Behind the aphorism’s sudden ubiquity lies a long and surprising history—one that yields a fresh perspective on our present technocultural moment. It suggests that Facebook’s business model is neither as novel as it might seem, nor as deterministic of its values as critics assume. The pithiness that makes “you are the product” so quotable risks obscuring the complex pact between Facebook and its users, in ways that make social media’s problems seem inevitable and insoluble. They’re not—but if we want to fix them, the first thing we need to do is redefine our relationship.
Author: Douglas McLennan
French Museum Discovers Half Its Art Is Fake
An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist’s death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist’s birthplace in southern France, were fakes.
The Baltimore Museum Of Art’s Plan To “Correct The Historic Record” By Deaccessioning
“The decision to do this rests very strongly on my commitment to rewrite the postwar canon,” Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford told artnet News. And while institutions sell art to fund new acquisitions every so often, the BMA’s latest deaccession stands out. While museums usually sell work to trade up, angling for major pieces by the hottest artists, the BMA is instead expanding out, redirecting the funds to correct the historical record. “To state it explicitly and act on it with discipline—there is no question that is an unusual and radical act to take,” Bedford says.
Digital Art On Your Wall By Subscription
Meural is one of the more notable startups in the digital art subscription space. For hardware that is ultimately just a high-end digital photo frame, the companies are more focused on the idea that a certain type of consumer is interested in a monthly subscription to digital art. It’s a wild idea that has been a tough one to chase.
How Fabulousness Animates Queer Culture
How to define a word that’s so slippery yet so engrained in everyday use? It’s a tricky task, but moore offers the four main characteristics of fabulousness: It doesn’t have to be expensive; it can be secured in innumerable ways; because it’s largely practiced by queer and other marginalized people, it’s “dangerous, political, confrontational, [and] risky”; and it’s about being a spectacle not only to be seen, but also because certain people are over-surveilled and undervalued. Put another way, fabulousness is primarily about a swashbuckling and transgressive world-making.
Afraid The Robots Will Take Over? Relax, Says Steven Pinker
Intelligence has to be defined relative to goals and the knowledge needed to attain them. In any case the argument against the doomsday fear-mongering of existing AI extends to more powerful systems: any system that monomaniacally pursued one goal (such as making paperclips) while being oblivious to every other goal (such as not turning human beings into paperclips) is not artificially intelligent: it’s artificially stupid, and unlike anything a technologically sophisticated society would ever invent and empower. And scenarios in which the systems take over themselves commit the fallacy that intelligence implies a will to power, which comes from confusing two traits that just happened to come bundled in Homo sapiens because we are products of Darwinian natural selection.
Are Fake Books On Amazon Being Used For Money Laundering?
“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.
A New Institute To Study Failure
Research on failure as a motivator is limited, though the evidence that does exist suggests that students can grow both from learning about the failures of other successful people and from experiencing failure themselves. Crucially, for failure to “work,” research indicates that educators and parents need to encourage students to figure out what went wrong and try to improve. “Failure needs to give people a chance to regroup and rewind the clock,” Xiaodong Lin-Siegler explained. Her main goal, she said, is to help students realize that failure is a normal part of the process of learning.
How The Supreme Court Broke Hollywood’s Movie Theatre Studio System 70 Years Ago
The Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling agreed that the studios were giving preference to their own theaters, which was a violation of antitrust laws. Targeted were Metro, Warners, Paramount, RKO and 20th Century Fox, which were ordered to get rid of their theater holdings. Also affected were “the little three defendants, United Artists, Universal and Columbia,” according to Variety at the time.
What It Takes To Be A Festival Director These Days
Preserving a special sense of meaning is pivotal for Jane Moss. “There are lots of festivals around. You need to stay focused on a festival that has meaning of some sort.” She has found that the most successful performing arts events “always have enormous passion attached. For a festival, you need somebody who is an advocate and who is passionate about what they are presenting. Audiences do not want programming based on a focus group. They tend to respond to vision. If you start with the premise: ‘We want an audience of XX and therefore will do YY, because we think we know what they will like’, it almost never works. The audience will respond to a director who has passion.”