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    1. What's good to air fry or dehydrate?

      For Christmas, I got the household a toaster oven with air fryer. We have so far done french fries and brussels sprouts, both of which turned out great. I'm curious what else I can air fry? Any...

      For Christmas, I got the household a toaster oven with air fryer. We have so far done french fries and brussels sprouts, both of which turned out great. I'm curious what else I can air fry? Any favorite recipes?

      It also has a dehydrate feature and we've done apple slices and strawberry slices. They also turned out pretty good. (I think I needed to leave them in for maybe an extra hour or two because they weren't quite crisp.)

      9 votes
    2. The results of the 2019 Census

      Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel...

      Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧhelp me

      Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKESdid I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED? Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

      Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

      The 2019 Census

      Anyway.

      This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

      Personal details

      Age

      When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

      Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.Hint, this was one of the fishy responses

      Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat

      Geographical... Stuff

      Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

      All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT

      Language

      Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

      Gender & Sexuality

      Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

      Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

      Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

      The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

      Religion

      So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟

      Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

      Politics

      I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

      Economy - 7,02
      Diplomacy - 6,9
      State - 3,8
      Society - 7,48

      Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

      Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

      When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

      IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREMEEveryone else will remember that All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

      And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

      Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

      OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

      Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

      When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.

      As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

      The freeform questions

      Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

      Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

      Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

      Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

      Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

      Special mentions

      Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.This is how it works, right? Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

      I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

      To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

      And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

      Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

      83 votes
    3. Death, Disrupted

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here. Death, Disrupted Tamara Kneese Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital...

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here.

      Death, Disrupted

      Tamara Kneese


      Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital avatar. They’re present when you’re making dinner and watching Netflix in bed. What happens if you plan to start dating again? Do you hide them in a corner of your basement? The infamous “Be Right Back” episode of the British science fiction series Black Mirror is an exaggerated version of this speculative scenario, but the future is in many ways already here.

      San Francisco-based entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend, Roman Mazurenko, died suddenly at a young age. As technologists who spent countless hours messaging each other over various apps and platforms, and because Roman was also a Singularity proponent, Kuyda decided the most fitting way to memorialize Roman would be to construct a postmortem chatbot based on an aggregate of his personal data. Kuyda quickly realized that, much like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, Roman’s friends engaged in heartfelt, intimate conversations with the bot (Turkle 1984). Through her startup company called Luka, Kuyda built a prototype. Replika mimics your patterns of communication and learns more about you while you are still alive, acting as a confidante and friend as well as leaving a potential digital legacy behind.

      Eterni.me, funded by an MIT entrepreneurship fellowship, makes many of the same promises Marius Ursache, a technology entrepreneur, started the company as a way to create digital copies of the dead. He, too, suffered a personal tragedy that inspired the startup. In addition to answering personal questions posed by a chatbot, the Eterni.me avatar relies on additional data: "We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources.” Skeptics have raised questions about surveillance, privacy, and data rights attached to the digital belongings and likenesses of dead individuals, as well as the healthfulness of continuing intense relationships with the dead through mediated channels. Life Naut purportedly uploads your mind file into your bio file, or at least will when technology is advanced enough. In this context, genetic and biometric information is potentially combined with personal data streams to simulate a human being. Terasem, a transhumanist organization, backs Life Naut. Martine Rothblatt, one of its founders, created a robot clone of her wife, Bina.

      Immortality potions have been around for millennia, promising long life while sometimes inadvertently poisoning their consumers. Beyond the hucksters and hoaxers, however, some wholeheartedly believe in the quest for a magical substance that will indefinitely prolong life and cheat death. Rather than relying on the alchemy of past centuries, such as the liquid elixir found in an Ancient Chinese tomb, today’s immortalists tend to work in the tech industry, pitching products built from recipes of code and financial speculation.

      In Silicon Valley, short-lived startups centered on radical life extension and digital immortality abound. While promising their users endless posterity, the companies themselves are dependent on the whims of venture capital. Not everyone’s a cynic, however, as some elite techies really do think they can escape the limits of their earthly fate, uploading their minds to become part of the cosmos or remaining young and virile for centuries through cryonics or biohacking. The apocryphal part is that wealthy technologists plan to live forever at the expense of ordinary users, who may only achieve immortality through their measly data.

