The Morning After: Meta's Instagram-linked Twitter rival could arrive this week

As Twitter continues to figuratively kneecap itself by limiting tweet views, Meta is hustling to bring its Twitter rival to reality. A listing for an app called Threads was spotted on the iOS App Store with an estimated release date of July 6th. In May, a report said the microblogging service was nearing completion and could be out as soon as the end of June. While an end-of-June launch didn't quite happen, the app could arrive when Twitter users are more willing (and maybe even eager) to finally jump ship.

Twitter boss Elon Musk announced at the weekend that verified accounts — which translates to paying users — can read 6,000 posts daily, while non-paying users can only read 600. He said the website is adopting the measure to "address extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation."

From both the app listing and rumors, we’re expecting Threads will migrate your followers and circles from your existing Instagram handle, ensuring you should have an active timeline right from the outset. That is, if you’re an Instagram user.

– Mat Smith

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Compacts, DSLRs, action cams and, of course, mirrorless cameras.

Engadget

Since smartphones started eating casual photography’s lunch, camera makers have focused on devices designed for very specific uses. Action cams provide sharp, fluid video. Compact cameras target both tourists and vloggers. And DSLRs are available at some of the best prices we’ve seen. Then there are mirrorless cameras, which continue to improve their autofocus and video. And that’s where some guidance helps. Whether you’re a creator looking for just the right vlogging camera, an aspiring wildlife photographer or a sports enthusiast, we’ll help you find the perfect camera to match your budget and needs.

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There’s an animated GIF generator now

Are your group chats ready for this level of nonsense?

Remember the early days of the AI hype train, when everyone spent their time making stupid images using text prompts? If you want to recapture the nostalgic haze of, uh, late 2022, Picsart has you covered. The popular image editor just launched an AI-powered animated GIF generator, calling the tool its “most unhinged” platform yet. Type a bunch of nonsense into the chat box, wait a minute or so and marvel at your “chaotic and eccentric” creation. The platform’s integrated into the regular Picsart app and is available for iOS, Android devices and on the web.

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Twitter launches 'new' TweetDeck as the old version breaks down

The feature will also be exclusive to Twitter Blue in 30 days.

If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues since it started limiting the daily number of posts users could view. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, TweetDeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of TweetDeck the main version. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck."

Continue reading.

Some HBO shows are streaming on Netflix in the US for the first time

'Insecure' is now on the platform, with 'Band of Brothers' and 'Six Feet Under' arriving later.

There really is an HBO show on Netflix. All five seasons of Issa Rae's highly acclaimed comedy-drama series Insecure are now streaming on Netflix in the US. Even more HBO shows are on the way, too. Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Six Feet Under and Ballers are also coming to Netflix as part of the deal, the company told Deadline. Meanwhile, Netflix users outside the US can stream True Blood on the service.

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Screenshots of the iPhone screen showing a new app called Threads by Meta.

Junk Anthropology: A Manifesto for Trashing and Untrashing

It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)

Junk as Failure

In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.

I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.

In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.

Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.

Junk as Potential

The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.

But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:

Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)

I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)

Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.

Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.

A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)

For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.

Junk as Repair

Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.

If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.

Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)

Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).

Junk as Resistance

More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:

Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.

Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).

But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.

A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)

Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.

Acknowledgements

My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.

This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.

Notes

[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.

[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”

[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”

[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.

[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.

[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)

[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.

References

Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.

DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338. 

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. 

Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z

Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.

Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.

Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.

Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.

Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.

Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.

Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.

Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.

UChicago Course on Whiteness Sparks Debate Over Free Speech and Cyberbullying

Twitter launches 'new' Tweetdeck as the old version breaks down

If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues ever since it started limiting the number of posts users could view each day. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, Tweetdeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of Tweetdeck the main version, announcing on Monday that it has "launched a new, improved version of Tweetdeck."

