October 31, 2023

📡 – 2023-10-31

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Friends! I hope you’re well! Here is a make-up Tuesday post for a missed missive two weeks back; planning on another mailing Friday-or-Monday, schedule permitting. There’s plenty in the back catalog to share with y’all.

What, you may be asking, has been eating up so much of your time?

There’s more than one answer. I’m engaged in a massive media archaeology / genre-study research project for YouTube at the moment, about which there is not much I can say, but which has been very fun and fascinating work to do. Though our release schedule has slowed, Fun City nonetheless requires 20-to-30 some hours of work a week here and there. Client work continues apace, our daughter Clem is about to turn one year old (!!!) and I am secretly (not so secretly) piloting a new show.

There is not much significant to share at the moment except: it is an audio-only podcast (for now), it will be about the internet (in the same way Idea Channel was ‘about the internet’, but a very different format) and we are planning to launch in January. We’ve made two pilot episodes so far; they were both good, but never intended for release. The show is entirely independently produced; aggressively so, even. And the folks I’m making it with – mostly old friends – are very good at what they do.

There’s a lot to say about making a show, especially now – with media and tech in the states they’re in. I’ve been sharing some of that on bsky, if you happen to have an account there, and will be sharing more on my new-ish work-updates-only mailing list. If this sort of thing interests you, there and my Patreon will be the first landing zones for major updates, the first of which should go out this week or next.

Until then … here’s some stuff that I liked!

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Gonna try something new and start ordering these roughly by “difficulty”, increasing. That’s a highly subjective measure, and the breadth of the continuum is dependent upon what all I’ve liked in the last couple weeks. So, you know, just don’t get mad if you think you’re clicking on easy listening and its horrible noise (or vice versa).

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The ‘new elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse

The ‘new elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse | Center for an Informed Public

With seven accounts racking up a cumulative 1.6 billion tweet views over three days of posts, our analysis points to a new crisis twitter that is faster, more disorienting, and potentially more sha…

Online we have seen many users of X describe their experience of this crisis as different. Some of that may result from the more ambiguous nature of the larger conflict, especially as the news cycle moves from the unambiguous horror of the initial attack to concerns about Israel’s response. However, our investigation here suggests an additional factor: in Musk’s short tenure as owner of the platform, a new set of news elites has emerged. These elites post frequently, many sharing unvetted content and emotionally charged media. While sharing no single political ideology, many embrace a similar culture of rapid production of unlinked or ambiguously sourced content, embracing a “firehose of media” ethos that places the onus of verification on the end-user. This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the “credibility signals” that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content. Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.

The IRS crackdown on high-end taxpayers is already raking in millions in back taxes — here’s how much

The IRS crackdown on rich taxpayers is already raking in millions in back taxes - MarketWatch

One case involved an alleged tax cheat who spent $502,000 on gambling, the IRS says.

That’s on top of $38 million in back taxes the IRS has already collected from 175 other millionaires. It brings the recent rake-in of back taxes from wealthy households to $160 million, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said.

“The funds that we’ve collected should give you a fairly good idea of how much money is on the table for us,” Werfel told reporters, highlighting how the IRS is using money from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Accidental Spies: Amazon Ring Owners May Be Unknowingly Emailing Police

Accidental Spies: Amazon Ring Owners May Be Unknowingly Emailing Police – The Markup

An investigation by The Markup found that Ring’s social platform funnels suspicions from residents in Whiter and wealthier areas of Los Angeles directly to police

Neighbors has built a forum in which private citizens can monitor one another in service of keeping neighborhoods “safe,” as the company puts it.

That raises important questions: safe for whom, and from what? While homeowners may believe their cameras and posts are preventing break-ins and theft, some research has shown that surveillance is a poor deterrent of such property crime. And by trusting their cameras to keep watch for them, users render themselves blind to the ways in which community surveillance breeds paranoia, perpetuates prejudice, and puts people at heightened risk of police or vigilante violence.

Why Meta is getting sued over its beauty filters

Why Meta is getting sued over its beauty filters | MIT Technology Review

A new sweeping lawsuit takes aim at various Meta features that allegedly endanger children and their privacy. It could have a big impact on child online safety.

The case against Meta specifically calls out visual tools “known to promote body dysmorphia” as one of the “psychologically manipulative platform features designed to maximize young users’ time spent on its social media platforms.” It also says that “Meta was aware that young users’ developing brains are particularly vulnerable to certain forms of manipulation, and it chose to exploit those vulnerabilities through targeted features,” like filters. 