      Data Ghosts

      Social networking services for the dead are emblematic of a fantasy regarding disembodied information and its capacity for thwarting physical decay and death (Hayles 1999, Ullman 2002, Braidotti 2013). With data-based selves, habitual, consumer-based, and affective patterns constitute a speculative form of currency and capture; to know the data is to know the person (Raley 2013, Cheney-Lippold 2017). Through harvesting data from a variety of sources, it is possible to predict dead individuals’ responses to conversational prompts or, employing resources like Amazon’s recommendation engine, what a dead individual would purchase if they were still alive. For the most part, companies don’t go so far as to claim that these captured patterns or glitchy avatars are the same exact thing as the person they represent, but they are still of social value. Perhaps in a world where many transactions and interactions happen through awkward interfaces—from virtual assistants on banking or travel websites to app-based healthcare or iPad ordering systems and the on-demand economy—a data double is close enough.

      This is why digital afterlife companies also exist on the more mundane side of the spectrum. Digital estate planning startups promise to protect your personal data forever, passing your accounts onto your loved ones after you die. After death, illness blogs and even email accounts may take on a new aura, as they are visited and kept by mourning kin members and broader social networks. Through an act of intergenerational exchange, ordinary Twitter and Instagram accounts can become treasured family heirlooms. This is obviously not what social media, with its focus on rapid, real-time responses, was intended to do. Death has disrupted social media. In the same way that you would want to care for your tangible property and keepsakes like houses, jewelry, and mutual funds, you might also want your descendants to take care of your Facebook profile and email accounts (Kneese 2019). Dead Social promises to help individuals organize their social media wills, bequeathing password information as well as goodbye videos and final status updates along with funeral instructions and organ donation information. In many ways, digital media have entered into serious existential concerns over life and death. Recent works by media scholars like John Durham Peters (2015), Amanda Lagerkvist (2015), and Yuk Hui (2016) underscore the ontological status of digital objects and the techno-social assemblages inherent to digital afterlives.

      Silicon Valley’s “fail fast, fail often” mantra is at odds with eternity: most digital legacy companies die out almost as quickly as they appear. Apocryphal life extension technologies are deeply rooted in the techno-utopianism and hubris of Silicon Valley culture and much older dreams of achieving immortality through technology. Immortality chatbots rely on venture capital and the short-term metrics of startup culture, as well as on the mountains of personal data ordinary people accumulate across everyday apps and platforms. There is an inherent temporal contradiction between the immediate purposes of digital media and their capacity to endure as living objects. Startups are, for the most part, intended to die early deaths; in Silicon Valley circles, failure itself is a badge of honor. Thus, the longevity of people’s digital legacies relies on the lifespans of corporate platforms, as well as a number of potentially ephemeral startups.

      Despite its techno-optimism, Silicon Valley is also a cynical place. Or at the very least, it’s full of bad ideas: many startups are built to fail. Failure comes so naturally to Silicon Valley that a San Francisco-based conference called FailCon launched in 2009. What does it mean to trust your personal data, your most intimate collection of digital objects, to ephemeral startups? Can they really help you live forever? And if so, what does digital immortality look and sound like? (Immortality chatbots are stilted conversationalists and would never pass the Turing test. Still, they purportedly preserve and store the essence of a human personality).

      Because digital estate planning companies are not lucrative, often providing free services, they tend to quickly fold and vanish. What seemed to be a promising enterprise in 2008 is mostly a dead end today. Over the course of my dissertation and book research, most of the startup founders I interviewed left the business and nearly all of the digital estate planning companies I researched have folded: Sites such as Legacy Locker, Perpetu, MyWebWill, 1,000 Memories, CirrusLegacy, Online Legacy, Entrustet, Lifestrand, Deathswitch, and E-Z Safe have all disappeared. Digital death is an underlying condition of digital posterity. It is ironic that such web-based companies promise to keep your data alive forever when digital estate planning startup companies are themselves highly erratic and subject to failure. Today, a younger generation of founders is hoping to disrupt digital death, often targeting millennials with their products. But digital estate planning and immortality chatbots do not address the overarching problem of platform ephemerality.