Despite officially launching, this "new" Tweetdeck still calls itself the "Tweetdeck Preview" while in app, and users still need to opt-in to using it in the menu of the original Tweetdeck interface. Even so, switching to the new interface does indeed restore basic Tweetdeck functionality for users that rely on its list aggregation features. Twitter says the process should be fairly straightforward as well, promising that saved searches, lists and columns should carry over instantly. Although Twitter says that the updated preview build should now support Twitter Spaces, polls and other features that were previously missing, it notes that Teams functionality is currently unavailable.

Twitter hasn't officially announced that it's retiring the old version of Tweetdeck, but in a thread discussing the issues a Twitter employee suggested the change would be permanent, stating that they were "migrating everyone to the preview version." 

Although switching to the new version of Tweetdeck potentially resolves the issue, many legacy users may still find themselves without access to the power-user tool in the near future. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access Tweetdeck." It's unclear if that change will be applied to all users in early August, or if all users will have a 30-day trial of the new Tweetdeck before being prompted to subscribe.

FILE - A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2022. Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday, July 1, 2023, after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

AMAs are the latest casualty in Reddit’s API war

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Ask Me Anything (AMA) has been a Reddit staple that helped popularize the social media platform. It delivered some unique, personal, and, at times, fiery interviews between public figures and people who submitted questions. The Q&A format became so popular that many people host so-called AMAs these days, but the main subreddit has been r/IAmA, where the likes of then-US President Barack Obama and Bill Gates have sat in the virtual hot seat. But that subreddit, which has been called its own "juggernaut of a media brand," is about to look a lot different and likely less reputable.

On July 1, Reddit moved forward with changes to its API pricing that has infuriated a large and influential portion of its user base. High pricing and a 30-day adjustment period resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing and others moving to paid-for models that developers are unsure are sustainable.

The latest casualty in the Reddit battle has a profound impact on one of the most famous forms of Reddit content and signals a potential trend in Reddit content changing for the worse.

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Twitter's apps are breaking following Elon Musk's decision to cap tweet rates

Over the last few days, Twitter not only stopped showing tweets unless you're logged in, but also started capping the number of tweets users can read each day ("rate limiting") — ostensibly due to "data scraping," according to Elon Musk. Those actions are starting to have an impact elsewhere across Twitter's ecosystem, with many users reporting that Tweetdeck (a power-user version of Twitter) no longer works. In addition, Google Search is reportedly showing up to 50 percent fewer Twitter URLs due to the logged-in requirement, Search Engine Roundtable reported. 

For a lot of users (including Engadget), Tweetdeck effectively stopped functioning, just showing a spinning wheel above most columns. That may be because a bug in Twitter's web app is sending requests in an infinite loop, effectively creating a "self-DDOS" (distributed denial of service), Waxy reported. As researcher Molly White tweeted, that effect is multiplied in Tweetdeck for anything other than the "Home" column, as it keeps "repeatedly retrying 404s," she wrote. 

It's possible to at least get your columns to show up by using a new beta version of Tweetdeck, as Engadget's Matt Brian tweeted. However, those columns are still subject to the rate limits (800 tweets for non-Twitter Blue subscribers), and so most users will stop seeing new tweets shortly after Tweetdeck loads.

On top of that, Google Search may be showing up to 50 percent fewer Twitter URLs following Musk's move to block unregistered users. Using the site command, Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz found that Google now has about 52 percent fewer Twitter URLs in its index than it did on Friday. It's still showing recent tweets in the Search carousel, but normal indexing seems to be broken at the moment. "Not that a site command is the best measure, but... Twitter is down [around] 162 million indexed pages so far since this change," Schwartz tweeted. 

There's no confirmation that the "self-DDOS" theory is accurate, but a post from developer Sheldon Chang (on Mastodon) indicated that shutting off anonymous access to Twitter may be playing a role in the issues. Twitter has promised that the login requirement and rate limiting are "temporary," but has yet to give a date for eliminating those restrictions. 

