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doctorstupid's comments

doctorstupid | 8 years ago | on: Jack White bans phones at gigs for “100% human experience”

About these people who "use their phones to have human experiences and connect to others that aren’t physically present". How is the sender anything more than a human tripod for a webcam that happens to be in a concert? Nothing is being shared because nothing is being experienced in the first place. If anything, the camera is doing the experiencing.

By bypassing our minds and instead offloading experiences directly to the digital middleman we reduce our powers of memory and lose respect for ourselves as witnesses; we begin to feel that only what is digital is real.

Can you not see that we become less human by separating ourselves from the intimacy of experience? We demote ourselves to mediators evaporating reality to the cloud.

What musician wants to perform to a crowd of cloud-zombies? That's equivalent to a crowd of no one. And they really don't care about the experiences of those who "aren't physically present"; that's what recorded albums are for.

doctorstupid | 8 years ago | on: Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for total surveillance

Perhaps that toilet paper dispenser with facial (faecal?) recognition might be hinting at the future of retail. I can imagine people walking into supermarkets, picking their items, and then simply leaving through the doors. Stealing will occur when a face isn't attached to enough credits. Ditto for public transportation. Sounds terrible to me.

doctorstupid | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: Solo – App for sharing loneliness and aloneness

Very true. When friends fetch their smartphones to 'capture' the moment I suddenly feel lonely, getting the feeling that we no longer value our own memory, that only what can be digitally shared and verified is real. So we end up talking to the digital middleman whilst failing to remember the 'shared' moment.

doctorstupid | 8 years ago | on: A Japanese Pen Maker Anticipated the Fountain-Pen Renaissance

Not entirely, and that doesn't account for the rise in sales. Paradoxically, the destruction of handwriting by computers may have benefited some fountain pen makers. As most everyday writing tasks are now computerised, writing by hand is increasingly becoming an activity for special, often personal occasions such as writing a journal entry. Now that the task has become rarefied, it occupies a different part of the mind which attaches a higher and perhaps more ritualised value to its tools. The experience is now done for pleasure not utility, and so the implements should be as joyful to use as possible. The emotional attachment to the activity justifies the disproportionate money and time spent on it (as is typical of recreational activities).

doctorstupid | 9 years ago | on: US billionaire helped to back Brexit

It's clear that Facebook and its ilk are becoming the gatekeepers to elections and social movements. China must have foreseen this long ago when it blocked them. The means are now in place to steer the governments of the democratic world in the directions preferred by those able to pay Facebook. As an increasingly political group of corporations, perhaps these new social gatekeepers will one day like to do a bit of steering towards their own goals. After all, cybernetics is the art of steering.
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