Stanford has put up a video of a talk on why you should Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Humanities Ph.D.. The talk is by Dr. Damon Horowitz who did just that. He quit doing AI and got a Ph.D. in philosophy. He argues that it has given him perspective on what AI can and can’t do, in addition to helping him think about his life and some of the things that make him uncomfortable about the tech world. It isn’t a ground breaking talk, but it is delivered with humour and addresses technology folk where it matters. Are you really that happy with your job and the hype around what you do?
In response to the US president, Wolfenstein’s marketing used his own words to market the game: “Make America Nazi Free Again”, “There is only one side”, “These are not ‘fine people’”, and so on. Many of his supporters have taken exception to this, decrying the notion that Nazis support the current occupant of the Oval Office. Unfortunately, the fact that white supremacists and actual Nazis support Trump and march openly in America doesn’t help their claims.
The Guardian and others have stories about how the marketing of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has angered Trump supporters: Nazis as the bad guys in videogames? How is that controversial? The issue is partly how Wolfenstein adapted Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” Alt-Right gamers would like games to not be political, but they always have been; it’s just that certain demographics weren’t bothered by the politics before.
It is also worth noting the reference in the game title to the poem by Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty titled The New Colossus. I knew the famous line about “Give me your tired, your poor …”, but not the whole poem that starts:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. …
The larger story is how the gamergate community began to affiliate with the alt-right. Motherboard has a story about the shift in the r/KotakuInAction (KiA) subreddit.
So where does that leave Gamergate? Some people within the community are embracing the alt-right, others are peeling off in disgust, and most, it seems, continue to deny the link vehemently while paradoxically allowing that ideology to supplant Gamergate’s identity.
Cross, who even some Gamergaters would now agree was right about the nature of the movement from the very beginning, thinks that it’s going to be completely absorbed by the greater alt-right, and that this process has already begun with KiA essentially becoming a sub forum of r/The_Donald. The standard around which Gamergate organized—fighting for video games—is no longer the driving force behind KiA.
The Atlantic has a good article on What Facebook Did to American Democracy by Alexis C. Madrigal (Oct. 12, 2017). What is interesting is how we assumed that the net and social media could affect things and that is would naturally benefit the left.
The research showed that a small design change by Facebook could have electoral repercussions, especially with America’s electoral-college format in which a few hotly contested states have a disproportionate impact on the national outcome. And the pro-liberal effect it implied became enshrined as an axiom of how campaign staffers, reporters, and academics viewed social media.
The story of networked politics seems to be that of tactics being developed by the left and promoted as democratizing and inclusive that are then reused by the right. It is also the story of how Facebook decided to own news and fake news. They created filter bubbles so that none of knew what the other was thinking.
From this motley chorus of suburban parents, journalists, tech leaders, and conservative intellectuals, Yiannopoulos’s function within Breitbart and his value to Bannon becomes clear. He was a powerful magnet, able to attract the cultural resentment of an enormously diverse coalition and process it into an urgent narrative about the way liberals imperiled America. It was no wonder Bannon wanted to groom Yiannopoulos for media infamy: The bigger the magnet got, the more ammunition it attracted.
Many of those who wrote Milo seem to be disgruntled people who feel oppressed by the “political correctness” of their situation, whether in a tech company or entertainment business. They email Milo to vent or pass tips or just get sympathy.
