I subscribe to a magazine called Delayed Gratification that specialises in ‘slow news’, so it goes back over big news three months after it happened with long form journalism. I love it, and is pretty much my most trusted news source. https://www.slow-journalism.com
My hairdresser brought it up thinking it was real mid hair cut/dye. I wasn't game to disagree and risk my hair so I just said nothing. Blows my mind anyone would believe this stuff.
Me too! In completely different scenarios. I thought it would be confined to crappy facebook groups and the like but nope, people in real life in regional Australia.
I left the UK for NZ 15 years ago and the first thing I noticed was the media was so KIND here compared to the savage portrayal in the UK on the hundreds of tabloid paper headlines screaming at me from the garage forecourt (they have them all on display facing you, all variations on the same theme.. shock, scandal, outrage, blame). But in 15 years I see NZ has caught up.
I was recently watching Mr Bates and the Post Office, a dramatisation of the real crime the UK post office committed when they sacked hundreds of UK postmasters for fraud, when it was their own machines and systems.
The innocent people took years to be cleared, some of them chose to end their lives believing they never would be. But one woman I read an interview of said the stories of her 'theft' and crimes are still online, her name is still associated with huge financial liabilities and theft. And there is nothing she can do to change all those outlets, posts, images of her being arrested. She's a mum, and her children will now have the same life.
The post office have since gone on to pay liability money out to victims, but nothing has been done about the media. There used to be a saying 'today's news is tomorrow's fish n chip paper' but that's no longer true.
Honestly don't know anything about the US in comparison, but I now recall the multiple cases of people and celebrities driven to take their own lives based the vicious way they've been treated. When will something be done? 😭
I read these stories with horror. The fake contrition for the former CEO who talked all passive voice screamed psychopath/narcissist to me. It turned my stomach.
Yep, it’s pretty bad. I had to do a report recently for uni about the “truthiness effect”, it’s an effect researchers discovered when asking people to rate their perception of the truthfulness of a claim when it’s presented with or without a photo. They found even when the photo is related but neither proves or denies the claim, people perceive the claim to be more true when a photo is present. It seems the image aids in our cognitive processing and we mistake this ease for certainty. The same thing holds for information we’re repeatedly exposed to, even if we knew to begin with that a claim was false, the more times we hear it the more truthy it feels. There’s a free book called The Psychology of Fake News that talks about all this stuff and also some research that is happening to try and counteract these effects.
I deal with this a lot when teaching data viz. Just because it's a chart doesn't mean it's 'official', but the public assumes it's 100% legit. We vizzers are basically using the honor method, but we somehow come out with more credibility than the person reading it. We have the same data! I'm just making it pretty, yo.
Yes, but this comes in very handy when you need to present results to senior execs who don't really understand it anyway, and so they just want to see some "pretty graphs".
Charts and graphs are also SO easy to draw so that they misrepresent the actual data to the general public, or so that they look like they support your viewpoint when they don't, etc. The same can be said for running statistics (p hacking, etc) but that's a little tougher at least for a layperson to do. I see stupid charts ALL THE TIME in the news that are clearly bungled on purpose and are more or less click/rage bait and are misrepresenting actual studies behind them. I'm glad to hear there is a class in data visibility so that more people can understand that charts don't automatically equal legitimacy!
I had to do Business Data Analysis for the first year of my Wine Marketing degree (but WHY?! 😭 - it's long since been dropped from the requirements because lmost all of us doing the degree failed and had to take it twice/three times) The only thing I've used that information for is... scrolling straight past any graph. I know it could be a huge biased misrepresentation, and there's no way in hell I'm going to actually look at it to work out if it's a good graph or a shit graph. I'll read the numbers without pictures thanks 😅
All the people that cried out for 'citizen journalism' in the early aughts can get wrecked, this is the kind of stuff that happens once it runs rampant. Idiots informing idiots. And this isn't even the bad actors from hostile countries that use it to engineer a social apocalypse.
props for "get wrecked" which I haven't heard since the early aughts... Though things like "full send" and "send it" which were popular at the same time are still current I think. I'm totally down with the, er, sickness.
It's this thing some US states seem to do. It's so weird, and actually something I wanna press into for Flightless Bird. I mean courts are often open, in that members of the public can go and see a fair and open democracy in action. But to have it filmed and broadcast - that seems incredibly irresponsible.
