Fake people reading and writing fake news on fake websites? If this keeps up, we'll end up with a fake President. Don't give me negative points, for this is a fake reply.
Do you mean the President Rudy Kalbfleisch simulacrum who keeps breaking down in "The Simulacra", or the President Abraham Lincoln simulacrum who doesn't want to be sold in "We Can Build You"? Or do you mean the world has gone full blown "Faith of our Fathers" where the government is putting hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply to keep us from discovering the truth about our glorious leader(s)? Or some other book written by the fake Philip K Dick simulacrum built by Hanson Robotics, who was was ostensibly lost on a flight from Dallas to San Francisco in late 2005, and is rumored to have absconded to an undisclosed location and rebooted his writing career on the Dark Web?
Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of an America where the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Against this backdrop Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist, is struggling to practice in a world full of the maladjusted. Ian Duncan is desperately in love with the first lady, Nicole Thibideaux, who he has never met. Richard Kongrosian refuses to see anyone because he is convinced his body odor is lethal. And the fascistic Bertold Goltz is trying to overthrow the government. With wonderful aplomb, Philip K. Dick brings this story to a crashing conclusion and in classic fashion shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.
Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold.
Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.
Tung Chien is a Vietnamese bureaucrat in a world that has been conquered by Chinese-style atheist communism, where the population is kept docile with hallucinogenic drugs. When a street vendor gives Tung an illegal anti-hallucinogen, he discovers that the Party leader has a horrible secret.
Activated in 2005, Hanson Robotics debuted Philip K. Dick (aka Philip K. Dick Android) at Wired Nextfest. Designed by David Hanson as a robotic paean to the sci-fi writer of the same name, it was initially created using thousands of pages of the author’s journals, letters and published writings.
Spoiler alerts are a 20th century invention. Everyone has been taught to get angry about spoilers, but the very word "spoiler" itself is an internet invention coined in Usenet. The idea of society at large working hard to keep a fictional story secret is a marketing ploy invented by Alfred Hitchcock to sell more movie tickets to his mystery films. It used to be common to know everything about a story before you even experienced it, and there is evidence that despite what people say, they actually enjoy stories even more if they know beforehand how the story ends.
If a story isn't worth reading if you already know the ending, it's not worth reading without knowing the ending either. Good stories cannot be spoiled. Good stories are not merely puzzles to be savoured for a single punchline.
We also enjoy stories we already know well. It's why James Bond movies keep getting churned out despite all following the exact same formula or why Shakespeare plays are still in production centuries after they were written. Only bad stories are ruined by knowing the story.
This is a fascinating perspective I never really considered. The implications of "Spoiler Culture" on modern storytelling and consuming entertainment really are massive.
The seasonal buzz about Christmas movies has me dwelling on the paradox between the backlog vs. the new release. 21st century entertainers are competing against an entire century of modern culture available to viewers in a second.
How is it that my home has Netflix, HBO, and Hulu, and yet my wife and I are still paralyzed about what to watch every night? Why do we naturally lean towards the fresh thing on the front page?
Movies and other art forms are just bandwidth now, so Hollywood has to artificially set the value through marketing and buzz. It seems like every studio is combating this existential threat in different ways (Sunday night dramas that trigger water cooler conversations, visually stunning films that are meant for the big screen, twist-filled plotlines, podcasts and other media focused on discussing the "latest episodes").
While I am fine with the social conventions that hold spoiling recent works as anathema, or even older works within limited contexts (for instance, /r/WoT tries to allow readers to talk about the early books without instantly being spoiled for the later ones), the absurd demands people make to not "spoil" any book or movie people still read or watch recreationally -- and not just as a homework assignment -- is harmful.
The metaphors, the concepts, the philosophies expressed in books, even trashy 1960's SF, are important. They are tools we can use to explain, to convince, to argue, to communicate.
Demanding that we never speak aloud in any public place the words from any work of art more recent than Black Beauty (is that too recent? Is it OK to at least reference the end of Romeo and Juliet?) is demanding that we weaken ourselves, like Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut's short story of the same name, and only communicate at the level of the least well-read individual in any society. If books are not going to contribute to discourse, if we cannot tell other people of what we read, we might as well burn them all, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
And at the end of the day, the only thing being protected by fervent cries of "spoilers!" "spoilers!" are the barest, sparsest facts of the story: if finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled". Journey before destination.
