Twitter is the land of the dead. In this social networking microcosm the living, real human content generators; and the dead, automated bots/marketeers/spammers; share a peaceful coexistence.
Every day my account gains new spam followers and loses a few real people. Gradually the human agents of my readership are being replaced by automata, until one day soon I will be left babbling to a disinterested audience of the inert, passive and/or robotic, shuffling along behind me like Romero zombies [*].
Might this be the ultimate destiny of Twitter? Will there come a point where my following is entirely automata? Might it eventually devolve into a closed memetic feedback loop in which uncomprehending bots blindly retweet auto-generated content at each other at high speed, while the humans are all off partying on the moon.
Some days it feels like this has already happened.
Rudy Rucker, my favourite mathematician (we all have a favourite mathematician don’t we), has a concept he calls “the lifebox“. I’ve written about it before. He foresees a future where the dead live on through the data they have left behind. The content (text, audio, video etc…) they have generated during their lifetimes, bundled with some intelligent search software, could create a type of queryable data-entity, a lifebox.
In this scenario our descendants will be able to converse with their long departed relatives, in much the same way as they interact with the living, through electronic channels. The lifebox software would be able not only to return, but also extrapolate, meaningful responses to queries. In short, you could ask your dead great-grandmother a question and, even if she had not left record of her thoughts on that topic, the kind of response one might expect from her could be generated.
It is autobiography as a living construct. Our grandchildren will be able to enjoy the same quality of relationship with the dead as you might do now with your warm bodied FaceBook/Twitter chums. And as the sophistication of semantic tools develop, the lifebox could become capable of creating fresh content too, writing new blog posts, or copy-pasting together video messages. It is a much more feasible form of immortality than Walt Disney ever invested in.
Toying with this idea I decided I’d have a go at creating my own rudimentary lifebox. I was going to build it in Flash, just a basic text muncher that trawled my online writings, matched any cultural references from a dictionary, replaced that text with the trending topics of the day, then tweeted what it had generated. This way I would have a zenbullbot that could rant on the state of the world, without me having to do the hard work of getting grumpy about it myself.
Ok, so this undead clone of me (follow him here) may not be as coherent or relevant as the flesh version (a belief I’m clinging to very tightly). But it sure sounds like the kind of shite I come out with.
Having just finished writing a book on the subject of generative art, which might be said to go some way toward devaluing human practitioners of the abstract visual arts, you might dismiss The Late Mr Bullets as a piss-poor attempt to do similar for the written word. But no, there is less allowance for abstraction with text, which is why the randomness of dedbullets betrays his inhumanity. Shardcore’s experiments along these lines are interesting though, see also his Word of God (mashing up the King James Bible, The Koran and the writings of L Ron Hubbard) or the Fortune Cats (who impart wisdom upon anyone who asks a question of them).
No, this is not a foray into generative text, this is more than that. Today I have done nothing short of achieving IMMORTALITY. For as long as shard’s server is around to run the Perl script, dedbullets will be talking to his bot (and human) followers on a social network somewhere. He’s alive I tell ya. ALLLIIIIVE!
* This, presumably, is what it feels like to be a presenter on Channel 5.
MC Escher’s Relativity gloriously rendered in Lego by Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu. Full size version here. Read the ‘making of..’ here (they made “widespread use of SNOT – Studs Not On Top – techniques” apparently.)
I have to confess I have only ever seen one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. I say this not out of snobbery, but in admission of what a poorly researched knee-jerk rant this post is going to be. The only reason I made the effort to endure an hour of this insanely popular shitefest was Chris TT’s awesome appraisal in his Morning Star column, which gets right to the nub of what the program is about; power games and homogenising public opinion.
“It is a parallel to the corporatist vision of the owner not just possessing everything but possessing everyone’s values too and overseeing what is regarded as acceptable.”
While BGT may appear to be new nadir of prole patronisation as entertainment, I have to say I have seen worse. Probably the ugliest example I can recall was ITVs Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway, (”a cross between Jim’ll Fix It and Dragons Den“) where worthy causes juggled, danced, or gurned for our entertainment, then held out cloth caps to a panel of millionaires, in the hope they would toss them a few scraps. It was truly appalling, and not just because the panel included loathsome twatLord Archer (I struggle to find a kinder adjective).
