There are legitimate open questions: should we maximize minimum happiness? Should we maximize mean, or median, or total happiness? But, no existing social system optimizes for any of these metrics or any combination of them.
In an equitable society, social problems are a matter of individual choice. We don’t live in such a society, and never have. If we want to, we should be honest about this. Pretending to have achieved equity is a good way to amplify shitty power relations.
We’re really bad at being dispassionate about non-social technologies, but even worse about social technologies (by which I mean: political systems, power relations).
Social structure is a technology, but it’s one that most self-identified techies are ill-equipped to debug, mainly due to bigotry against properly studying it.
People make the obvious comparison to Blade Runner, but seeing as how Blade Runner is a famously shallow & aesthetically-focused adaptation that strips the social & political elements from its source, Altered Carbon comes out the winner here
I feel like Netflix’s adaptation did a pretty good job of keeping that social & political focus, and even frontloading it a little bit by injecting backstory from the second and third books.
The second and third books are mostly about the political & social ramifications of resleeving technology over centuries. That is, after all, the point of the series.
The first book in the Altered Carbon series hews closer to standard hardboiled structure & is less ‘about’ resleeving but is very much about social inequality at scale.
I keep hearing the awful take that Altered Carbon is shallow aesthetic-centric cyberpunk devoid of social commentary. Did these people rush to skim the book when they heard about the TV show or something?
The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland https://dynamicland.org/research-notes/social-dynamics-of-programming-together/
Bad idea of the day: Adversarial social graphs. 99% similar to your actual graph, but friending one guy makes Facebook think you’re actually Al Gore.
AR MMORPG overlays as a tool of social policy and peacekeeping, giving everybody their own reality so that consensus reality is fought over less
How extreme rituals forge intense social bonds | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-extreme-rituals-forge-intense-social-bonds
Progress:↵1. spambots↵2. thirst bots, propaganda bots↵3. bots able to hold actual conversation, surrogate friends↵4. bots better than humans, none of the drama but all of the relationship↵5. social-network-in-a-box, a complete circle of friends for those done with the real world
@leveck@leveck.us I really want to use mastodon, but I just can’t seem to come up with a use case for me. Guess I don’t really do much Social Media type stuff
Who Filters Your News? Why we built gobo.social | … My heart’s in Accra http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/11/16/who-filters-your-news-why-we-built-gobo-social/
How socialism helped to seed the landscape of modern religion | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/how-socialism-helped-to-seed-the-landscape-of-modern-religion
Social Media Experts Say the Russian Trolls Suck at Facebook - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43n4pn/were-the-facebook-russian-ads-effective-good
Social network tarot cards / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2017/11/04/social-network-tarot-cards.html
Why Is the U.S. So Susceptible to Social-Media Distortion? | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-is-the-us-so-susceptible-to-social-media-distortion
Neanderthals With Disabilities Survived Through Social Support https://gizmodo.com/neanderthals-with-disabilities-survived-through-social-1819801216
How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qv34zb/how-i-socially-engineer-myself-into-high-security-facilities
"Key to the City: Writing Code to Induce Social Change" by Jurnell Cockhren - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Z0LGeQCWU
social networks are among the few spiders known for weaving their web out of their victims instead of silk
wear android fashion and a fake identification plate so that humans ignore you and don’t expect emotions and social participation #lifehack
Not drinking or driving, teens increasingly put off traditional markers of adulthood - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/neither-drinking-nor-driving-more-teens-are-putting-off-traditional-markers-of-adulthood/2017/09/18/b46027a0-93f1-11e7-8754-d478688d23b4_story.html
Why the Media Refuses to Understand Antifa - Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/social-justice/understanding-antifa?curator=MediaREDEF
Unpopular ideas about social norms – Julia Galef https://juliagalef.com/2017/08/23/unpopular-ideas-about-social-norms/
an AR overlay that indicates where it’s socially acceptable for your eyes to be
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News - MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608561/first-evidence-that-social-bots-play-a-major-role-in-spreading-fake-news/
Why does U2 irk so many people? A look at their struggle for pop hits and social justice | America Magazine https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/07/17/why-does-u2-irk-so-many-people-look-their-struggle-pop-hits-and-social?curator=MusicREDEF
The Splintered Mind: The Social-Role Defense of Robot Rights https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-social-role-defense-of-robot-rights.html
Inside the extreme Facebook fandom for old rental VHS tapes http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2017/07/inside-extreme-facebook-fandom-old-rental-vhs-tapes
When you design a biosphere and carefully nerf all the obvious paths to superintelligence, but some social mammals discover it anyway
social network that lets you search users by emotional state so that you can binge on certain emotions in times of need
idea addressed networking, a paradigm under which packets reach their destinations through social network shares and word-of-mouth
dunbar number but for number of social networks and circles of friends to keep track of
I recently tried to write a command like client to GNU social, but after reading the specs on ActivityStreams, Webfinger, PubsubHubbub and Salmon i soon lost interest… :)
twtxt: The only social network where every new user starts by writing it’s own client.
Hard to believe
If you hear or read this somewhere else — whether on social media, or via your clueless uncle Olaf — you will find it hard, if not impossible, to believe. Now, finding it on Reuters is a different story.
In his first call as president with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump denounced a treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployment of nuclear warheads as a bad deal for the United States, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official with knowledge of the call.
… ⌘ Read more
The social network does not love you, or hate you. But you are made of tasty attention that it can use to grow.
He has a few million social media followers and an impressive dakimakura collection he printed, mostly posts poems and holos of moonscapes.
Cats are a social parasite co-opting human reproduction. For our future’s sake, we must steal their niche and evolve catgirls and catboys.
Phase 2: Virtual consensus reality diversification - ideologies become completely irreconcilable as populous “social” realities hard-diverge
it’s twitter’s frontpage vs everything that happens on it; the “walls” of any social site are plastered with profiles, virtual skins
“the egregore layer”, “memespace”, “social norms”, to name some
The whole sprawl is a music box, a mechanism performing an esoteric social symphony. Its gears will take you along and you won’t know it.
@kas@enotty.dk, @mian@miangraham.com twxt: The only social network where you’re welcomed personally.
China’s two child policy
This one is worth documenting, as it doesn’t happen every day. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t happened for over three decades.
“It is the latest twist in the most ambitious and ruthless social-engineering program ever undertaken by a modern state: Beijing announced Thursday that the Chinese Communist Party will officially abandon it … ⌘ Read more