Month: December 2017

Everybody’s trundling out their Best of Lists. Here’s some of my favorites which are not the same ol’ same ol’.

Best Albums of 2017 from Vinyl Factory: Jumpin’ cats, I own none of these albums, have heard of about three, and now just want to explore all. Recommended by Jon Crow. Jazz seems to be making a comeback in the UK.

52 Things I Learned in 2017: Tom Whitwell of Fluxx compiles this list every year of tech advancements, strange data, business stories, and general oddness. I read about very few of these items over the year…how am I missing out?

Here’s a similar science-based list over at the Irish Times, including the fact that bees can count to four and humans are still evolving, despite the current state of the GOP.

https://vimeo.com/245670075
Best Films of 2017: David Ehlich should be hired by the Oscars, if only these films would all be up for an Oscar. Another list that made me realize I barely went out to see films this year.

Birth.Movies.Death have several lists up this year, and though they do tend towards the bro-ness and StarWarsfapfapfapdom side of film fandom, they have often recommended some gems. Here’s some Underrated Films of 2017. I also liked Siddhant’s Top 20.

Film Comment has its own list of Best Films of 2017.

And if that’s too much 2017, here’s the Best Films of 1927.

 

Some more long reads from the last week:

A popular post but worth repeating/reposting: Ted Chiang‘s takedown of Silicon Valley’s concerns over AI, pointing out that much of their dystopian fears are actually projections of their own rapacious late capitalism. A good quick read, but here’s my takeaway quote:

It’d be tempting to say that fearmongering about superintelligent AI is a deliberate ploy by tech behemoths like Google and Facebook to distract us from what they themselves are doing, which is selling their users’ data to advertisers. If you doubt that’s their goal, ask yourself, why doesn’t Facebook offer a paid version that’s ad free and collects no private information? Most of the apps on your smartphone are available in premium versions that remove the ads; if those developers can manage it, why can’t Facebook? Because Facebook doesn’t want to. Its goal as a company is not to connect you to your friends, it’s to show you ads while making you believe that it’s doing you a favor because the ads are targeted.

(Again, and I wish I could find it, but I think about that essay that pointed out that Musk/Zuckerberg aren’t these godlike geniuses, they’re robber barons.) This also ties into my thoughts about how modern tech/apps/startups have separated their user-side uses from the way they make profits.

Meanwhile, Umair Haque’s essay “What Do You Call a World That Can’t Learn from Itself” says something I’ve been harping on about for ages: America has stopped dreaming of a better future and also ignores the advances in other countries (whereas we used to steal ideas left and right).

Everything I consume in the States is of a vastly, abysmally lower quality. Every single thing. The food, the media, little things like fashion, art, public spaces, the emotional context, the work environment, and life in general make me less sane, happy, alive. I feel a little depressed, insecure, precarious, anxious, worried, angry — just like most Americans do these day. So my quality of life — despite all my privileges — is much worse in America than it is anywhere else in the rich world. Do you feel that I exaggerate unfairly?

Finally, as the corrupt tool Ajit Pai ruins Net Neutrality, articles like this one have been popping up:

Motherboard & VICE Are Building a Community Internet Network It reads like a call to arms:

In order to preserve net neutrality and the free and open internet, we must end our reliance on monopolistic corporations and build something fundamentally different: internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it.

And that’s what I’ve been thinking about this week (apart from Thomas Fire-anxiety.)

(image taken Dec. 17 at the Ace Hotel Palm Springs)

Some longform articles I read this week.

I love this story of the guy who fooled TripAdvisor into thinking his garden shed was a super-exclusive London restaurant. When it becomes #1 and he is found out, he has only one option: embrace the false reality.

But how? I’ve never even had more than three people round at once, let alone provided dinner and drinks for 20. There’s only one way to do it: recreating the exact location people have been describing in reviews for the past six months.

My social media/news diet has reduced anxiety somewhat. So essays like this from Clive Thompson help encapsulate why this is a good thing. It introduced me to media theorist (and Canadian cultural nationalist) Harold Innis as well. He’s long gone, but what he saw in newspapers have become hypermetabolized in the info-stream of Twitter, which keeps us always refreshing the feed, afraid to miss something new. Says Thompson:

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

This was a useful and in-depth video essay from Vox on the history of Technicolor:

This promo for Tim O’Reilly’s book WTF? looks at separating what is actually useful about social media and/or an app from any evil that its company does. Could we separate what Uber does for us (helpful improvement on catching a cab) from Uber itself (shitty, anti-worker techbro asshats)? I’ve been thinking about that recently.