But I have to take issue with Chris on one point, or more accurately two words, in his article – “The Apprentice“. This programme cannot be dumped in the same shitbox as Britain’s Got Talent, Big Brother, 10 Years Younger and American Idol. Chris has questioned how so many of his seemingly intelligent friends are devoted to this crass reality show. I am one of this faithful, so allow me to stage a defence.
The crucial difference is context. The candidates on The Apprentice are not dreamers with a desire to find an audience for their meagre talents. They are comically extreme devotees of the Capitalist dream. These people are whoring themselves for the ‘prize’ of commuting to Essex for the rest of their lives. The ‘winner’ gets a nine to five job where they can continue to kiss their hairy master’s arse FOREVER.
The contestants on Britain’s Got Talent are victims. It is truly tragic that the only platform they have found that will allow their decidedly average faces on the gogglebox is one where they are manipulated and abused in some kind of emotional pornography.
Whereas the comedy we get from the candidates on The Apprentice is purely down to their own warped ambition, misguided self-belief and unshakable faith in a capitalist road to happiness. These people are exactly the kind of freaks our society SHOULD be ostracising. They should be in the stocks to be ridiculed, as to mock them is to make their shallow capitalist ambitions less socially acceptable.
The Apprentice is a capitalist comedy, it one of the few antibodies in the face of our biggest cultural disease. It is also bloody good telly.
With sufficient distance we can now see the 1970s and 80s had a distinct look to them; soft focus, lens flares, heavy make-up, billowing whites and golden glows. But the look of our modern era is going to be defined by one thing only – bad PhotoShop. We now live in a world where over-whitened teeth and eyeballs, plastic looking skin, impossible body shapes and unconvincing compositing look out at us from every magazine cover, and have become accepted as perfectly normal.
There is a poster splattered across our town at the moment, advertising the new Uma Therman masterpiece, which I can only assume is a rare example of advertising honesty; a poster designed to be deliberately poor so as to warn the unsuspecting off from seeing what I can only assume must be a god-awful film. Here we have three people, seemingly standing very close to each other but somehow each lit completely differently. One of them appears to be made of rubber, while Uma looks like she has had new eyes painted onto her closed eyelids, like a corpse. Add two weird disembodied hands in the foreground, and … hey, it’ll do, get it to the printers. Someone got *paid* to create this y’know.
There are no shortage of horrors that can be witnessed on DVD, but the one that has the power to disturb me even 20 years after I first witnessed it is the brutal act Molly Ringwald commits upon Ally Sheedy at the end of The Breakfast Club.
I better give a spoiler warning for the ending of the film, even though if you haven’t seen it by now you probably aren’t very interested. Although it might make the film more enjoyable if you know the right time to look away. Anyway, in short; the grebo gets a make-over.
The Breakfast Club are the Rebel, the Jock, the Princess, the Basket Case and the Nerd. They all have their emotional journeys through their days detention and come out of it having learned something about themselves. All very life affirming and touchy feely so far. But Sheedy’s character, the Basket Case, the cute goth who quite reasonably has little interest in the rest of the lame stereotypes she’s stuck in a room with, has her emotional journey lead her within the viscious influence of Ms Ringwald, the Princess. Who then does THIS to her:
Clearly, the moral here is that all any confused, introverted, iconoclastic emo kid really wants is a makeover. This message; of conformity, superficiality, and a twisted sense of personal fulfillment, sends shivers down my spine.
Poor, poor Ally. Having had her individuality stripped, her face painted, and a stupid bow tied in her hair, she is then further humiliated with the sexual attentions of Emilio Estevez, The Jock (who only notices her for the first time once she’s dressed like bloody Barbie). Maybe it’s just me, but can you really see that relationship working? Was the sequel ever written, where we revisit Alison after the traumatic gang-rape by the rest of the football team?
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