Tags: destruction

Probable events poison reality - by Rob Horning

No matter what a specific technology does — convert the world’s energy into gambling tokens, encourage people to live inside a helmet, replace living cognition with a statistical analysis of past language use, etc., etc. — all of them are treated mainly as instances of the “creative destruction” necessary for perpetuating capitalism.

Meet the new hype, same as the old hype:

Recent technological pitches — crypto, the “metaverse,” and generative AI — seem harder to defend as inevitable universal improvements of anything at all. It is all too easy to see them as gratuitous innovations whose imagined use cases seem far-fetched at best and otherwise detrimental to all but the select few likely to profit from imposing them on society. They make it starkly clear that the main purpose of technology developed under capitalism is to secure profit and sustain an unjust economic system and social hierarchies, not to advance human flourishing.

Consequently, the ideological defense of technology becomes a bit more desperate.

Shame. – Dirty Feed

Deleting your old thoughts may be giving your older self a kick they really don’t deserve. And the beauty of having an archive is that you don’t need to decide whether you were right or not. Your views, with a date attached, can stand as a reflection of a specific moment in time.

Reconciling every past view you’ve ever had with how you feel now isn’t required. It sounds exhausting, frankly.

How Yahoo Became an Internet Villain - The Atlantic

Andy, Jason, and Maciej testify against Yahoo.

The Blog That Disappeared - The New York Times

Fortunately there’s a back-up on the Internet Archive, but this tale of Google’s overnight destruction of fourteen years of writing is truly infuriating.

When we use their services, we trust that companies like Google will preserve some of the most personal things we have to share. They trust that we will not read the fine print.

When you pitch your tent in someone else’s walled garden, they can tear down your home whenever they want.

Blogging Ourselves to Live

The internet never forgets? Bollocks!

We were told — warned, even — that what we put on the internet would be forever; that we should think very carefully about what we commit to the digital page. And a lot of us did. We put thought into it, we put heart into, we wrote our truths. We let our real lives bleed onto the page, onto the internet, onto the blog. We were told, “Once you put this here, it will remain forever.” And we acted accordingly.

This is a beautiful love-letter to the archival web, and a horrifying description of its betrayal:

When they’re erased by a company abruptly and without warning, it’s something of a new-age arson.

Focusing on our future — some changes to our product line-up

What an Orwellian title for a blog post announcing the wholesale destruction of user’s content. Oh, Yahoo, you sound so proud of your cavalier attitude towards the collective culture that you have harvested.

Vile fuckwits.

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

A fascinating blog documenting the secrecy around nuclear weaponry, past and present, by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institue of Physics.

ID card database destroyed - a set on Flickr

For once, I’m happy to see data being destroyed.

The Morning News - Still Life

Beautiful images of destruction. "I drop the figurine from the same height in complete darkness while the lens of the camera is open. When the figurine hits the ground, the sound triggers the lights to go off for a fraction of a second."

HYDESim: High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator

This is cool and frightening in equal measures. Eric uses the Google API to demonstrate the effect of nuclear detonations on American cities.