      Platforms and profiles change over time and may even disappear, so it is difficult to ensure that digital remains are preserved. For one, they are dependent on the particular corporate infrastructures on which they are built and the continued commercial viability of such companies. MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LiveJournal, GeoCities, and other obsolete social networking platforms remind us that even the most successful tech giants may not live forever, or that their uses and users may change over time. It is hard to trust that a profile, blog post, digital photo album, or uploaded consciousness will survive in perpetuity.

      Immortality Hiccups

      Despite its intimate relationship with ephemerality, Silicon Valley is attempting to defeat death through movements like cryonics and transhumanism, as well as less fanciful enterprises like life extension through supplements, exercise, and nutrition. It is perhaps unsurprising that youth-obsessed Silicon Valley is disturbed by the notion of bodily decline. The wellness ideology associated with the Quantified Self movement and self-tracking through Fitbits and other wearable devices emanates from Silicon Valley culture itself, with its unique blend of New Age counter-culturalism and libertarian or neoliberal tendencies (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, Turner 2006). Failure itself is a feature, not a bug, of startup culture. The death of companies is an expected part of the culture, with failure baked into the very system of venture labor and the prominence of risk-taking (Neff 2012). But to actually die, to be a mere mortal and subject to the whims of time or the flesh, is less than ideal. Silicon Valley is in search of a techno-solution to death, both on a physiological level and in terms of the problems associated with digital inheritance.

      When it comes to dealing with death, startup culture attempts to apply to a techno-solutionist salve to something inherently messy. The logics of planning, charts, and neat lists don’t necessarily add up when a death happens. There is always the potential for a glitch. For instance, a British woman who died of cancer received a letter from PayPal claiming a breach of contract for her failure to keep paying. After her death, her husband had contacted PayPal with her death certificate and will, as requested, but PayPal’s system failed to register this and accidentally sent the letter anyway.

      Many digital immortality startups are in fact vaporware, or novelties that are more theoretical than utilitarian. But they are made material through the capital backing them and the valuable data their subscribers provide. At the same time, entrepreneurs often overestimate their possibility for success. A 1988 study showed that a majority of entrepreneurs believe they can prevent the death of their company. In a paper called “Living Forever: Entrepreneurial Overconfidence at Older Ages” (2013), Dutch economists found that entrepreneurs have a tendency to overestimate their actual life spans as well as the lifespans of their companies. This in part may explain the number of transhumanists in Silicon Valley. On a practical level, entrepreneurs must display a certain degree of optimism in order to ease the worries of accelerators and incubators who might be interested.

      Death is sometimes used as a metaphor in Silicon Valley discourses about failure. Many startups do not go bankrupt right away, but never attract a healthy customer base. Instead, their founders or other investors continue pouring money into them. According to one technologist, “We call them the walking dead…They don't necessarily die. They putter along.” (Carroll 2014). Software engineers may have to decide to abandon the startup shift and find more stable work, whereas founders have a hard time knowing when to pull the plug on their creations. Shikhar Ghosh, a lecturer at Harvard who has studied startup mortality, noted that “VCs bury their dead very quietly” (Carroll 2014).

      It is increasingly easy for startups to get funding, thanks to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe or IndieGoGo in addition to the standard angel investor route. Would-be entrepreneurs do not have to rely on venture capitalists. But this also means that a sea of unlikely startups has proliferated, while the vast majority of those companies will die early deaths. For anxious founders, the startup death clock can estimate when their ventures are about to run out of money. Much like individuals can leave goodbye messages on sites like Dead Social, dying startups often post final messages to their users before their websites become defunct. Startup death is a significant problem in Silicon Valley, so what does it mean to rely on precarious startups to broker long-term relationships with the dead?

