Virtual Thought

So this woman’s riding the subway through New York, minding her own business, and then this guy exposes himself to her and begins masturbating. Being the 22-year-old technorati that she is, she counters what he whipped out by whipping out her camera phone and snapping some photos. This is fantastic.

And it gets better. Apparently some people recognize this guy from the Flickr photo and the coverage it starts getting and not only come forward saying this guy exposed himself to them but that he owns a restaraunt in New York and his name is Dan Hoyt.

Good job, guy.

So the way reporters see it, black people ‘loot’ while white people ‘find.’

There’s an interesting discussion that follows about whether Yahoo should have edited these captions before running them.

I’ve lately been entranced by the notion, new to me, that our society no longer operates under the aegis of capitalism—or, at least, we no longer operate under vanilla-invisible-hand-Adam-Smith style capitalism. Because we don’t have a free market the likes of which Smith wrote about and, indeed, such a free market being impossible given the realities of modern economics, we have some sort of hybridized capitalism. In talking with people smarter than me I’ve found that I should be looking at “late-era capitalism”. That term describes our current large-scale economic model. Okay then.

This Wired article has some neat things to say about what motivates capitalism—a choice between the consumer or the producer. In traditional models it is a feedback loop like in supply and demand… but, lately, given that the goal of making as much money in as short a time as possible has become the overriding law under which almost all large-scale business is run.

Which is too bad because I think that’s pretty short-sighted. If a company makes $1 billion in one year by screwing everything around it and then tanks immediately afterwards because of said screwing when it could have made $5 billion in three years by not screwing everything around it… I mean, WTF, right?

So I’m on the lookout for something that’s post-capitalist. I think a realistic, applicable post-capitalist model of economics would have to take into consideration local striations in markets. For instance, economics based on scarcity of resources don’t quite apply in the digital media: if I can reproduce one episode of one TV show a billion times with no degradation and zero manufacturing cost per episode then we should adjust our models.

I’ve heard the argument that time has become the primary scarce resource and we can adjust capitalism to reflect that and still use our old models… but I think that’s false. It’s not time that’s scarce but attention. Human attention is what is at stake.

What about peer-to-peer solutions to attention scarcity (like grassroots movements seeking volunteer synergy in petitionts and letter-writing campaigns)? Ever hear the one about how porn bots could defeat CAPTCHA by forcing free website viewers to defeat said CAPTCHA as part of the entry into a free website? That’s a combination of using supposedly scarce attention resources which are, actually, available for free. Have you seen Peekaboom? It’s a computer vision training program that uses human players who are playing a game to provide training data. Training data for computer vision programs is tedious to create… unless one dupes the audience into believing they are playing some game (no one is duped at Peekaboom... the website is very upfront). So attention is kind of scarce but relatively easy to harvest.

Where does that leave us?

In the book The Best American Science and Nature Writing I was reading an interesting article about the total lack of actual fact from the Pentateuch in the Bible from an archaeological standpoint: it turns out that Abraham might not have been a real person, that the Israelites weren’t thrown out and didn’t come back, that Solomon and David weren’t fantastic kings who ruled the Fertile Crescent but were, more likely, chieftans who ruled the nearest few hills… and on and on. You get the picture here.

I am disturbed that we are having to prove in scientific literature that our religious writings (in this case, the Torah/Bible/Quran) are not the literal truth. Get a grip. These are metaphors about how we should strive to behave better towards each other—they are not historical documents depicting necessarily real people and the daily events of their lives. I believe that Jesus and Moses and Abraham and Mohammed all existed… but did their respective holy books capture the minutiae of their lives? Heck, did those holy scriptures capture even the essence of their lives?

Probably not.

To veer off in a more historical direction… when I was 14 I thought I was in love with this girl. We were telling each other everything, having all night conversations, that kind of thing. We started talking about faith. She was a Born Again Christian; I’m a lapsed Catholic with an orthogonal spiritual leaning. We had some clashes. Right about the time we started having the “What about the dinosaurs/God is testing us/What about evolution/No no that’s just a theory” I realized that I was doomed to never be able to fully love this girl as she was clearly mentally disturbed. I was deeply shaken and scared. How could someone who was so intelligent believe this? I just couldn’t understand it.

I am, by turns, less scared of fundamentalism and more scared of it now. Less scared because I believe that I can feel a measure of sympathy for people who have different spiritual beliefs that can lead them contrary to everyone around them while they know, know, that they are right. I’m more scared these days because I can feel a measure of empathy for these people and know that someone who has the conviction of their beliefs to fully fly in the face of established fact and common sense is someone that I do not want too close to me.

God of War is hands-down one of the best video games I’ve ever played. Beautifully brutal, endlessly gory, with gameplay that is seamless (no loading screens!) and a combat system that just barely keeps it from being a no-brainer button masher… this game has it all. It even has a more-than-slightly engrossing storyline: the character of Kratos is well-conceived and pretty well executed within the confines of the game itself through a combination of flashback movies (nothing new), foreshadowing (very nice to see in a video game), and even some in-game mechanics.

The production designer deserves a big pat on the back, too: the game immediately creates this lush, decadent feel of Ancient Greece. Except for one easily overlooked flaw (Roman Legionnaires in Ancient Greece?) the games mood and theme are presented wonderfully.

Nice job, guys.

Okay, that was weird. For a few days there my sites were all down… I’m guessing because of database unavailability, which really blows. Anyway.