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Faked Out

Nathan Jurgenson 11-13-2018

To see truth as dying and reality as increasingly fake is self-flattering. It feels good because it allows readers to affirm that they are smart, a stable island of reasonable good in a chaotically bad world. If reality itself is in crisis, then you can posit yourself as the savior, the slayer of chaos dragons, by simply continuing to do what you were already doing: Consume the same news that misinformed you about the election and that today can only describe reality as bizarre. Support those politicians and political strategies that lost. Fight for the recent past that gave us Trumpism in the first place. Float adrift in a bubble of those who have nothing left to do but complain about bubbles.

Faked Out Featured

Haunted Village

Joe Sutton 11-08-2018

Toward the end of the 19th century, medical science viewed epileptics as straddling the line between sanity and insanity. The etiology of the disease was not understood, and seizures were seen as uncontrollable and dangerous periods of insanity that could launch an epileptic into a murderous rage, no matter the nature of their ordinary behavior. The perceived danger of these fits led to the forced institutionalization of epileptics. One idea, held to be progressive at the time, was to take them out of “lunatic asylums” and place them in their own institutions — not because they were seen as requiring less supervision so much as their seizures distressed other patients.

Haunted Village

Personal Panopticons

L. M. Sacasas 11-05-2018

Older conceptions of privacy — which construe privacy as a merely individual concern — may misread the threat pervasive surveillance poses, leading to a paradox in which a deeper concern for privacy produces only more despair or indifference about it. Privacy pragmatists may conclude that they have nothing to hide, or that the capture of their anonymized consumer data poses no particular risk to them. They may be right on both counts, but they are missing the collective privacy risks presented by a networked society.

Personal Panopticons

The Last Format

David Turner 10-29-2018

The mp3 seemed like the endpoint for music consumption, the last format: free, accessible, unencumbered, it enabled fans to enjoy their favorite artists with minimal interference by corporate entities. But, while it took a decade, the music industry found a way to dash those utopian hopes. The mp3 was just another format, after all, and eventually the industry managed to undercut its relevance, partly by appealing to the ideals it once represented.

The Last Format

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