Not sure but I would expect if I rolled into a courtroom with a camera and started to "Liz Gunn" it, the bailiff would take my camera and escort me out. Which is what should happen. Surely this would be the case in the US and NZ.
About 20 years ago our family was the target of a sustained legal campaign re the bounday of our land. At first, the issue was covered by print and radio media. We were described as usurpers and widely believed to be villains. When (two years later) our boundary was upheld by the Supreme Court of NZ, that was not covered by any media. Attacks are interesting, the truth is not.
Oof. Perfect example. I am so sorry you went through that. The results / corrections are always less sexy, can make the outlet look like idiots, and be less read.
Apologies for the confusion. I posted out of empathy for Corey and his family: imagine being captured doing something and it’s shared publicly with zero context (social media or otherwise). The majority of people have the ability to capture others’ moments with their smartphones, so what happens when a video is taken of someone in public and it’s shared everywhere, and what are the consequences?
Man it sucks realizing that we already live in the dystopian future we watched in movies growing up only it doesn't come along with that great hazy-city-with-a-slight-sepia-tone atmosphere (although, I'm in NYC so it is a little bit of that).
I was literally having this exact thought! Every now and again I try to rewind the VHS in my brain to be like "okay if I knew about this 10 years ago, what would I think?" and it's terrifying and downright wild.
It’s crazy how we’ve been living it the world like this, knowing we can’t trust everything we hear. But we all still march on going with the general consensus. David, I appreciate your reporting and I fully support you. This is truly one of the biggest problems we face today and you bringing light to it really helps.
I think it's still pretty ironic albeit way more tragic now with the additional information. It's still bizarre to be driving to a doctors office at the same time you have a court appearance, even if its on Zoom, people shouldn't be driving at all while doing a video call (license suspended or not).
There have been several videos of people similarly driving while participating in Zooms/video calls and it even happens at my own company - it feels dangerously stupid. It's easy to pull over and or stop and take the call vs driving distracted and putting others in danger. That was the most ironic part to me - his license had already been suspended at one point and then he's demonstrating unsafe driving on the call. It wasn't ideal for him or the other people on the road that day but I also get it's unfair to him to improperly report.
I definitely commented and I still agree with what I said - it still wasn't smart despite the situation being different and the details reported incorrectly. It's hard to not look at a screen when you are supposed to be and would have been better to pull off the road as soon as the call started, etc...
Thanks for getting to the truth of the matter though - the facts are important no matter.
Yeah, in an ideal world you'd pull over. I also think - life happens and we all make some dumb decisions - and I like to er towards, "this person was going through some shit so let's go easy".
Yeah, unfortunately we all are going through some shit and rarely ever catch a break. I feel like the stories presented aren’t matching up and that’s OK but it does feel like he tries to save face after and say he was driving his wife to an appointment when in the video he says it’s his appointment.
If you look at some articles now they say he never had a license his entire life. It’s all kinda of bullshit and non of us should care except it’s a little unsafe - that’s all I’m saying.
However, it's a Fox affiliate so probably more wrong information. Why are we invested? Why did it get shared to social media and the news? That's the real problem - not what he did or didn't do.
I was looking to see if anyone else commented this! I saw this in a few places on the internet, and as David says was one of those who didn't click through. I actually thought the uproar was because he was driving whilst on a video call, which I don't know about US but is illegal in Australia... And that the stupid part was he was doing it ON a call to court... I had totally missed the suspended licence part!
🤔Agree in principle - but more details on his visit to the Dr for his wife MIGHT reveal it was urgent? As in he might have felt he needed to get there ASAP, and unlike anyone else, he KNEW he was allowed to drive. And though I haven't actually done video calls, it is possible to have your phone handsfree & angled to do a Zoom call on speakerphone - not much different to watching your GPS screen while trying to navigate in an unknown & busy location while talking on speakerphone to someone. Just sayin' - we are still making assumptions & judgements.
In theory ANY distractions while driving are not ideal, but to single him out absent the lie that he was disqualified is still egregious when many other "legal" drivers are doing similar or worse and are anonymous... 🤷
Agree, however again regardless of his license situation- if he’s in a real emergency and needs to get his wife somewhere he should just tell the judge/his lawyer.
They could likely push his case back some if she needs to be rushed somewhere. However, I thought he said that HE had a doctor’s appointment in the original video. If it’s an appointment then he or they scheduled it at a bad time.