The twitter's logo is pictured on screen reflected by mirrors in Mulhouse, eastern France on May 30, 2023. (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP) (Photo by SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images)

Valve won’t publish games that feature copyright-infringing AI assets

Earlier this week, reports began surfacing that Valve was refusing to publish games with AI-generated art and other content. Over the weekend, the company finally commented on the matter. In a statement shared with IGN, Valve spokesperson Kaci Aitchison Boyle said the company is not trying to “discourage the use of [AI] on Steam.” Aitchison Boyle attributed the confusion to Valve “working through” how to account for the technology in its existing review process, which is a “reflection” of current copyright law.

"Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can,” Aitchison Boyle said. "We welcome and encourage innovation, and AI technology is bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming. While developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses, they can not infringe on existing copyrights."

Aitchison Boyle added that Valve has been refunding submission credits to those who ran afoul of the company’s current rules on account of their game’s use of AI-generated content. It’s not surprising to see Valve attempt to get ahead of what is quickly becoming one of the thorniest issues in tech. We’ve already seen generative AI create headaches for the music industry. In April, for instance, streaming services like Spotify and YouTube spent the better part of a week responding to a copyright claim from Universal Music Group after someone uploaded a viral AI-generated Drake song to their platforms.

Valve Steam Deck

Twitter puts strict cap on how many tweets users can read each day

Twitter has begun aggressively limiting how many tweets users can view per day. On Saturday afternoon, Elon Musk said the company would restrict unverified accounts to reading 600 posts per day and new accounts to only 300 tweets daily. Meanwhile, Twitter will allow verified accounts to read 6,000 posts each day. For most people, that means, short of paying for Twitter Blue, they can spend about a minute or two on Twitter before encountering a "rate limit exceeded" error. Less than two hours later, Musk said Twitter would "soon" ease the limits to 8,000 for verified accounts and 800 for those without Twitter Blue. 

Musk claimed the "temporary" limits were put in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping" and "system manipulation." The day before, Twitter began preventing people not logged into the site from viewing tweets. Like the usage limit, Musk has claimed the login restriction will only be temporary and was put in place in response to data scrapers. "Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience," Musk said Friday. He later claimed "almost every company doing AI" was scraping Twitter to train their models. "It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation," he said.  

Musk did not say what "new" means in the context of an account, nor did he say how long Twitter plans to restrict users in the way it's doing so currently. He also didn't state if viewing ads counts against a user's view limit. Either way, the restrictions severely limit the useability of Twitter, making it difficult, for instance, to verify if a screenshot of a tweet is authentic. A cynical view of the situation would suggest Twitter is trying to find ways to squeeze every bit of money it can from its user base. In March, the company introduced API changes that could cost some organizations as much as $42,000 a month. However, that move and the introduction of Twitter Blue don't appear to have offset the advertising revenue Twitter has lost since Musk's takeover. Limiting how many tweets, and by extension ads, users can see is unlikely to make the company’s remaining clients happy.

A view of the Twitter logo at its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S. November 18, 2022.

A Failure in Capture: An Experiment in Multimodal Interactive Ethnography where ‘Nothing Happens’

The video below this text is interactive.[1] To view, click play and follow the instructions you see on the screen. As you watch, look for areas that you can click with a mouse (or tap with your finger, if on a mobile device)[2] or see what appears when you mouse over different areas of the image at different times. What do you see?[3]

Notes

[1] This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration:

[2] On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner.

[3] This is an interactive video. This video is designed to get the viewer or reader to “search” the image for interactive buttons. To navigate by keyboard, you can use the tab key to switch between objects. Press enter to click on each object. The text is revealed by interacting with objects that appear at various times during the video. As each object appears, the video will pause, and you will be instructed to click or press enter for the text to appear. When you’re ready to continue, click the play button object or press enter.

References

Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2021. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press.

Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. International Library of Sociology. London ; New York: Routledge.