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | MIT Technology Review

The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. 

Artists who want to upload their work online but don’t want their images to be scraped by AI companies can upload them to Glaze and choose to mask it with an art style different from theirs. They can then also opt to use Nightshade. Once AI developers scrape the internet to get more data to tweak an existing AI model or build a new one, these poisoned samples make their way into the model’s data set and cause it to malfunction. 

Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. The poisoned data is very difficult to remove, as it requires tech companies to painstakingly find and delete each corrupted sample.

VTubers have reached their inevitable conclusion

Should you join a VTuber agency? We break it all down - Polygon

Many still want to ‘go pro’ with a VTuber agency

Mugi says that if VTubers took cues from other content creators and explored options like lore analysis videos or short-form reviews, the scene wouldn’t be as stagnant. And like other VTubers, Mugi has dreams of going corporate. Already relatively successful, having created her own storefront that hosts collaborations and merchandise featuring other VTubers and artists, she has auditioned for several major agencies. She says that one agency asked if she would close down her business if she passed the interview phase and became one of its talents.

The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned

https://news.artnet.com/opinion/devon-rodriguez-parasocial-aesthetics-2380960

But the spirit of the article is clearly, if you read it, the exact opposite of what Rodriguez seems to think it is: I’m arguing that traditional art circles should take the phenomenon seriously, and think through what is really going on with this kind of art career. Rodriguez has a lot of cultural clout—but the fact is that most people who go to museums and galleries or who regularly read about art haven’t heard of him.

Pity the Landlord

Pity the Landlord | Charlie Dulik

Landlords big and small have cast themselves as victims of a tenant-led assault on their right to profit.

… landlords, especially the smaller ones, have begun repurposing the identitarian language of systemic oppression in a relentless public campaign against rent regulation and eviction protections.

And they’ve been successful: for four straight years, tenant-backed bills have failed to reach a floor vote in the state legislature; the state’s pandemic era eviction moratorium was abruptly scuttled; landlord groups have launched bold new campaigns to circumvent rent regulations. The president of the RSA, the largest of the state’s landlord organizations, has called the effort “one of the most robust public relations campaigns in the history of [the New York real estate] industry.”

Amiga ASCII art

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/amiga-ascii-art/

In my thesis, I study Amiga ASCII text art. Amiga ASCII is a form of text art where the composition of letter characters set in the Amiga computer's font forms a two-dimensional representation or image. The Amiga scene is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that was popular in the 1990s. At its core are the logos and other visual materials created for BBS systems and the competitive rivalry among artists who create text art over their image-making prowess.

I delve into the creation of Amiga ASCII art and use it as a method to develop my visual expression. I define text art as one style of visual art, which includes ASCII art and its sub-genres, and I briefly describe the history of text art and ASCII art and the subculture associated with it. In my thesis, I focus especially on Amiga ASCII text art and create a collection of images from my experiments with this image-making method.

Note from 2023:

This is my BA thesis I wrote in 2015. The original is in Finnish, but I finally managed to translate it to English.

This thesis is just a bachelors thesis, so it's far from being comprehensive. But as far as I know, it's still the only study of Amiga ASCII art. I have included some comments here and there from my 2023 perspective where I thought it needed them.

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My pal Doug’s studio Die Gute Fabrik just released their newest game, Saltsea Chronicles. It’s a narrative storytelling game set in an antediluvian future-past and it is charming as hell. I am but a few hours into it and really, really enjoying it. Highly recommend.

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Two things:

• A new Fun City last Friday! The gang attempts to best their strongest foe yet after their ship [is] crashed into a houseboat multiple miles off the coat of Newport, Rhode Island. They. are. struggling. More than one of them ends up in very dire straights.

  

• Mentioned also at the top of this post: I have minted a second mailing list, which you can sign up for here. This list is for updates on my work only. Less often than the updates you get here (in theory, lol), but with a little more detail, and none of this other stuff. Some large-ish updates coming in the next week or so, including details on This New Show I’ve Starting Putting Together, and some fun live and in person Art Stuff™ around the city this fall.

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That’s what I got for you! I hope you liked it, because there’s a bunch more where that came from on the way. And if you did, consider tellin’ your pals about this here little mailing list:

Share 📡 by Mike Rugnetta