I’m not arguing… the facts are what’s been shown in video and then later in the article so far. Yes, we don’t have everything and we rarely do. I’m simply stating what I would do or how I would act in those situations. In a bad situation, you can still not do the right thing.
I don’t know that he did or didn’t but remember original said his appointment only to hear about his wife later. He could be trying to cover his tracks too. We have no idea.
Correction: he didn’t say whose appointment he was - he just says, “I’m pulling into my doctor’s office” but he says it nonchalantly so can’t imagine it’s an emergency.
I sometimes wonder if the internet is going to get to a point where it can't be cleaned up and we have to abandon the entire thing and start a whole new thing. Companies & universities continue to sign contracts that make tech -- that nobody wants -- mandatory. Bots, bad algorithms, AI, & just plain shit all just work on their own to perpetuate things and humans are left behind. And somehow, nobody is going to pull the plug on this thing even though humans no longer use it. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. We will continue to be told that it's a good thing, too. I'm not sure how but the reason behind it all is because someone is making money. It will make even less sense than it does now. And there will be some really wild and unexpected direct effects like maybe eradicating an entire population of a beloved species of cute animals, but still, it's okay, because that's just how the internet works.
Also, because this is heavy on my mind, I just want to say that the internet is a much sadder place right now because @dominoDaBombino's momb has left us. I don't know if you know anything about Cat Twitter but it's one of the few social places online with lots of joy and little drama. The accounts are run as if the cats themselves are writing the posts and most of them have their own quirky ways of speaking. Domino really stood out to me; he was a mischievous guy living in Baltimore with his 3 siblings (Jake, Elwood, Bigeyes), his mom (Nibbler), Burley the dog, & his human momb an dade. He was sharp & witty; just incredibly funny. I eventually became friends with the person behind the account and talked with her more on her personal account. I had planned to go up to Baltimore to meet her but all my plans for the last two months got derailed because of my dad's death. I saw that Dom hadn't tweeted in a while so I sent a message asking if he was okay and Katherine's sister and partner responded with the news that she has died of suicide. My inquiry and the response blew up -- and are still blowing up -- with replies from Cat Twitter accounts all over the world. I'm not a popular person online so this is the first time I've ever had a situation where I just couldn't keep up with my mentions. The messages and stories just keep pouring in. Everybody loved Domino. Everybody loved Katherine. She brightened our days and made us laugh and even those of us that followed her much less popular human account (@katherinetheok) had no idea what she was going through.
I'm not sure there was a point to me sharing this story other than to showcase the humanity of the internet and how we need to fight to keep it......but maybe go take a look at Dom's account. It's silly, cute, funny, and sometimes touching. I can't look at this post without crying now: https://x.com/dominoDaBombino/status/1792362609737650642
Oh, I am so fucking sorry to hear about your dad. And your online buddy. I had someone I'd known from online forever pass away last week, and it was crazy how hard it hit. Hoping to make their memorial in a few weekends' time.
🫂 And this is the GOOD side of the internet that we must cling onto & elevate - not losing someone to suicide of course 💔 & I am so sorry for your loss of someone special. But the ability to genuinely connect to strangers like we do here on Webworm & another community did via Cat Twitter helps so many people to deal with the dark side of life & the news cycle. Thank you for sharing - it is a positive story of connection & caring despite the sadness. 🫂
"This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you.""
Thanks for sharing, David. Lots of great insight in there.
For someone as chronically online as I am, I am surprisingly tech stupid....and all of this makes it so I kind of don't mind being that way. The biggest thing is that I have never owned a smartphone before; I still use a flip phone with no internet & limited texting. I love taking photos but my DSLR is more than 20 years old at this point. And, of course, I am talking to you on my laptop which is very old and quite literally falling apart. My parents are always urging me to move forward and at least get a smartphone but honestly, I'm being pulled in the other direction. I'm looking for a mostly low tech job where I get to deal directly with people and I'm just not interested in dealing with tech unless that is a dedicated thing which I am doing. (The only exception to all of this is that I wish I had GPS/directions when traveling. For now, I look at maps -- yes, maps -- and write or print my directions. I do have a great sense of direction as a direct result of having less tech, though!) On the more extreme side of things, there is a commune less than an hour away from me and I sometimes fantasize about just giving everything up and moving there. I don't think I'd actually do that, though; I like my stuff and my freedom too much.
even the silly AI generated stuff is everywhere, I can't believe how annoyed I get when I see yet another fake kitchen with comments asking "where can I get those tiles? what paint colour is this?" and the poster replies with fake names of stuff. And that's pretty low importance on the shit heap of misinformation that's out there
The volume of AI posts on my social media feeds is off the charts lately! But so many people don’t recognise it for what it is, sadly. Does not bode well for the future…..