      Wealthy VCs also fund life extension research. It’s not just the bearded weirdos like Aubrey de Grey. There is a much longer history of using new technologies and data tracking, along with changes in diet and exercise, to prolong the human lifespan and optimize the self (Bouk 2015, Wernimont 2019). For elites, that is. The Life Extension Institute of the early 20th century, for instance, found ways for wealthy white men to cheat death through diet and exercise regimes, publishing self-help books like How to Live while surveilling workers in factories according to eugenicist principles in order to maximize their productivity. Founded in 1913, the LEI was backed by members of the National Academy of Medicine, major insurance firms, and companies like Ford and GM alongside President Taft and Alexander Graham Bell; it was by no means a fringe movement.

      Echoing these historical connections, at a conference on radical life extension, Terasem’s Martine Rothblatt exclaimed, “It’s enormously gratifying to have the epitome of the establishment, the head of the National Academy of Medicine, say, ‘We, too, choose to make death optional!,” highlighting the ways that transhumanist visions are often tied to esteemed institutions. Consider Nectome, an MIT connected and federally funded startup that promised to scan human brains and turn them into digital simulations. Because it relied on fresh brains to work, it required subscribers to be euthanized first. This seems like a risky move, but investors like Sam Altman of Y Combinator immediately signed up. One of the founders said, “The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide…Product-market fit is people believing that it works.” In other words, the founders don’t really care if it works or not: if people believe it does, the market will abide.

      Silicon Valley-centered narratives are typically focused on short-term gains, a few entrepreneurs, and innovation at all costs. But as the internet ages, social media platforms have been caught up in questions of posterity and even transcendence. For Silicon Valley startup culture to deal with death raises some interesting questions about future projections and risk. Instead of trusting religious entities with your immortal soul, you should put your faith in the tech industry. Rather than employing established banks and corporations to manage your digital assets, you, the ordinary user, are expected to outsource that labor to a host of new, web-based companies. By definition, startups attempt to “disrupt” industries they view as obsolete or clunky. Or as one of my research subjects put it: “investors say the most boring industries are the most lucrative.” There is an obvious disconnect between the companies that promise to organize your digital belongings for eternity and Silicon Valley’s cultural expectations around failure.

      There is historical and contemporary synergy between powerful Silicon Valley interests and transhumanist belief systems, as many noted futurists have prestigious positions in the tech industry. For instance, Ray Kurzweil, a well-known proponent of the Singularity, is also Google’s Director of Engineering. According to computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, humans’ technological capacities will accelerate. Eventually, superintelligent AI will self-replicate and evolve on an ever-increasing timescale, leading to humanity’s end. While Vinge sees the technological Singularity as a destructive force, Kurzweil and those of his ilk believe it has the ability to solve all of the earth’s problems, including climate change. The temporal patterns of the Singularity thus coincide with Silicon Valley’s race for the new, i.e. the planned obsolescence of Apple products, perpetual updates and upgrades for software packages, or the fetishization of the latest gadgets.

      It’s not always completely cynical, either. Ray Kurzweil is actively trying to resurrect his dead father, and many transhumanists have suffered personal losses that inspire them to find ways of mitigating death. For some, transhumanism is a form of spiritual practice or belief system (Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut 2016, Bialecki 2017, Singler 2017, Farman 2019). The truth is that no matter how far-fetched some of these technologies may seem, they are already starting to affect how people interact with the dead and conceive of their own postmortem legacies. But for those who can’t afford the treatments and elixirs, digital immortality might be the only available route to living forever. There is a chasm between those who can afford actual life extension technologies (in the US, this includes things like basic healthcare) and those who can train free digital chatbots to act in their stead.

      When it comes to the history of life extension technologies, as well as modern genres of transhumanism and digital afterlife startups, people are actively working to engineer these items. They are not abstract fantasies, but connected to real money, speculative investment, and sites of extreme wealth and power. While their technologies are apocryphal, they rely on logic and cold rationality to justify their vision of the future, which they are actively building. Their science fiction tinged narratives are not speculative, but roadmaps for the future.