On the paucity of ‘raising awareness’

This post is about philosophy, memes, and taking action. It’s a reflection on an experience I had this week which caused me to reflect on the paucity of ‘awareness raising’ as a tactic.

I studied Philosophy at university a couple of decades ago. One of the courses was on ethics and involved the trolley problem.

The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway tram or trolley is on course to collide with and kill a number of people (traditionally five) down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track. Then other variations of the runaway vehicle, and analogous life-and-death dilemmas (medical, judicial etc.) are posed, each containing the option to either do nothing, in which case several people will be killed, or intervene and sacrifice one initially “safe” person to save the others.

It’s a powerful tool to generate insights into your own ethical position on certain topics. These days, it’s rolled out to warn about outsourcing decision-making to the systems underpinning self-driving cars. And, of course, it’s now a recognisable meme.

In my experience, most of the trolley problem thought experiments lead towards an understanding of supererogation.

In ethics, an act is supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be done. It refers to an act that is more than is necessary, when another course of action—involving less—would still be an acceptable action. It differs from a duty, which is an act wrong not to do, and from acts morally neutral. Supererogation may be considered as performing above and beyond a normative course of duty to further benefits and functionality.

Interestingly, in a recent episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Theron Pummer suggested a twist on this. Pummer, who is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, has published a book entitled The Rules of Rescue. I haven’t read it yet, but to quote the summary on his own web page about the book:

Pummer argues that we are often morally required to engage in effective altruism, directing altruistic efforts in ways that help the most. Even when the personal sacrifice involved makes it morally permissible not to help at all, he contends, it often remains wrong to provide less help rather than more.

I have issues with Effective Altruism, which I’ll not go into here, but I find Pummer’s framing fascinating. Basically, you don’t have to help others in certain situations; no-one would think it was immoral or illegal to go about your business. However, if you do decide to help, then there’s a minimum amount of help that could reasonably be required.

This week, I was at MozFest House. I had a good time. As with all MozFests I’ve been to, there are exhibits with which you can interact. One of them asked you to use a touch screen to fill in details of the kinds of services you use. It then printed out a long receipt on the type of data that is gathered on you when using them. I asked the PhD students who had come up with the machine what I was supposed to do with this data. They intimated that they were merely raising awareness and didn’t suggest a single thing I could do.

I was left in a worse position than I began. One could say that’s the point of awareness-raising, that it’s about making people feel discomfort so that they take action. But if you’re going to make an intervention I would agree with Theron Pummer’s stance that there’s a certain minimum level of guidance to give. A first step, at least.

Contrast this with another interactive exhibit in which you received tokens for free coffee if you answered a series of questions about yourself. I managed to get three by lying and not providing personal data. Which, of course, could be said to be the point of the exercise: be careful about the data you put out there, especially for scant reward.

Once you see people putting in the minimum effort of ‘awareness raising’ you start seeing it everywhere. It’s particularly prevalent on social media, where it takes a single tap to reshare news and make others aware of something you’ve just seen. As humans, though, we tend to have a bias towards avoiding harm so social media timelines become full of doom.

I’m on a bit of a mission to get some more positivity into my life. Not in a mindless way. Not in an avoiding-reality kind of way. But rather following people who have noticed a problem and are doing something about it. Seeking out those who can take a step back and look at the wider picture. And, of course, those who share some of the wonder of the world around us.

Book Review: OK by Michelle McSweeney

Becoming a Socialite: How Virtual “Fakeness” Produces Material Realities among Urban Chinese Gay Men

Real, Unreal, and Whatever Else In-between

On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.

One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.

Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.

Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).

In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.

The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.

“Fake” Profiles, Classification, and Platform Economy

A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.

Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)

Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)

During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.

What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.

There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.

Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.

Conclusion

Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.

References

Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Philosophy News Summary (updated)

Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…

1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.

UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).

2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.

3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.

4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).

5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.

* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.

The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.