Classic yesterday… trump being interviewed by his idiot mates at Fox - “I never said lock her up”. And his MAGA people will reorganise their brainworms and it is now so. ‘He never said lock her up.’
Oh - you're so right! I saw that original post and certainly, until now, thought the man must have been a fool. The answer demands we give far more attention to every darn thing we see and read than we think we have time for.
It really is unfortunate how very easy it is to completely ruin a normal person's life with one headline...and yet...here's Trump with countless headlines and convictions...and somehow he's making money on it...what is this world ya'll?
I subscribe to a magazine called Delayed Gratification that specialises in ‘slow news’, so it goes back over big news three months after it happened with long form journalism. I love it, and is pretty much my most trusted news source. https://www.slow-journalism.com
Never heard of that - will check it out. Thanks.
David, I hate how often I need to cite your writing on the kitty litter hoax in real-life conversations. Ugh it came up just last week. Happy Pride!
It sucks, but I am so, so glad you have it to reference. Ugh - what a weird situation to be in.
Unfortunately every time you disprove the hoax in one location, the believers insist it is true in a different location.
Fucking. Endless.
........and real life "Whack a Mole" isn't as much fun as it said it would be on the box. Plus, you know, criminal charges. DAMHIK...
My hairdresser brought it up thinking it was real mid hair cut/dye. I wasn't game to disagree and risk my hair so I just said nothing. Blows my mind anyone would believe this stuff.
Me too! In completely different scenarios. I thought it would be confined to crappy facebook groups and the like but nope, people in real life in regional Australia.
I left the UK for NZ 15 years ago and the first thing I noticed was the media was so KIND here compared to the savage portrayal in the UK on the hundreds of tabloid paper headlines screaming at me from the garage forecourt (they have them all on display facing you, all variations on the same theme.. shock, scandal, outrage, blame). But in 15 years I see NZ has caught up.
I was recently watching Mr Bates and the Post Office, a dramatisation of the real crime the UK post office committed when they sacked hundreds of UK postmasters for fraud, when it was their own machines and systems.
The innocent people took years to be cleared, some of them chose to end their lives believing they never would be. But one woman I read an interview of said the stories of her 'theft' and crimes are still online, her name is still associated with huge financial liabilities and theft. And there is nothing she can do to change all those outlets, posts, images of her being arrested. She's a mum, and her children will now have the same life.
The post office have since gone on to pay liability money out to victims, but nothing has been done about the media. There used to be a saying 'today's news is tomorrow's fish n chip paper' but that's no longer true.
The UK's press is absolutely savage and has always stunned me. Infinitely worse than the US which is saying a lot, huh.
Honestly don't know anything about the US in comparison, but I now recall the multiple cases of people and celebrities driven to take their own lives based the vicious way they've been treated. When will something be done? 😭
I read these stories with horror. The fake contrition for the former CEO who talked all passive voice screamed psychopath/narcissist to me. It turned my stomach.
The poor woman is on an excellent Guardian podcast. It is so disarming to hear her tell the story.
I watched that mini series last week and it broke my heart! Those poor postal workers 😔
I watched it then watched the documentary where the real people featured, it really hit home.
Yep, it’s pretty bad. I had to do a report recently for uni about the “truthiness effect”, it’s an effect researchers discovered when asking people to rate their perception of the truthfulness of a claim when it’s presented with or without a photo. They found even when the photo is related but neither proves or denies the claim, people perceive the claim to be more true when a photo is present. It seems the image aids in our cognitive processing and we mistake this ease for certainty. The same thing holds for information we’re repeatedly exposed to, even if we knew to begin with that a claim was false, the more times we hear it the more truthy it feels. There’s a free book called The Psychology of Fake News that talks about all this stuff and also some research that is happening to try and counteract these effects.
I deal with this a lot when teaching data viz. Just because it's a chart doesn't mean it's 'official', but the public assumes it's 100% legit. We vizzers are basically using the honor method, but we somehow come out with more credibility than the person reading it. We have the same data! I'm just making it pretty, yo.
so, everything I know about data visualisation I know from reading this article. And having the graphic pinned to the notice board in my office for six years. No, it ain't going anywhere. https://nassoskappa.com/blog-posts/can-wrong-design-be-good-design
Yes, but this comes in very handy when you need to present results to senior execs who don't really understand it anyway, and so they just want to see some "pretty graphs".
