GITS Laughing Man in Real Life
The real lesson of the GITS Laughing Man for the digital age is not about myth or becoming a folk hero. Anti-corpo is just the surface level It is about copycats and the viral spread of memes. Not all memes succeed in going viral. But Once everyone (even foreign adversaries manufacturing outrage) amplifies a meme, it takes on a life of its own, to become a powerful force to shape opinion and distort truth. Agents spam memetic messaging to gain acceptance and followers, not to spread truth. ...Jone's Dilemma
1-48. This principle is named after Reginald Victor Jones, a British professor heavily involved in solving science and technology intelligence challenges. In this deception, the target receives information through multiple means and methods, from many angles, throughout an operational environment. Deception generally becomes more difficult as the number of conduits available to the deception target to confirm the real situation increases. However, the greater the number of conduits that are d...Multiple Forms of Surprise
1-46. A strong correlation exists between deception and surprise. The more forms of surprise built into the deception plan, the more likely it will overwhelm the target. These forms of surprise include size, activity, location, unit, time, equipment, intent, and style. One effect of surprise is the cry-wolf syndrome in which repeated false alarms have the potential to desensitize an enemy. A pattern of behavior lulls an opponent into a sense of normal behavior to allow a friendly action to oc...There were issues with this book, but I appreciate how the Critical Theory aspects of it serve as a sort of "red pill" to break us out of our complacent acceptance of the world--specifically in video games. Many reviews complain about the erudite verbiage, but all Critical Theory makes use of newly-invented words in order to circumvent our preconceptions about the social constructs that rule our lives. I appreciated the concept of the "allegorithm" of how the programming of games is used to define a world, the questioning of "play" in games when really many games are actually work, criticizing the concept of "flow" and calling it "non-contemplation," and the idea that the best gamers are merely the ones who most internalize the algorithms. This book is not for everyone. It is dense and obtuse, but also highly effective and will be very enjoyable for the right readers.
Boredom Always Returns
Boredom can be displaced only so far. Even the most deluded of gamers can eventually realize that their strivings have no purpose, that all they have achieved is a hollow trophy, the delusion of value, a meaningless rank built on an arbitrary number. Boredom always returns. Giacomo Leopardi: “The uniformity of pleasure without purpose inevitably produces boredom.” The very action of overcoming boredom reproduces it, when gamer and game reach some impasse. There is always a limit. In games...Topic, Topology, and Topography in Critical Theory
In practice, critical theorists use these concepts to: Topic: Identify and critique the central themes and issues in various discourses, questioning what is considered important or relevant and why. Topology: Analyze the networks and relationships within social structures to reveal how power and influence are distributed and maintained. Topography: Map and describe the socio-cultural landscape to expose the underlying forces that shape it, often highlighting issues of power, inequality, a...Anthropocene Traps
The concept of evolutionary traps has been used almost exclusively for studying how non-human species respond to cues in anthropogenic environments [24–34]. Key examples include artificial human lights attracting insects, island species responding naively to the presence of introduced predators, and seabirds not being able to discriminate between the cues of marine plankton and marine plastics [34–36] (figure 1a). In the context of humans, evolutionary mismatch is a much more fr...When Isolation and Disconnection are Desirable
In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?†He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You t...Three Guidelines and Eight Stages
I.A The Three Guidelines The Dao of Great Learning lies in making bright virtue brilliant; in making the people new; in coming to rest at the limit of the good. Only after wisdom comes to rest does one possess certainty; only after one possesses certainty can one become tranquil; only after one becomes tranquil can one become secure; only after one becomes secure can one contemplate alternatives; only after one can contemplate alternatives can one comprehend. Affairs have their roots and bra...Identifying AI Online
Before you continue, pause and consider: How would you prove you're not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can't? 1. Triangulate objective reality [...] This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive. Language models can decently mim...There are additional tactics for differentiating ourselves from AIs, but the first two were the most interesting to me.