      On a rapidly warming planet where tech billionaires fantasize about escaping to the far corners of the earth in their bunkers, or even to Mars, immortality technologies are undeniably apocryphal. Freezing your head, perfecting your body so it lives for centuries, or uploading your consciousness to a magical server won’t help you if the whole earth burns. But for those with immense wealth and power, and a fervent belief in the salvific potential of technology, immortality is still a goal. Even if the Silicon Valley transhumanists eventually figure it out, only a select few will have access to their life-sustaining wares.

      References

      Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6(1): 44-72.

      Bialecki, Jon. 2017. “After, and Before, Anthropos.” Platypus, April 6. http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/after-and-before-anthropos/.

      Boenig-Liptsin, Margarita, and J. Benjamin Hurlbut. 2016. “Technologies of Transcendence and the Singularity University.” In Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, edited by J. B. Hurlbut and H. Tirosh-Samuelson, 239-268. Dordrecht: Springer.

      Bouk, Dan. 2015. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Polity.

      Carroll, Rory. 2014. “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure and the ‘Walking Dead’ it Leaves Behind.” The Guardian, June 28. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/28/silicon-valley-startup-failure-culture-success-myth.

      Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.

      Farman, Abou. 2019. “Mind out of Place: Transhuman Spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87(1): 57-80.

      Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

      Hui, Yuk. 2016. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

      Kneese, Tamara. 2019. “Networked Heirlooms: The Affective and Financial Logics of Digital Estate Planning.” Cultural Studies 33(2): 297-324.

      Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness.” New Media & Society 19(1): 96-110.

      Neff, Gina. 2012. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge: MIT Press.

      O’Gieblyn, Meghan. 2017. “Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s Simulation Theology.” N+1 28. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/.

      Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Raley, Rita. 2013. “Dataveillance and Countervailance.” In Raw Data is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 121-146. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Singler, Beth. 2017. “Why is the Language of Transhumanists and Religion So Similar?,” Aeon, June 13. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar.

      Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Shuster.

      Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Ullman, Ellen. 2002. “Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines ‘Life.’” Harper’s Magazine, October. http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/programming-the-posthuman/.

      Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2019. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

      3 votes
    4. Society, not just Goldman Sachs, has an anti-women bias

      Today in twitter drama, people are up in arms about the Apple Card offering a tech entrepreneur's wife significantly less credit than her husband. Recently, other tech entrepreneurs like the Woz...

      Today in twitter drama, people are up in arms about the Apple Card offering a tech entrepreneur's wife significantly less credit than her husband. Recently, other tech entrepreneurs like the Woz have noticed similar limit discrepancies. However, I think this is all missing the forest for the trees. It is likely that GS is in fact offering less credit to women. However, in both cases, higher credit was offered to male tech entrepreneurs (while their spouses got much less credit). And, given that Only 1/5th of VC money goes to startups with even a single women on the founding board, I don't think it's super far fetched that the statistics will show women, on average, are given notably less credit than men, especially when those men are tech entrepreneurs.

      Ultimately, I have no idea why twitter is so surprised by this. People seem to think this is a unique case of bank discrimination, yet it's really just a reflection of a society which pays women less than men, and values their work as less than men. And I worry we might "fix" the algorithm, but never correct the larger societal issues surrounding this problem.

      Sidenote: Currently, most cards circumvent this issue by linking spouses accounts, so they are one and the same. The Apple card, for privacy(?) reasons, does not allow this.

      6 votes
    5. the city

      Something I wrote after watching a scene in the Apple TV+ "The Morning Show" showing an NYC skyline. I've always had a love for NYC, even though I don't live there, and a love for cities more...