Charts and graphs are also SO easy to draw so that they misrepresent the actual data to the general public, or so that they look like they support your viewpoint when they don't, etc. The same can be said for running statistics (p hacking, etc) but that's a little tougher at least for a layperson to do. I see stupid charts ALL THE TIME in the news that are clearly bungled on purpose and are more or less click/rage bait and are misrepresenting actual studies behind them. I'm glad to hear there is a class in data visibility so that more people can understand that charts don't automatically equal legitimacy!
I had to do Business Data Analysis for the first year of my Wine Marketing degree (but WHY?! 😭 - it's long since been dropped from the requirements because lmost all of us doing the degree failed and had to take it twice/three times) The only thing I've used that information for is... scrolling straight past any graph. I know it could be a huge biased misrepresentation, and there's no way in hell I'm going to actually look at it to work out if it's a good graph or a shit graph. I'll read the numbers without pictures thanks 😅
All the people that cried out for 'citizen journalism' in the early aughts can get wrecked, this is the kind of stuff that happens once it runs rampant. Idiots informing idiots. And this isn't even the bad actors from hostile countries that use it to engineer a social apocalypse.
Worst timeline ever.
props for "get wrecked" which I haven't heard since the early aughts... Though things like "full send" and "send it" which were popular at the same time are still current I think. I'm totally down with the, er, sickness.
Context is a powerful part of a story.
Roll back here for a moment. Why, was it even possible to get a recording of this court appearance??!!?
What possible good can come from this?
It's this thing some US states seem to do. It's so weird, and actually something I wanna press into for Flightless Bird. I mean courts are often open, in that members of the public can go and see a fair and open democracy in action. But to have it filmed and broadcast - that seems incredibly irresponsible.
Not sure but I would expect if I rolled into a courtroom with a camera and started to "Liz Gunn" it, the bailiff would take my camera and escort me out. Which is what should happen. Surely this would be the case in the US and NZ.
Perp walks, mugshots, court recordings..... Dystopia much?
About 20 years ago our family was the target of a sustained legal campaign re the bounday of our land. At first, the issue was covered by print and radio media. We were described as usurpers and widely believed to be villains. When (two years later) our boundary was upheld by the Supreme Court of NZ, that was not covered by any media. Attacks are interesting, the truth is not.
Oof. Perfect example. I am so sorry you went through that. The results / corrections are always less sexy, can make the outlet look like idiots, and be less read.
And so here we are.
I feel so bad for Corey and his family. Imagine having a very horrible moment in your life captured and shared by millions, and it goes viral.
Recording and posting to social media is so easy to do now. The spread of misinformation is truly like a virus.
I don’t realize how this got posted in the first place - I know it’s public but shouldn’t be on social media.
My second thought in my post deals mostly with the nature of how stuff gets spread around. I had never seen this story until David posted it.
I was wondering that too
Apologies for the confusion. I posted out of empathy for Corey and his family: imagine being captured doing something and it’s shared publicly with zero context (social media or otherwise). The majority of people have the ability to capture others’ moments with their smartphones, so what happens when a video is taken of someone in public and it’s shared everywhere, and what are the consequences?
Man it sucks realizing that we already live in the dystopian future we watched in movies growing up only it doesn't come along with that great hazy-city-with-a-slight-sepia-tone atmosphere (although, I'm in NYC so it is a little bit of that).
I was literally having this exact thought! Every now and again I try to rewind the VHS in my brain to be like "okay if I knew about this 10 years ago, what would I think?" and it's terrifying and downright wild.
I love the idea of a VHS in your brain. I think my brain runs BETA tho. Lol.
Betamax was better quality so you’re doing alright!
It’s crazy how we’ve been living it the world like this, knowing we can’t trust everything we hear. But we all still march on going with the general consensus. David, I appreciate your reporting and I fully support you. This is truly one of the biggest problems we face today and you bringing light to it really helps.
I think it's still pretty ironic albeit way more tragic now with the additional information. It's still bizarre to be driving to a doctors office at the same time you have a court appearance, even if its on Zoom, people shouldn't be driving at all while doing a video call (license suspended or not).