One More Descript Thing

People still read blogs. Well, maybe a few of them. I was happy to see others get intrigued and interested in my sharing of the ways Descript had really revolutionized my way of creating podcast audio.

More than likes and reposts there’s not much more positive effect when you can capture Jon Udell’s interest as it happened in Mastodon and as he shared (aka blogged) about an IT Conversations episode he re-published.

And as it often happens, Jon’s example showed me a portion of a software that I was unaware of. This was as I remember one of the most evident aspects I found in the 1990s when I started using this software called PhotoShop- each little bit I learned made me realize how little of it’s total potential I did not know, like it was infinite software.

You see, I made use of Descript to much more efficiently edit my OEG Voices podcasts – but my flow was exporting audio and posting to my WordPress powered site. Jon’s post pointed to an interesting aspect when audio was published to a Descript.com sharable link.

Start with my most recent episode, published to our site, with audio embedded, a link to the transcript Descript creates.

If you access the episode via the shared link to Descript, when you click the play button in the lower left, the transcript highlights each word, in a kind of read along fashion. That’s nifty, because you might want to stop to perhaps copy a sentence, or look something up.

Even more interestingly, you can highlight a portion of text, use a contextual menu, and provide a direct link to that portion of audio. Woah. Try this link to hear/read Sarah’s intro from the screenshot above.

Yes, Descript provides addressable links to portions of audio (note, I have found that Descript is not jumping down to the location, maybe that’s my set up, I did post a request in their Discord bug report).

But wait there’s more. You can also add comments (perhaps annotation style) to portions of he transcript/audio.

You do have to create an account to comment, so you might not appreciate that. It looks like it’s more aimed at comments for production notes, but why cannot it be more annotation like?

Anyhow, this was nifty to discover, and I would not have known this, had not Jon shared his own efforts with a link.

This is how the web works, well my web works this way. And refreshing to explore some technology and not with the din of AI doomsday or salvation day reverb (although there is a use of AI for Descript in transcription, but it’s at a functional use level, not a shove it your face level).

I am confident as always there is more here that I do not know with Descript than what I do know (I need learn the Over Dub tool).

Featured Image: There’s always that one thing…

The Media Meltdown

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Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]

Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]

Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.

On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?

Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023. 

If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.

In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.

You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.

You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:

• Chapter 8: “Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt” by Kanta Dihal
• Chapter 9: “Machine Visions: Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Control” by Will Slocombe

Other relevant book titles include: 

• Relationships 5.0: How AI, VR, and Robots Will Reshape Our Emotional Lives by Elyakim Kislev
• Human-Centered AI by Ben Shneiderman (Read Chapter 16: “Social Robots and Active Appliances” for free until 31 May)

You may also be interested in the following journal articles: 

• “AI ethical bias: a case for AI vigilantism (AIlantism) in shaping the regulation of AI” by Ifeoma Elizabeth Nwafor from the Autumn 2021 International Journal of Law and Information Technology
• “My AI Friend: How Users of a Social Chatbot Understand Their Human–AI Friendship” by Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Marita Skjuve, and Asbjørn Følstad from the July 2022 Human Communication Research (Open Access)
• “Persuasion in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Theories and Complications of AI-Based Persuasion” by Marco Dehnert and Paul A Mongeau from the July 2022 Human Communication Research

_{Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Twitter blocks interactions on tweets with Substack links

Substack users woke to a strange surprise today when trying to share links on Twitter, finding an error message when interacting with any tweet featuring a Substack link. Tweets with an outgoing link to Substack cannot be retweeted, replied to or even liked. The error message states that “some actions on this tweet have been disabled by Twitter.” The loss in functionality even extends to tools like TweetDeck.

You can still tweet out Substack links, but that is where engagement ends. This could be a garden variety error, but it could be a response by Musk and Twitter to Substack’s recently-announced Twitter-esque Notes feature. After all, Twitter is no stranger to silencing rivals, both real and imagined. The social network briefly placed restrictions on tweets with outgoing links to Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, even outlawing outgoing links to other social media profiles in bios. Musk has also experimented with banning journalists who cover Twitter and made other questionable decisions for a self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist.

