Inverse why the site closed, LiveLeak co-founder Hayden Hewitt explained that the team was simply … done. They had accomplished their goals, and it was time for the next thing (a video hosting site which explicitly forbids shocking content, it turns out). Hewitt admitted running the site was “brutal” – “You’ve got a constant battle of content versus revenue,” he said, “You’ve got a constant battle with the changing weather online. Then you’ve got a battle with people who just outright hate you and decide that you are actually on the opposite side of wherever they are because you won’t defend their position.” When asked about the racist, far-right content on the site he described himself as “tremendously liberal” and said (emphasis original) “It’s the same anywhere. If you go on Twitter now, you will find evidence of things we wouldn't have allowed on LiveLeak in a million years. In a million years.”

I’m not interested in defending the shock sites, only in observing that their demise (full or partial) is perhaps a misnomer – maybe they were driven out of existence by legal threat, but at the same time, they were made obsolete by massive platforms who can simply absorb legal threat, or dodge the risk of it by hiding the horror in plain sight2. Shock Sites were not locked out of the walled gardens, but enclosed by them. In this way, they become a surprising, and weirdly instructive case study in the slow, gruesome death of what we might refer to retronymically (and, yeah, only somewhat accurately) as the “independent internet” – a time before consolidation came for content, as it seemingly does for all things.

ANYWAY – on to some significantly less horrific stuff that I liked!

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Living sound forever: The genius of Wendy Carlos

Living sound forever: The genius of Wendy Carlos | Xtra Magazine

The trans synth pioneer changed music—and the world—forever

For anyone who’s intimately familiar with both, there are clear parallels between musical synthesis and transgender hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Operating a synthesizer involves rewiring signals in electrical circuitry to bring sound into the audible physical realm. HRT involves rewiring the endocrine system to alter one’s mind, body and emotions to their desired state. 

‘We’re mowed over’: colossal data centers are taking over the US countryside

‘We’re mowed over’: colossal data centers are taking over the US countryside | Virginia | The Guardian

New developments for cloud computing could threaten civil-war era and post-emancipation historical sites in rural Virginia

Some locals, especially those who sold their land to the data center developers, welcome the proposal, saying it could bring jobs and boost the county’s economy. It could bring in an estimated $470m in annual tax revenue.

Others are staunchly against it, saying the hub would come too close to the Manassas battlefield and threaten areas where some believe there are unmarked graves from the civil war era. Two developers, Compass and QTS, plan to build close to the battlefield park itself.

What Happened When a Brooklyn Neighborhood Policed Itself for Five Days

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/nyregion/brooklyn-brownsville-no-police.html

Several times a year, workers from Brownsville In Violence Out stand sentry on two blocks for five days. The police channel all 911 calls from that area to the civilians. Unless there is a major incident or a victim demands an arrest, officers, always in plainclothes, shadow the workers.

The civilians have no arrest powers. But they have persuaded people to turn in illegal guns, prevented shoplifting, kept a man from robbing a bodega and stopped a pregnant woman from hitting a boyfriend who had not bought a car seat and a stroller as he had promised.

An Encounter With Jeremy Fragrance, the Unhinged Future of Influencers

An Encounter With Jeremy Fragrance, the Unhinged Future of Influencers | GQ

On today’s internet, everyone is playing a character. Some more so than others.

The Fragrance fandom—genuine, ironic, or something in between—has arrived at a moment when the world of viral stars and influencers has morphed into a fairly stable industry, commonly referred to as the creator economy. And unlike the increasingly grim world of digital media—which, it now appears, may be looked back at as a failed attempt to move traditional media online—creators like Fragrance have had a much easier time translating content that used to be locked behind glossy magazines into something that can succeed on chaotic, nonlinear social platforms.

“I’ve noticed that people respond the best to extreme energy,” he tells GQ between selfies.

Days of Plunder

Days of Plunder - The American Prospect

Two new books call ‘private equity’ what it actually is, but neither offers much hope for emancipation from our eternal hostile takeover.

CW: Pretty much every awful thing you can imagine but specifically animal abuse, the holocaust, and economics.

My point is not to draw parallels between history’s most unimaginable atrocity and your local state prison or pet store, but to ponder whether the universal acknowledgment of “Auschwitz” as shorthand for the unquestioned nadir of human civilization perhaps unhelpfully obscures the fact that there was a privatized corporate camp right next door in Monowitz that was quantifiably one or two Hell circles deeper, even though its corporate overlords were by all accounts reluctant and late-adopting antisemites. (Some Farben execs later tried at Nuremberg had vainly gone to some lengths to bribe Nazi officials to spare its Jewish co-founder Arthur von Weinberg.)

The neoliberal perils of yoga and self-care on apps and platforms

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13678779231179739

This article situates the digital self-care industry within a neoliberal framework in which I critically analyze the effects of modern postural yoga through platforms and apps. In specific, I argue that the neoliberalization of digitally mediated self-care through Instagram, YouTube, Calm and Yoga-Go not only place the onus of health and wellbeing on individuals, they also endanger the physical health, mental health and digital privacy of their users. In turn, the consequences of economic and political systems that have created many of the social conditions that push people to seek ways in which they themselves can alleviate the pressures and stresses of everyday life continue to be ignored.

‘All possible sounds’: speech, music, and the emergence of machine listening

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20551940.2023.2195057?af=R

“Machine listening” is one common term for a fast-growing interdisciplinary field of science and engineering that “uses signal processing and machine learning to extract useful information from sound”. This article contributes to the critical literature on machine listening by presenting some of its history as a field. From the 1940s to the 1990s, work on artificial intelligence and audio developed along two streams. There was work on speech recognition/understanding, and work in computer music. In the early 1990s, another stream began to emerge. At institutions such as MIT Media Lab and Stanford’s CCRMA, researchers started turning towards “more fundamental problems of audition”. Propelled by work being done by and alongside musicians, speech and music would increasingly be understood by computer scientists as particular sounds within a broader “auditory scene”. Researchers began to develop machine listening systems for a more diverse range of sounds and classification tasks: often in the service of speech recognition, but also increasingly for their own sake. The soundscape itself was becoming an object of computational concern. Today, the ambition is “to cover all possible sounds”. That is the aspiration with which we must now contend politically, and which this article sets out to historicise and understand.

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Besides it being a great video, I did a little VO for this one 👆 !

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corru.observer

ATTENTION::'mindspike logging active'

I have no idea how to explain what this is, except to say that it is weird and fun and you should play (?????) it.

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Float City Returns! Last week we published the first in a short arc returning to the Float City Universe, in celebration of Stillfleet’s successful CRB kickstarter from last year, and their upcoming QADIDA kickstarter.

Listen at http://funcity.ventures, and wherever you pod.

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That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Hope y’all had a nice week and a nice day and a nice hour and a nice this newletter. If you liked it, tell your pals, but tell them that you love and respect them first.

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