“Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself.” — Snow Crash
I’m stuck on the role of FB and Twitter as virus vectors. How naive of us to think the worst parts of humanity — racism and white supremacy — would not spread more rapidly than our better natures.
Gabriele Benefico is a freelance illustrator and comic artist.
“The conglomerate’s AM 1470 in Allentown, Penn., will now feature back-to-back podcast programming. The initial podcast selections for this change include several of the flagship shows from HowStuffWorks, which iHeartMedia acquired in September 2018.”
What about commercials?
“It was followed by a massive traditional block of radio commercials: the iHeartRadio app, Bank of America, “Best Fiends” mobile game app, an air conditioning company, Outback restaurants, Capital One bank, Curious Goods (a local store), the Home Depot, a pet store, My Computer Career training program, Walgreens, NAPA Auto Care Center, Choice hotels, AARP, Progressive insurance, and the iHeartRadio app again, this time emphasizing podcasts and introducing the next podcast.”
I seem to recall this being tried back when podcasting first appeared. A San Francisco station? Not sure why I’d want to let this Allentown station pick the podcasts when I can do that myself. Maybe for people to lazy or stupid to do that? Is there an in-car angle?
“The BBC has released a brief teaser for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, giving us a first look at the series and its characters. The BBC greenlit the show for an eight-episode season back in 2015, and ordered a second season last fall. The series is set in an alternate world in which people are accompanied by manifestations of their souls, shapeshifting animals called daemons. In the first novel, The Golden Compass, a girl named Lyra Belacqua (played by Logan star Dafne Keen) travels to the arctic to search for a friend who has been kidnapped. There, she discovers that a major church has been studying a phenomenon called Dust, an elementary particle that imparts consciousness in humans, something that the organization deems heretical.”
“Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.”