While I appreciate your thorough and heartfelt response here, what I don't understand is how your comment would have been diminished in any way without the explicit spoiler?
Anyone who has already read the book would get it anyway. Everyone else wouldn't be any worse off, since that simple summary doesn't help understand the nuance of why it reminded of the ending. The only thing it does is spoil the ending.
> If finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled"
False dichotomy much? It's not the only reason, but it's certainly a decent sized factor in the enjoyment of a novel. I certainly don't feel like you did me any favors.
Your expecting a fake reply from a fake phone sending fake bytes through a fake cyberverse. The worst part of all the faking is the people who won’t fake their faking.
The most powerful agent is the one which manages to confiscate our only real asset - our time.
Trump is pretty good at it with all the controversies he is generating.
AI-assisted systems will be targeted at maximizing this interaction metric. You are slowly cooked by your favorite entertainer of the day to be then fed with an opinion which you take as your own. It is not novel at all.
This. Fact-checking is more time consuming than making things up. So they can drown out the fact checkers easily. And the facts are often uncomfortably murky. Whereas the lies build loyalty and belonging, an ideal basis for a movement.
"We interviewed Elena, a geophysicist, about the different ways scientists collect data about the planet we live on and the cosmos it's situated in. On the other side, Bob from the internet offers his theory about the earth being flat".
In Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" he proposes a distant alternate-history future where a priest-like cult of technical experts set themselves up to do effective human-aided Google searches which were necessary because the Internet was full of machine-generated disinformation.
I genuinely thought this was an implausible, hokey premise when I read the book in 2008.
I felt similarly about Orson Scott Card's plot in "Ender's Game" where two teenagers influence global political trends by posting a lot on social media (and I'm not the only one who thought this was silly: https://xkcd.com/635/ ). Then a bunch of Macedonian teenagers proved it worked in 2016.
I'm really sorry, but I think I had a little bit of trouble understanding your question.
In your first reply, you quoted me saying the phrase "Then a bunch of Macedonian teenagers..." and asked "is this a commonly accepted fact?". You then said "I literally had not heard this before now."
I apologize for not asking you what you meant by the word "this" in either of those two places where it was used, and I agree that it can be difficult to have a conversation if two people don't agree about what they're talking about.
It sounds like you were confused by my answer because you weren't sure what question I was trying to answer.
I suppose I should say that my original point is that:
The notion that teenagers could successfully influence global political trends by posting a lot on social media seemed far-fetched in the 1985 novel "Ender's Game". Indeed, Randall Munroe in 2009 seemed to think so, when satirized that novel's storyline in a webcomic suggesting that this notion was far-fetched.
My first claim is that this notion seemed considerably more likely after the events of 2016, specifically the part where Macedonian teenagers successfully influenced global political trends by posting a lot on social media. Their behavior, including their influence on political trends and their profligate posting, was well documented in news coverage including CNN, Wired, NBC, and BBC reporting.
To the specific claim that their influence was not merely profitable but also successful I'd suggest as evidence NBC's analysis that "The challenge of engaging readers on social media is one familiar to most journalists. They have a formidable opponent in Dimitri and his peers; analysis by BuzzFeed after the election showed that fake news websites actually performed better than conventional press and television", and the linked primary-source information ( https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa... ) showing that among the most twenty popular news stories engaged with by Facebook users, from August 2016 to election day 2016, more engagement was had with "fake" articles promoted by people including these Macedonian teenagers than with "real" news. This included several million engagements with "fake news" falsely claiming that the Pope had endorsed the President; that WikiLeaks had confirmed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS; that per federal law, Clinton was disqualified from holding any federal office; and that an FBI agent involved in investigating Clinton had been killed in a murder-suicide.
My second claim is that the news that Macedonian teenagers were involved in the fake-news fracas of 2016 is fairly mainstream knowledge, meant to answer your question about whether "this" is a "commonly accepted fact". I would cite the same news coverage as evidence that "this" (Macedonian teenagers were involved in spreading fake news in 2016) is indeed a "commonly accepted fact" (although I would say rather a story which has been reported with large amounts of evidence; I would set a pretty high standard for proving a fact).
Do you feel like you sufficiently understand my claim and its evidence or is there an area where you are confused? I am happy to discuss further, although perhaps we should have this conversation in person as I have clearly had some difficulty understanding your responses.
I tried a few times to explain how Ender's Game was different as they got into "moderated political debates in the higher class nets", but...it's not. We had the 2016 Presidential Debate.