The progressive insistence that the baby is inseparable from the bathwater works to the favor of big business and big tech. If technology’s critics insist that you have to choose between Facebook and surveillance and manipulation, they affirm Facebook’s own position. But if critics insist that Facebook has deliberately, cynically married something wonderful with something terrible, they invite people to join their case and fight for a good Facebook, rather than demanding a kind of antitech hairshirt that insists that you have to give up, not demand better.

Furthermore, does being a pro-environment progressive necessarily mean trying to live in some magical pre-industrial age? Or should we seize the means of production (technology-wise) and actually make the world a better place? This promo for Leigh Phillips’s Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff is all in on the latter and is a straight-up Marxist to boot.

The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

The two minds behind “Every Frame a Painting”–one of the pioneering film studies video essayists, and who videos on Edgar Wright and Jackie Chan get shown in my film classes every semester–have called it quits. Instead of just saying goodbye, they reveal their working methods and show exactly how much work goes into one of their five minute gems.

Take aways: On YouTube style is more important that substance, but in a good way

Making it a channel meant creating a uniform tone and style, something that Tony initially resisted. But I argued that a person who watched one video would be more likely to come back and watch another if there was a uniform style — even if they weren’t interested in that specific topic.
This meant we could get away with talking about less-known subjects and plenty of people would still watch because the format was the same. To his credit, Tony now admits I was right. (Tony’s note: “I refuse to admit this”).

YouTube has so many algorithms to stop copyright material from being uploaded that they style developed from fooling the algorithm:

Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’ films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID.

The whole essay is full of goodies, so check it.

Laurie Penny has a freakin’ gangbusters essay over at LongReads.com which puts the #metoo movement in context with the increasingly awfulness of neoliberalism. Just like women are harrassed and worse without consent, so are we all exploited without consent. I’ve been thinking about this essay all week.

But that’s a hard truth to hang on to. Most people don’t want to know how much freer they might be if they had the energy and audacity to want it. And so we lie to ourselves and allow ourselves to be lied to. We watch the despots warming their tiny grasping hands around the trash fire of civil society, we look at the real extent of rape and abuse being revealed all around us and some of us still try to believe that we somehow choose this. Because the alternative is even worse. The alternative, awful truth is that it doesn’t matter what the vast majority of us choose. That none of the choices on offer are enough to protect us, or our families, or our communities from violence, that the important choices were never ours to begin with, that we are not living in an age of consent.

Kottke.org reported on Google’s AI machine not only learning chess in four hours but also beating the world’s top chess engine right afterwards. Fascinating read, but here’s my favorite takeaway quote:

I’ve long said that Google’s final fate will be to evolve into a hedge fund.

Indeed, what would happen if all these AI machines looked at the global market? Would it see inequality or equality as the best state?

Our friends have a Christmas party tradition: a themed ornament party. This year it was “Gold” and the above ornament is one of two I made that I feel sums up 2017: a big golden pile of poo, as (probably) emoji-tweeted by the #president.

Forgive the rudimentary nature of the piece, I only get to play with Sculpey clay on days like these. I should have another go soon, anyway. It’s good to create art in three-dimensions if you’re mostly used to two.

A former student of mine takes to Facebook often and posts these incredible little vignettes of life from the rough part of the city where he currently works and I assume lives. Through some sort of Lynchian magnetism, he seems to attract some of the most off-kilter characters who interact with him in all sorts of odd ways. Some stories are shaggy dogs, full of little humorous details. Others are transcribed dialogues. All burst off the page with crazed life.

So after reading a recent one I reached out.

To proselytize a little bit, I said, stop giving your art to Facebook and put it on your own (future) site. Your stories are hilarious and droll and need to be your own. Seriously consider owning your art. Soon enough at the end of a year or so, you will have a great book of some kind. And it’s the same amount of effort you put into taking your art and throwing it into the raging stream that is social media. (Which, as I saw, was not a lot of effort. Precisely because he wasn’t thinking what he was doing was “important.”)

Maybe he will turn this into a book. (I hope so!) Indeed, he admitted that he’s wanted to put out a book for some time. It was a dream project, he said.

I think, I replied, you already have that book.

(image: Foggy Night, San Francisco (1946) by Fred Lyon)