The founders of Substack issued a response to the move and it certainly seems like they believe the restrictions were instituted on purpose and not part of a system error.

“We’re disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else. This abrupt change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge,” the founders wrote.

There is another option beyond spite or a system error. It is possible Substack ran afoul of Twitter’s recently-announced API pricing scheme. The sheer number of links to Substack content from users would force the company to invest in the Enterprise-level API at $42,000 a month. If Substalk balked about these costs and Twitter caught wind of it, this could be another New York Times checkmark situation.

Substack says it is currently investigating the newly-imposed restrictions and that it will “share updates as additional information becomes available.” The company shared a blog post in which it expressed hope that these moves were made in error and stated that "cracks are starting to show in the internet’s legacy business models." We reached out to Substack and will update this post if the situation changes or if functionality is restored.

Twitter logo and Elon Musk silhouette are seen in this illustration taken, December 19, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Three new Star Wars movies are coming, including one with Daisy Ridley as Rey

The latest edition of Star Wars Celebration is underway and, along with some fresh details about shows coming to Disney+ over the next year or two, Lucasfilm revealed more info about what's ahead for the movie side of the franchise. It announced three Star Wars films, one of which will feature the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey.

That film will take place 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, the final movie in the Skywalker saga and the most recent Star Wars movie to hit the big screen. It will center around Rey forming a new Jedi Order. Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Ms. Marvel, Saving Face) will direct the film.

A movie from James Mangold (Logan, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) will delve into the origins of the Force and the Jedi. It will be set 25,000 years before anything else we've seen in the Star Wars universe to date, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Meanwhile, Dave Filoni will finally get a shot at directing a live-action Star Wars movie. Filoni has been at the heart of the franchise for many years. He directed the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars and has been deeply involved with the recent spate of Disney+ shows, such as The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. Fittingly, the movie he's set to direct will tie the stories of those shows together and put a bow on them.

Disney and Lucasfilm haven't revealed release dates for any of these films. However, Disney's current slate includes holiday 2025 and 2027 dates for untitled Star Wars flicks.

After the last three Star Wars films (The Last Jedi, Solo and The Rise of Skywalker) didn't exactly receive wide acclaim, Disney and Lucasfilm walked back on their plans to release a movie every year. They have made several attempts to get other Star Wars films off the ground, including Patty Jenkins' Rogue Squadron, a trilogy from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, another trilogy from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and entries from Taika Waititi and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige.

All of those projects have either been canned or deprioritized, according to reports. Disney and Lucasfilm are evidently hoping these three freshly announced films will reignite Star Wars' success in movie theaters, even if we'll have to wait at least a couple of years to see the first of them.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) in Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker.

‘Super Mario Bros. Movie' review: A fun but safe Mushroom Kingdom romp

Super Mario Bros. is an almost perfect kids film. It's stunningly animated, it has enough momentum to keep youngins from being bored, and almost every character is unique and likable (even Bowser himself, thanks to the comedic stylings of Jack Black). It's clear that Nintendo didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that other Mario movie, the live-action 1993 film that's ironically beloved by some '90s kids (it's all we had!), but ultimately failed to capture the magic of the games. This film, meanwhile, is chock full of everything you'd remember from NIntendo's ouvre. It's a nostalgic romp for adults, and it's simply a fun time for children.

But boy is it safe. Maybe I'm a bit spoiled by the excellent non-Pixar animated films we've seen over the last decade, especially the ones that Phil Lord and Chris Miller have touched (The Lego Movie! Into the Spider-Verse!). But it's glaringly obvious Nintendo didn't want to take any major creative risks with this adaptation. The script from Matthew Fogel is filled with enough humor and references to keep us from feeling bored, and directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic deliver some inspired sequences. But it's almost like the film is trapped in a nostalgia castle thanks to the whims of an aging corporate dinosaur. (Bear with me.)

