Posts Tagged ‘online’
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”*…
In his invaluable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick unpacks the full– and forlorn— story of the online travails of Kate Middleton (AKA Catherine, the Princess of Wales) and considers its implications…
… As Charlie Warzel wrote, “It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.” But this also wasn’t a simple case of the unruly masses being Bad Online.
Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you’re looking for someone to blame all of this on, it’s clearly Kate’s press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn’t. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit.
But this is also just how our various institutions work — or more accurately do not work — now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we’d have to smash the whole thing and I don’t think that’s going to happen. So let’s hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward…
Those of us in post-colonial North America, might ponder the implications of this sad tale for matters closer to home– public health, meme stocks, and perhaps especially our looming elections…
The saga of #WhereIsKate: “How we got here,” from @broderick.
* Eleanor Roosevelt
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As we lean back and think, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.”
“If you want the truth — I know I presume — you must look into the technology of these matters”*…
The estimable Alan Jacobs on why we’re all going nuts online…
On January 6, 2021, Samuel Camargo posted a video on Instagram showing him struggling to break through a police barrier to get into the U.S. Capitol building. The next day he wrote on Facebook: “I’m sorry to all the people I’ve disappointed as this is not who I am nor what I stand for.”
A month after the riot, Jacob Chansley, the man widely known as the QAnon Shaman, wrote a letter from his jail cell in Virginia asking Americans to “be patient with me and other peaceful people who, like me, are having a very difficult time piecing together all that happened to us, around us, and by us.”
“This is not who I am,” “all that happened … by us” — it is commonplace to hear such statements as mere evasions of responsibility, and often they are. But what if they reflect genuine puzzlement, genuine difficulty understanding one’s behavior or even seeing it as one’s own, a genuine feeling of being driven, compelled, by something other than one’s own will?…
There follows a consideration of Augustine, Foucault, Pynchon, Paul, Dostoevsky, Zadie Smith, Dawkins, Auden, Joesph Heller, and others, on the topic of why we succumb to what Augustine called curiositas: “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology,” from @ayjay in @tnajournal. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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As we examine exorcism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1986 that Geraldo Rivera opened “Al Capone’s Vault”…
Notorious and “most wanted” gangster, Al Capone, began his life of crime in Chicago in 1919 and had his headquarters set up at the Lexington Hotel until his arrest in 1931. Years later, renovations were being made at the hotel when a team of workers discovered a shooting-range and series of connected tunnels that led to taverns and brothels making for an easy escape should there be a police raid. Rumors were spread that Capone had a secret vault hidden under the hotel as well. In 1985, news reporter Geraldo Rivera had been fired from ABC after he criticized the network for canceling his report made about an alleged relationship between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. It seemed like a good time for Rivera to scoop a new story to repair his reputation. It was on this day in 1986 that his live, two-hour, syndicated TV special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault aired. After lots of backstory, the time finally came to reveal what was in that vault. It turned out to be empty. After the show, Rivera was quoted as saying “Seems like we struck out.”
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“There’s a compounding and unraveling chaos that is perpetually in motion in the Dark Web’s toxic underbelly”*…
CIRCL, Luxembourg’s computer security incident response team, has published a dataset of 37,500 .onion website screenshots, a subset of which have been categorized by topic (e.g., “drugs-narcotics”, “extremism”, “finance”) and/or purpose (e.g., “forum”, “file-sharing”, “scam”)
Via Jeremy Singer-Vine’s fascinating Data is Plural.
[For more background see “WTF is Dark Web?,” whence the image above]
* J
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As we grab our flashlights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that CompuServe launched the first consumer-oriented online information service, which they called MicroNET (and marketed via Radio Shack)– the first time a consumer had access to services such as e-mail.
The service was not initially favored internally within the business-oriented CompuServe, but as the service became a hit, they renamed it CompuServe Information Service, or CIS. By the mid-1980’s CompuServe was the largest consumer information service in the world and half their revenue came from CIS.
In 1989 CompuServe connected its proprietary e-mail system to the Internet e-mail system, making it one of the first commercial Internet services. But CompuServe did not compete well with America On-Line or independent Internet Service Providers in the 1990’s and rapidly lost its dominant market position.
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