Isn't It Ironic?

The Field of Dreams game, played in the iconic ball field in the middle of the Iowa corn, featured advertising on the outfield walls for Fanduel Sports and BetMGM.

Which, I mean... were they trying to torment Shoeless Joe's ghost, or what?

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Tab Clearing...

• Some Substackers are big mad about the automated AI flag.


• A student wrote a piece for his California high school newspaper looking into local connections in the Epstein Files. Some people got big mad.


• I will henceforth be referring to CVS as "shampoo jail". I hope it makes them big mad.

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Life in the Panopticon...

Not only is your LG television spying on you, your LG computer monitor may be installing bloatware on your system behind your back...

LG's Smart TV features being overly intrusive is common among smart TVs, but LG's newer UltraGear computer monitors are now also taking liberties with user privacy and security.

On some Windows systems, connecting a new LG monitor will spur Windows Update to download drivers and the LG Monitor App Installer, which will then display pop-up ads for other LG applications or even McAfee antivirus software. This is disappointing news to say the least, but fortunately my LG UltraGear 27GL850-B doesn't seem to be impacted.

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Antisocial Media

Not only is Meta the company itself ontologically evil, but they also push new frontiers in Awful User Experience and Hostile Interface Design.

And when I say "ontologically evil", I am not being flippant or hyperbolic.

Never used Threads, stopped updating Instagram when the schoolgirl scandal broke, deleted the apps from all my devices... but I more or less have to keep at least a token toehold on FB and it grates me.

The single thing I hate most on the entire internet now is Facebook automatically sending me to my Feed if I leave a browser tab open to a post for too long.

I never use the feed. The feed is ass cancer. It is the throbbing heart of the terrible user experience on FB.

Manic Pixel Dream Girl...

That twenty-something blonde EMT chick who's a big MAGA fan and who runs an OnlyFans account on the side that you follow?

She's actually a dude who's a med student in northern India running a side hustle looking to build up enough cash to emigrate.

This is just the latest version of the Macedonian Social Media Political Rage Bait Hustle.

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QotD: Ticktockification Edition...

In a post on the lingering death of some of the bigger social media sites, I came across this deliciously laugh-out-loud paragraph:

"For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms)."

Remember that a social media site's entire business model is based on keeping you engaged on their site, not sending you away to follow links to blog posts or magazine articles. Every outgoing link you post on, say, Facebook lowers your hidden internal "social credit score" and causes your posts to be de-prioritized in other people's feeds, even if they specifically follow you because they want to see your stuff.

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Tab Clearing...

• Some people have more of a right to privacy than others.


• Firefly animated series in development.


• Is Rationalism a religion?

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Epistemic Crackup

The universality of always-on broadband internet connections in our pockets really kicked off an experiment in Epistemological Choose Your Own Adventure and, friends, it's not going swimmingly.

The proliferation of AI-generated imagery and video has absolutely turbocharged it. Social media was awash by yesterday afternoon in AI videos of varying quality claiming to show a burning USS Abraham Lincoln sinking. (You know, the one the Houthis claimed they sank last year.)

Can't wait to run into the CVN-72 Truthers in the wild later this year who claim that the Iranians actually sank the Lincoln and the Deep State is covering it up.

Tab Clearing...

• Keeping people mad all the time in order to keep them staying tuned through the commercials to sell Trumpy Bear, commemorative coins, and dick pills has some negative side effects.


• More Epstein Files squickery. (Related: "Russiagate" and the Epstein Files are the same story.)


• Spanish Hornets operating out of Lithuania intercept Russian SU-30 over the Baltic.

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Cult of the Victim

What is it with these Right wing snowflakes and all their imaginary persecutions?

The "war on protein" is as much made-up ragebait as are the ones on Christmas or Christians.

You can’t swing a Happy Meal in this country without hitting a burger joint or a barbecue shack or a steakhouse. (And thank heavens for that.)

If there was a war on protein, then protein won a crushing, lopsided, complete victory sometime before I was born. I mean, Dr. Atkins wrote his book while we still had boots on the ground in Vietnam.

And why are they using a photo of RFK, Jr. that makes him look like the bad guy from a low-budget Saw ripoff?

WH Comms Director: "Did you get that picture of Bobby for the socials?"

Photographer: "Sure did, boss. All creepy and sinister just like you asked."

WH Comms Director: "What?"

Tab Clearing...

• The Policy Implications of Grok's 'Mass Digital Undressing Spree'


• "Venezuela has the world’s most oil: Why doesn’t it earn more from exports?": an explainer from Al Jazeera*


• Measles outbreak at creationism museum.

*The tl;dr is that not only is Venezuela's oil infrastructure decades old and dilapidated from lack of maintenance, even if you fix it, Venezuela's oil reserves are sulfur-rich sludge, what is known as "heavy sour" as opposed to the "light sweet" crude preferred for easier pumping and refining. Also, demand is not rising at old rates and we're actually in a global overproduction scenario at the moment to the tune of several million barrels.

Like a Well-Oiled Machine

Y’ever watch a whole school of fish suddenly change direction all at once? Thousands of creatures with less brainpower than a smartwatch all executing a one-eighty simultaneously with a level of precision that makes the finest human drill team look shambolic? 