      Something I wrote after watching a scene in the Apple TV+ "The Morning Show" showing an NYC skyline. I've always had a love for NYC, even though I don't live there, and a love for cities more generally. I've never not lived in a city after moving out of my parents' place, and can't imagine going back to the suburbs. Cities are my home, cities are where I belong. I don't think this one is finished, yet; there are a few rough spots, and I'm not sure about the ending. But, like people have said in a few of the timasomo threads, the important thing is to get the words out, to make the work exist outside of one's head.

      the city is awake, alive
      lights dance in the dark of night
      little lifesigns, each a past and present
      each a history and a story not yet told
      subways and busses and ubers
      the occasional oblivious cabbie
      (cancer on the streets)
      each moving people to their goals
      their dreams
      veins and arteries in the city's body
      lights for seeing
      superstructure in steel and glass
      inspiration
      aspiration and ambition
      passion and drive
      these power the pulse and the breath
      each person, each cell
      shapes and grows the city, the body
      each experience shapes epigenetics
      no place the same after
      the city takes us all in
      gives us homes
      maybe not shelter, but homes
      we are alive and so is our home
      an energy ineffable yet indelible
      

      edit: A friend has said that this reminds her of the opening of Murakami's After Dark, and I can absolutely see it. Perhaps a bit of subconscious inspiration?

      6 votes
    6. Discussion: Top 10 Stupidest Things US Fed Govt has done

      Okay, so this notion is still a bit undefined in my head, kind of figuring it out now, as I type. I want to come up with a list (doesn't actually have to be 10) of the worst things the US...

      Okay, so this notion is still a bit undefined in my head, kind of figuring it out now, as I type.

      I want to come up with a list (doesn't actually have to be 10) of the worst things the US government has done, to undermine the ideals and principles that the United States was (at least nominally) founded on ... truth, justice, baseball and mom's apple pie - kinda stuff.

      You can go back as far in history as you like (so Civil War, Dred Scott, things like that are absolutely open for consideration) ... but it has to be something that continues to significantly impact US govt, US society and/or the world, to this day ... something they have not remedied.

      Off the top of my head, the main thing that comes to mind is the Citizens United case, which I believe has fundamentally broken the US political system (which was, previously, already seriously frayed). I'd also consider the non-consideration (by the Senate) of Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination (by Obama), and the US (both the govt and the public) collective "whatever" to the news that Russia interfered in the 2016 US elections (and continues to do so, now joined by China and assorted others).

      I may edit this to refine the idea. But the basic goal is to create a really high-level list of "First Things" the US needs to fix, to have any hope of returning to a state of democracy (okay, democratic republic), and/or normalcy.

      5 votes
    7. Is "The Morning Show" bad?

      Apple has spent a lot of money on The Morning Show for its new tv service. It has a bunch of actors that I love. In particular I'm excited to see Anniston, Duplas, Carell, and Crudup in this....

      Apple has spent a lot of money on The Morning Show for its new tv service. It has a bunch of actors that I love. In particular I'm excited to see Anniston, Duplas, Carell, and Crudup in this.

      Metacritic gives it only 60. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-morning-show Sometimes a single terrible review can drag that number down, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. There are a few bad reviews, and lots of mixed reviews.

      I don't know much about critique or how reviewing works, so I'm curious: is The Morning Show bad, or are critics terrible at reviewing, or is something else going on?

      7 votes
    8. Democratic Debate #4 - October 15 2019

      This debate will start at 8pm EST. From CNN's website: It will air exclusively on CNN, CNN International and CNN en Español, and will stream on CNN.com's homepage and NYTimes.com's homepage. The...

      This debate will start at 8pm EST. From CNN's website:

      It will air exclusively on CNN, CNN International and CNN en Español, and will stream on CNN.com's homepage and NYTimes.com's homepage. The debate will also stream live on the following Facebook Pages: CNN, CNN International, CNN Politics, CNN Replay, AC360 and Erin Burnett OutFront.

      In addition, the debate will be available across mobile devices via CNN's and New York Times' apps for iOS and Android, via CNNgo apps for Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, Chromecast and Android TV, SiriusXM Channels 116, 454 and 795, the Westwood One Radio Network and National Public Radio. You can also ask Amazon's Alexa to play the debate, and the voice-controlled assistant will play the audio of the debate.

      19 votes