Nintendo/Illumination

That wasn't a problem for the kids in my matinee audience, but it's a bit disappointing if you've waited decades to see a truly great Mario adaptation. It's in line with the recent live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie — Super Mario Bros. is "fine." There's no attempt to achieve anything deeper than the basics: Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are two floundering Brooklyn plumbers who are inexplicably transported to the Mushroom Kingdom. Luigi, ever the scaredy-cat, is almost instantly captured by Bowser's minions, and it's up to Mario and Princess Peach (an effervescent Anya Taylor-Joy) to save him. Big bad Bowser, meanwhile, has plans to either marry Peach or, barring that, take over the kingdom.

The film bombards you with an endless series of references from the start – just look at all those Punch-Out! characters on the wall! – something that will either delight longtime Nintendo fans or make your eyes roll. Personally, though, I mostly enjoyed seeing how all of the nostalgia fodder was deployed (the adorably fatalistic Lumalee from Mario Galaxy practically steals the film). The filmmakers also show off plenty of visual flair, like an early scene in Brooklyn that rotates into a 2D chase sequence. If only some of the musical choices were more creative. (A Kill Bill reference? Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" during Mario's training montage? Come on.)

It's always nice to see kids movies reach far beyond our expectations — The Lego Movie wrestled with the prison of capitalism, the importance of pushing against restrictive social expectations and how fandom can ruin the thing you actually love, all in addition to being a fun adventure for kids and injecting a dose of smart humor for adults. In Super Marios Bros., Mario learns to eat mushrooms because they literally make him big and strong. What subtext!

At the same time, I can still respect a movie that simply accomplishes its goal of entertaining children. Over the years, I've been subjected to plenty of truly awful kid's films with ugly animation and production design, lazy writing, and zero creative vision. I wish I could reclaim the time I spent watching Space Jam: A New Legacy or the 2011 Smurfs movie. The Super Mario Bros. may be a bit basic and safe, but it's not a waste of time.

For one, we've never seen Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom look this good. Illumination may not have the stellar track record of Pixar, but this movie is filled with gorgeously detailed characters, vibrant worlds jam-packed with detail and some of the most fluid animation I've seen in years. It's a visual feast, and it makes me long for the day when a Mario game can look so lush (as much as I loved Super Mario Odyssey, it's visuals are held back by the Switch's aging hardware).

And for the most part, the voice acting kept me invested. Jack Black is inspired as Bowser, a hopeless romantic who can only express his feelings through song and world domination. Charlie Day basically plays his usual harried persona, but it fits Luigi, a character who mainly exists to support his little bigger brother. And Anya Taylor-Joy makes for a perfect Princess Peach, a leader who has to feign bravery to protect her adorable Mushroom Kingdom people.

Nintendo/Illumination

For all of Chris Pratt's hype about his Mario voice, though, it's merely serviceable. The movie jokes about Charles Martinet's original problematic accent (Martinet also voices two characters in the film), but Pratt's spin on it just feels like someone pretending to be a schlubby Brooklynite. That's particularly surprising since Pratt injected so much life into his Lego Movie lead.

What's most disappointing about The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it's so close to being genuinely great. If the film had more time to build up its characters, or if it made room for Jack Black unleash his full Tenacious D talents as Bowser, it would easily be stronger. Why not go a bit harder on that Mario Kart sequence? (Even Moana managed to fit in a Mad Max: Fury Road reference!) Why not spend a bit more time on the rivalry/budding bromance between Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) and Mario?

With a projected opening weekend of $150 million or more, it's clear that Nintendo has a hit on its hands. A sequel is inevitable. I just hope that the company loosens up the next time around. After all, what fun is a Mario adventure without taking a few creative leaps over chasms of uncertainty?