Well, if a foolish consistency truly is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson famously wrote, then the right wing grifterverse has some galaxy brains indeed. What's the wildest part is that any random MAGA-on-the-street will still give you an earful about neocons and John Bolton and regime change.

My little mind was agin' it when Bush did it in Iraq in '03, and was agin' it when Obama did it in Libya in '11, and I'm still agin' it now.

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Tab Clearing...

• A handy guide for spotting AI slop animal videos on social media...and why they're bad. 


• "Why Does Generation Z Have Such A Fascination With Retro Tech?" Probably because physically owning something you paid for must hit like a drug if you're under thirty.


• America's political polarization has become the developing world's side hustle.

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Hypocrites

Can you imagine how the posters at TheFiringLine or TheHighRoad would have absolutely lost their shit about official "Clinton 2000" or "Obama 2016" merch back in the day?

"hUrR dUrR hE's jUsT tRoLlInG LiBs!"

That's beside the point.

This Modern World

I cannot imagine how confusing current events must be to the sort of normal person who catches the eleven o’clock news once or twice a week and who uses social media to talk about sports or Taylor Swift with their college friends.

We have an administration of the Very Online catering to a partisan fanbase of the Very Online and being reported on by the Very Online. 

If you spend your free time talking about politics on the internet, you're a small minority. (But in a fifty-fifty electorate, small minorities swing elections and therefore exercise disproportionate clout, especially when half everyone is too apathetic to vote.)

I literally had to explain to the people at the corner bar who Charlie Kirk was yesterday.

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Signifying Nothing

So, apparently a digital services company that used to have a contract with the Indiana state government got hacked, and this resulted in some scam ring getting a whole trove of Hoosier phone numbers.

Folks have been getting a pretty steady trickle of texts like this one:

Now, a reasonably well-informed person would glance at this, notice immediately that that's not an actual government URL (notice that the ".gov" is in the middle of it and it actually ends in ".vip") and would also know that the Indiana state government does not dun citizens via text message under any circumstance anyway, and send this straight to the spam file.

However enough people apparently fell for this that it made the news.

And everyone who saw it on the news immediately ran to NextDoor (or, as I call it, "Karens-dot-com"), where they temporarily paused their incessant monitoring of their Ring doorbell cameras for people walking through the neighborhood while Black and breathlessly reported to everyone that "THOSE TOLL MESSAGES ARE A SCAM PHISHING TEXT!!!ONE!"

There must have been fifty or a hundred more or identical posts by semiliterate people who apparently couldn't be arsed to check first and see if someone had already posted on the topic.

I don't know what the actual lowest common denominator social media site is... normally I'd be inclined to say Facebook or TikTok ...but NextDoor has got to be in the running.

Tab Clearing...

• AI hasn't made it any better, but Google search results have been sucky for a while.


• While everyone was busy being reminded by the media that Biden is old, the US lost its last AAA bond rating. At least the BBC noticed that one.


• I'm smelling farm bailout in the near future.

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Instawrecked

There once was a cute little app made for creative folks who’d noticed that their iPhone had a pretty good camera, actually. 

Meta bought it, tortured it to death over a few years, and has essentially reanimated it as a shambling, ad-heavy TikTok clone, oozing AI slop, but still wearing the old "Instagram" name like a skin suit.

I think my first Instagram post was this shot of Dinky taken at Castle Frostbite. 

I didn't get on Instagram until I got my first iPhone. I can't remember if it was still iPhone-only then or not. My pictures were normal ones: pets, food, fluffy clouds, shit I was doing. They were intended for my friends because I was one of those weirdos who thought that's what social media was for: y'know, being social.

I didn't know it was about trying to game algorithms and rack up followers for big-time influencer bucks. And with Meta at the helm, Instagram was increasingly optimized for that. Now if I were to open the app, I'd probably have to scroll through three or four screens before I saw a still photo from a friend I was following and not a video from someone trying to make money off me. (I thought the whole point of "following" someone on a social media app was so the app would show you new posts when they made them?)

I should probably do like I did with FB and just delete the Instagram app from my phone. I haven't opened it in months, after all.

Meta Is Evil

The maxim "If something's free, you aren't the customer, you're the product" has been around for a while. What companies like Meta and Google sell is your attention, and they can ask a fairly high price for it because they can target it so precisely, thanks to the volumes of data they collect on you.

"And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."

Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits."

Lately Meta got caught deliberately targeting beauty ads to teen girls who had recently deleted selfies, which is tap dancing on the borderline between advertising and psychoengineering.

If you haven't read Careless People, it's worth your while.

About the only place I ever go on Facebook anymore is my own personal timeline, especially because the feed has become a morass of ads interspersed with ragebait arguments. I'm the FB equivalent of the antisocial introverted homebody who doesn't like going to parties, but doesn't mind having friends over to chill.

I tend to leave a browser tab open to my own page. Now, if I leave that tab unattended for any length of time, when I click back on it, it automatically...and without any input from me...pops over to the feed, causing me to have to manually click the back button to get back to my own page. That's dirty pool.

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Sauce for the Gander...

From yesterday's batch of Executive Orders:

Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

If a Democratic president had issued this, people would be howling, and don't pretend otherwise.