Posts Tagged ‘ facebook ’

I sold my soul to Twitter

In a more elegant time I might have made a pact with the devil so that I could play a mean slide guitar riff. In our world I have to choose between facebook or twitter, both of which have the devil licked when it comes to controlling your soul.

Endless dialogue rages on in both places, people post, and post, and comment and star, and like, and retweet and post irritatingly positive quotes from dead people who never had accounts on either service.

“Why do we do all this?” you might reflexively ask yourself. Or if you are one of the few who stand in the sidelines, you might be screaming “What are you narcissistic morons doing?”

The truth is it is more probable than not that you are actually already on facebook now, playing in the walled garden, and you only stumbled on this because someone posted it. That is the big ugly fact of facebook, it won, it has done what AOL tried and failed, it has created a curated internet. And we use it simply because experiencing the web through the lens of our friendship network is either more useful or fun, I am not yet sure which. Will we ever know which of these is the truth?

If facebook is still here in 10 years then I would err on the side of usefulness, otherwise,… well it was an entertaining way to spend 100 billion dollars.

As for me I have walked over to the twitter side, it is even more shallow and narcissistic than facebook, with a cult of personality culture, and frivolous follow and unfollow ethic.

But there is a certain kind of honesty to the open shallowness of twitter. No one on twitter thinks it is anything other than narcissism, and they still read things that don’t exist only inside twitter. People come back to twitter for a moment of entertainment, but they are not trapped there, it is a game, it doesn’t have your photo albums, or your videos, or your friend’s birthdays or farmville. It is just people talking, joking, bullshitting, flirting, and desperately trying to be famous or sell stuff.

So I sold them my soul, I don’t need friends, I need followers.

2012
05/17
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Mediamash
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Osama Follows Your Tweets

Even if you have been living under a rock with Osama Bin Laden you probably know that he is now dead. Apparently, one of his wives helped identify him as a priority target as the strike team that will not be acknowledged stormed through his secret compound. Sadly, Bin Laden lived his last days without access to the Internet, so if he was ignoring your friend request on Facebook it really wasn’t personal. It numbs the mind to think of all the LOL Cats and free music that he denied himself in order to avoid leaving a digital trail that would betray his location. Ironically, it was exactly the absence of Internet access that created enough suspicion to identify his hideaway. Had Bin Laden been kicking back surfing the web, he may have been able to avoid his premature expiry as his neighbor Sohaib Athar was merrily tweeting a complaint about the attack helicopters hovering over his secret compound. However, this would have only helped him if he had been explicitly following Athar’s tweets, or if Athar was using GPS based location mapping for his tweets. So while you are all complaining about Apple and Google grabbing too much of our data, just take a moment to think about that poor little terrorist, who kept us all entertained for the last decade, and how he might have at least gone out with a decent chase scene if he had just embraced the end of privacy.

2011
05/03
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Mediamash
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My website smells

I was just pondering the topic of website content, when I remembered reading about technologies back in 2000 that would allow us to transmit smells over the Internet. Just think of the possibilities, you could sample flowers or coffee before ordering over the Internet, when you read you favorite trashy gossip blog you could smell your favorite movie stars, pop stars, not to mention the bloggers themselves. I realize of course that there are some things that you might not want to share, but the applications are enormous. Just imagine next time you are on Facebook, amidst all the sheep that are thrown at you, you also get sprayed with skunk juice, or monkey pheromone extract. The mind boggles, the possibilities are indeed so exciting that someone has dedicated a blog entirely to this magical technology, although the PhP errors in the sidebar don’t inspire a great deal of confidence.

If you are completely freaked out about the idea that next time you Skype with someone they may be able to smell your onion breath, you might find a myriad of other gadgets that will come to the rescue. Of course an easier way is to simply set up a virtual smell, like digital cologne that is sprayed in place of your physical aroma, a sort of smelly avatar (smellatar, smavatar, or smell-o-tar). That way when you are in second-life you can really smell like a vampire, or whatever the hell kind of body you inhabit in there. But until all these wondrous inventions are materialized we will just have to rely on word associations to conjure appropriate aromas. So if i had to pick something appropriate which captures the ideals and environment of this blog it would be: old socks.

2011
01/19
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Mediamash
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The Social Network

Last night I found myself in an alternate universe in which I was living in a college share house with my old colleagues Mark and Nathan. It looked a little like the dormitory from The Social Network, but neither of those guys look (or act) like Zuckerberg. We were having a long geeky discussion on the merits of php. I think this component of the dream was inspired by the quote I read from Eben Moglen that facebook is just “some PHP doodads”. I am kind of freaked out though, that my subconscious wove together these themes and then stuck Mark and Nathan in there.

Anyway. The evening in this alternate universe passed with drinking and geeky discussions and the dream segued to morning. I awoke to discover that the bastards had conspired to get up before me and eat all the good breakfast stuff. As I woke up (in this universe) I was still peering into a fridge full of half eaten meals, and grumbling to myself about the fact that they never left me enough space for my stuff.

2010
12/15
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