Mario and the team in karts in The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Twitter shut off its free API and it's breaking a lot of apps

Twitter has finally shut off its free API and, predictably, it’s breaking a lot of apps and websites. The company had previously said it would cut off access in early February, but later delayed the move without providing an updated timeline.

But, after announcing its new paid API tiers last week, the company seems to have started cutting off the thousands of developers relying on its free developer tools. Over the last couple days, a number of app makers and other services have reported that the Twitter API is no longer functioning. Mashable reported the shutoff seems to have started Tuesday morning, though many developers are still trying to understand what’s happening as Twitter doesn’t seem to have communicated with most developers about the changes.

The ending of Twitter’s free API comes after the company abruptly changed its rules to ban third-party Twitter clients as part of a larger shakeup of its developer strategy. But, as we’ve previously reported, third-party clients were only a small fraction of the developers, researchers, bot makers and others who relied on Twitter’s APIs.

For example, apps and websites that used Twitter’s API to enable sharing of content to and from Twitter are now seeing that functionality break. WordPress reported Tuesday that it was no longer able to access the API, rendering its websites unable to automatically share posts to Twitter. (The issue has since been fixed, according to the company.)

Likewise, Echobox, a service that allows publishers to share content on Twitter, said on Wednesday it was also disconnected from the Twitter API “without warning.” The company said it found a workaround, but hadn’t heard from Twitter. News reading app Flipboard, which recently began shifting its focus to Mastodon, also warned that anyone who used Flipboard to view Twitter feeds would soon see the feature disabled.

Many of Twitter’s bot developers are also impacted. The maker of “Cheap Bots Done Quick,” which allows people to create bots for Twitter, reported receiving a notice that they were cut off from the API. Twitter has said that its new “basic” tier is meant to provide a pathway to allow bots to continue, but many developers have said the monthly limit of 1,500 tweets is too constrained.

Newsletter platform Substack is also having issues using embedded tweets, though it’s unclear if this is related to the API shutdown or the company recently announcing a potential Twitter competitor. (Embeds seem to be functioning normally on other websites, including this one.)

All of these issues are further complicated by the fact that Twitter seems to have communicated very little with any of its developers about these changes or what they mean. Most of the employees who worked in developer relations were cut during the company’s mass layoffs. And the company’s developer forums are filled with posts from confused developers looking for answers. The company no longer has a communications team, and its press email auto-responds with a poop emoji.

As Mashablepoints out, the shutoff has even affected developers who are willing to pay for Twitter’s API, even though pricing for higher-level enterprise tiers is still unclear. “When Twitter announced these new tiers last week, we immediately sought to sign up for the Enterprise tier,” Echobox wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “ We still have had no response from Twitter’s enterprise sales team and our access to the API was cut off without notice yesterday.”

News app Tweet Shelf said its API access had also been suspended despite applying for Enterprise API access. So did TweetDeleter, a service for automatically deleting tweets, and Tweet Archivist an analytics tool. 

But it’s still unclear how many developers will be able to continue using Twitter’s API in some form. The free and $100/month “basic” tier are extremely limited compared to what was previously offered for free. And, while Twitter hasn’t revealed exactly how much the “enterprise” level will cost, many are expecting it to be prohibitively expensive – rumors have suggested it could cost $40,000 a month or more.

Some developers aren’t even waiting to find out the pricing details. The developer of Social Bearing, an analytics service used by researchers, said there was no way the service could continue to run. “I wish those of you left at Twitter and fellow devs the best of luck,” they tweeted.

The Twitter splash page is seen on a digital device, Monday, April 25, 2022, in San Diego. Twitter users were greeted early Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023 with an ultimatum from the social media app: Subscribe to the platform's new premium service or lose a popular account security feature. A pop-up message warned users they will lose the ability to secure access to their account via text message two-factor authentication unless they pay $8 a month to subscribe to Twitter Blue. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)