There have been several videos of people similarly driving while participating in Zooms/video calls and it even happens at my own company - it feels dangerously stupid. It's easy to pull over and or stop and take the call vs driving distracted and putting others in danger. That was the most ironic part to me - his license had already been suspended at one point and then he's demonstrating unsafe driving on the call. It wasn't ideal for him or the other people on the road that day but I also get it's unfair to him to improperly report.
I definitely commented and I still agree with what I said - it still wasn't smart despite the situation being different and the details reported incorrectly. It's hard to not look at a screen when you are supposed to be and would have been better to pull off the road as soon as the call started, etc...
Thanks for getting to the truth of the matter though - the facts are important no matter.
Yeah, in an ideal world you'd pull over. I also think - life happens and we all make some dumb decisions - and I like to er towards, "this person was going through some shit so let's go easy".
Yeah, unfortunately we all are going through some shit and rarely ever catch a break. I feel like the stories presented aren’t matching up and that’s OK but it does feel like he tries to save face after and say he was driving his wife to an appointment when in the video he says it’s his appointment.
If you look at some articles now they say he never had a license his entire life. It’s all kinda of bullshit and non of us should care except it’s a little unsafe - that’s all I’m saying.
Sorry, he simply says "Actually I'm pulling into my doctors office actually... just give me one second. I'm parking right now."
However, he doesn't appear stressed or panicked like you would in an emergency so I think the wife part was made up as far as I can tell.
There is also this... https://www.fox2detroit.com/video/1466424
However, it's a Fox affiliate so probably more wrong information. Why are we invested? Why did it get shared to social media and the news? That's the real problem - not what he did or didn't do.
I was looking to see if anyone else commented this! I saw this in a few places on the internet, and as David says was one of those who didn't click through. I actually thought the uproar was because he was driving whilst on a video call, which I don't know about US but is illegal in Australia... And that the stupid part was he was doing it ON a call to court... I had totally missed the suspended licence part!
🤔Agree in principle - but more details on his visit to the Dr for his wife MIGHT reveal it was urgent? As in he might have felt he needed to get there ASAP, and unlike anyone else, he KNEW he was allowed to drive. And though I haven't actually done video calls, it is possible to have your phone handsfree & angled to do a Zoom call on speakerphone - not much different to watching your GPS screen while trying to navigate in an unknown & busy location while talking on speakerphone to someone. Just sayin' - we are still making assumptions & judgements.
In theory ANY distractions while driving are not ideal, but to single him out absent the lie that he was disqualified is still egregious when many other "legal" drivers are doing similar or worse and are anonymous... 🤷
Agree, however again regardless of his license situation- if he’s in a real emergency and needs to get his wife somewhere he should just tell the judge/his lawyer.
They could likely push his case back some if she needs to be rushed somewhere. However, I thought he said that HE had a doctor’s appointment in the original video. If it’s an appointment then he or they scheduled it at a bad time.
My point was, we are STILL arguing about his situation WITHOUT THE FULL FACTS - further, it is none of our d*#@d business?
I’m not arguing… the facts are what’s been shown in video and then later in the article so far. Yes, we don’t have everything and we rarely do. I’m simply stating what I would do or how I would act in those situations. In a bad situation, you can still not do the right thing.
I don’t know that he did or didn’t but remember original said his appointment only to hear about his wife later. He could be trying to cover his tracks too. We have no idea.
Correction: he didn’t say whose appointment he was - he just says, “I’m pulling into my doctor’s office” but he says it nonchalantly so can’t imagine it’s an emergency.
Yeah there’s no way that would be legal in Aotearoa New Zealand
I sometimes wonder if the internet is going to get to a point where it can't be cleaned up and we have to abandon the entire thing and start a whole new thing. Companies & universities continue to sign contracts that make tech -- that nobody wants -- mandatory. Bots, bad algorithms, AI, & just plain shit all just work on their own to perpetuate things and humans are left behind. And somehow, nobody is going to pull the plug on this thing even though humans no longer use it. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. We will continue to be told that it's a good thing, too. I'm not sure how but the reason behind it all is because someone is making money. It will make even less sense than it does now. And there will be some really wild and unexpected direct effects like maybe eradicating an entire population of a beloved species of cute animals, but still, it's okay, because that's just how the internet works.
Also, because this is heavy on my mind, I just want to say that the internet is a much sadder place right now because @dominoDaBombino's momb has left us. I don't know if you know anything about Cat Twitter but it's one of the few social places online with lots of joy and little drama. The accounts are run as if the cats themselves are writing the posts and most of them have their own quirky ways of speaking. Domino really stood out to me; he was a mischievous guy living in Baltimore with his 3 siblings (Jake, Elwood, Bigeyes), his mom (Nibbler), Burley the dog, & his human momb an dade. He was sharp & witty; just incredibly funny. I eventually became friends with the person behind the account and talked with her more on her personal account. I had planned to go up to Baltimore to meet her but all my plans for the last two months got derailed because of my dad's death. I saw that Dom hadn't tweeted in a while so I sent a message asking if he was okay and Katherine's sister and partner responded with the news that she has died of suicide. My inquiry and the response blew up -- and are still blowing up -- with replies from Cat Twitter accounts all over the world. I'm not a popular person online so this is the first time I've ever had a situation where I just couldn't keep up with my mentions. The messages and stories just keep pouring in. Everybody loved Domino. Everybody loved Katherine. She brightened our days and made us laugh and even those of us that followed her much less popular human account (@katherinetheok) had no idea what she was going through.
I'm not sure there was a point to me sharing this story other than to showcase the humanity of the internet and how we need to fight to keep it......but maybe go take a look at Dom's account. It's silly, cute, funny, and sometimes touching. I can't look at this post without crying now: https://x.com/dominoDaBombino/status/1792362609737650642
Oh, I am so fucking sorry to hear about your dad. And your online buddy. I had someone I'd known from online forever pass away last week, and it was crazy how hard it hit. Hoping to make their memorial in a few weekends' time.
Thinking of ya, Big Sam x
I'm sorry for your loss. She sounds like a real light in the darkness, and the internet is a worse place without her. <3
😔
🫂 And this is the GOOD side of the internet that we must cling onto & elevate - not losing someone to suicide of course 💔 & I am so sorry for your loss of someone special. But the ability to genuinely connect to strangers like we do here on Webworm & another community did via Cat Twitter helps so many people to deal with the dark side of life & the news cycle. Thank you for sharing - it is a positive story of connection & caring despite the sadness. 🫂
Oh, the internet is definitely breaking. This piece is a really good read - you might dig it: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
"This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you.""
Thanks for sharing, David. Lots of great insight in there.
For someone as chronically online as I am, I am surprisingly tech stupid....and all of this makes it so I kind of don't mind being that way. The biggest thing is that I have never owned a smartphone before; I still use a flip phone with no internet & limited texting. I love taking photos but my DSLR is more than 20 years old at this point. And, of course, I am talking to you on my laptop which is very old and quite literally falling apart. My parents are always urging me to move forward and at least get a smartphone but honestly, I'm being pulled in the other direction. I'm looking for a mostly low tech job where I get to deal directly with people and I'm just not interested in dealing with tech unless that is a dedicated thing which I am doing. (The only exception to all of this is that I wish I had GPS/directions when traveling. For now, I look at maps -- yes, maps -- and write or print my directions. I do have a great sense of direction as a direct result of having less tech, though!) On the more extreme side of things, there is a commune less than an hour away from me and I sometimes fantasize about just giving everything up and moving there. I don't think I'd actually do that, though; I like my stuff and my freedom too much.
Integrity in reporting, fact-checking, and even absorbing information becomes increasingly rare every damn day
And harder to do. I am getting worse at it, just due to the volume of rubbish. My spidey senses are still pretty good, but I still get fooled daily.
even the silly AI generated stuff is everywhere, I can't believe how annoyed I get when I see yet another fake kitchen with comments asking "where can I get those tiles? what paint colour is this?" and the poster replies with fake names of stuff. And that's pretty low importance on the shit heap of misinformation that's out there
This is a really great piece on an increasingly poisoned internet: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
Thanks! Will check it out!
The volume of AI posts on my social media feeds is off the charts lately! But so many people don’t recognise it for what it is, sadly. Does not bode well for the future…..
Classic yesterday… trump being interviewed by his idiot mates at Fox - “I never said lock her up”. And his MAGA people will reorganise their brainworms and it is now so. ‘He never said lock her up.’
Oh - you're so right! I saw that original post and certainly, until now, thought the man must have been a fool. The answer demands we give far more attention to every darn thing we see and read than we think we have time for.
It really is unfortunate how very easy it is to completely ruin a normal person's life with one headline...and yet...here's Trump with countless headlines and convictions...and somehow he's making money on it...what is this world ya'll?