This field guide looks at social media that works on different “logics” than do Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. It features communities that have tried consciously to use different models than surveillance capitalism and includes the work of collaborators in other countries and subcultures.

We need to be more disciplined about feeding the trolls. Last year, I wrote a column about the U.S. World Cup team and the unexpected lesson it taught us on its march to world domination: Our greatest weapon is our attention and how we choose to wield it.

The Turing Test has a serious problem: it relies too much on deception… Consider the interrogator asking questions like these: How tall are you?
 Tell me about your parents.

At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes of CNN, H&M, and HP, and ask for help shopping, or the latest headlines.

Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking.

Photo: Faulkner at Virginia, © 2010 Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia; Author Stephen Railton.

In a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Nicolas Cage is one of the most versatile actors of all time.Nicolas Cage moves fruit to mouth with imperceptible motion.Nicolas Cage doesn’t usually like to admit his feelings.Nicolas Cage’s face hand painted on a denim jacket.Nicolas Cage was attractive in the 1980s.Nicolas Cage meant to steal the Declaration of Independence, But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage can do anything you can do better.Nicolas Cage surfs with the emotions of others.Nicolas Cage has a way with words.YESTERDAY, I REPLACED ALL OF OUR FAMILY PHOTOS WITH NICOLAS CAGE’S FACE, AND MY PARENTS STILL HAVEN’T NOTICED.Keep Calm And Imagine Nicolas Cage Saying : “Mumbo Jumbo.”Nicolas Cage leaps out, cackling and howling at the moon.Nicolas Cage texts with no spaces.Nicolas Cage sings “Love Shack” by the B-52’s.Nicolas Cage’s Face on Every Character in ‘The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’.Nicolas Cage is looking at himself in a mirror right now.Nicolas Cage owns a 9-foot-tall pyramid in New Orleans and plans to be buried in it. But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage stars as Nicolas Cage in: Nicolas Cage.Nicolas Cage smells like new born baby birds.Find out how Nicolas Cage handles his relationships and test what you and Nicolas Cage have going in love, marriage, friendship, partnership, dating and more.Sometimes at parties, two or more people ask Nicolas Cage questions at the same time.Nicolas Cage meets Shia Labeouf at the Oscars when competing in the same category. Shia Labeouf teaches Nicolas Cage how to ‘feel’.Nicolas Cage gets more than he bargained for during the new moon.Nicolas Cage sponsored by Crocs on Internet Explorer.Nicolas Cage isn’t affected by water, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, since he isn’t a normal cat.Nicolas Cage Performs John Cage’s Silent Masterpiece, “4:33”.Nicolas Cage became the first person to ever check his email without a computer, But instead he stole her heart.Nicolas Cage is switching on the Christmas lights in Bath.“Some religious extremists speculate Nicolas Cage’s head is a hollow vessel that angels will occupy on Judgment Day.”Please don’t masturbate, Nicolas cage.Nicolas cage thinks YOU are a terrible actor.Nicolas Cage’s condition is caused by two magnetic poles.Nicolas Cage is on a plane full of convicts.Nicolas Cage developed his own acting method, and it’s called Nouveau Shamanic.Nicolas Cage rode a centaur through a local Woolworths demanding ‘all the midget gems’.Nicolas Cage is inspired by his pet cobra.Nicolas Cage Pisses Fire.Nicolas Cage is the pinnacle of all human achievement.Nicolas Cage was temporary President of Angola for six months in 1997.Nicolas Cage is at home, reading a new script and drinking coffee, when he, after a short period of time and a couple of sudden happenings, finds himself in Equestria, whereupon he is arrested. But instead he stole her heart.Tonight: Nicolas Cage WILL be here.When I die, throw pictures of Nicolas Cage into my grave.

The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks; Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...

All this, I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.

I’m particularly interested in the political uses of technology-enabled deception—uses that I suspect are likely to become more prevalent in the near future.

Two of my rules for constructing useful and interesting scenarios are to (a) think about what happens when seemingly disparate changes smash together, and (b) imagine how new developments might be misused. In both cases, the goal is to uncover something unexpected, but (upon reflection) disturbingly plausible. I’d like to lay out for you the chain of connections that lead me to believe that we’re on the verge of something big.

Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient.

Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that the errors do not cause any problems. The result of a mathematical calculation, for example, need not always be calculated precisely—an accuracy of two or three decimal places is often enough. Dr Palem offers the analogy of a person about to cross a big room. Rather than wasting time and energy calculating the shortest path, it’s better just to start walking in roughly the right direction.

With regard to the relativity of value, Karl Marx expressed this function of ideology in the clearest terms in Volume I of Capital: "... one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king" (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I. London: Penguin, 1974, p. 63).

It is up to us to translate Marx's dialectical insight into a couple of simple formulas, according to which

the balance of your influence is positive if you have more followers than the number of people you, yourself, follow this influence resides not in the one followed but in the recognition of her followers Now, to "unfollow" or to "unfriend" someone is a huge insult, a gesture that breaks the distorted looking glass of ideology and demonstrates the power of the follower over the one followed. No wonder, then, that the media treat celebrities unsubscribing from the feeds of other celebrities as newsworthy events!

The New Aesthetic is now subject to discussion and critique on a number of forums, blogs, twitter threads, and so forth (for a list, see bibliography on Berry 2012a, but also Bridle 2012, Kaganskiy 2012, Sterling 2012). Many of these discussions have a particular existential flavour, questioning the existence and longevity of the New Aesthetic, for example, or beginning to draw the boundaries of what is 'in' or 'out' of the domain of New Aesthetic things (See Twitter 2012).[1] Grusin (2012), for example, claims: '[t]he "new aesthetic" is just the latest name for remediation, all dressed up with nowhere to go'. At such an early stage there is understandably some scepticism and, being mediated via Twitter, some sarcasm and dismissal, rather than substantive engagements with the questions raised by a moment presaged by the eruption of the digital into the everyday lifeworld, but also some partial support (for example see, Berry 2012b, Crumb 2012, Exinfoam 2012, Fernandez 2012, Owens 2012). Nonetheless, it is good to see so much discussion and excitement around the concept, however defined.

Twitter, that endless and obscure runway of missives; the burden of proof that mankind is nearing the atonement of its vapidity and carelessness, has shat out another Fabergé egg for us all to enjoy with a kind of guttural laughter only the misfortune of another human being can provide, and I love it more than anything under that sun right now.

Norman N., perhaps best known as @oldmansearch by his 90,839 (and counting) followers, is (ostensibly at least) an 81 year-old man whose son has tricked him into thinking Twitter is Google.

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author's real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader's time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet.

This is the story of Horse_ebooks, beloved online automaton, and how I tracked down its human master.

Horse_ebooks is a Twitter spam bot originally set up to promote horse-ebooks.com, an online store of horse-themed ebooks with a retro design equal parts GeoCities and MySpace. In addition to tweeting spam links, Horse_ebooks has apparently been programed to evade Twitter's spam filters by posting random snatches of text it scrapes from books and websites. About seven times a day, Horse_ebooks spurts out bits of context-free nonsense, like: "Worms – oh my god WORMS," and "I noticed that my hair grew faster from spending time in my pyramid."

Horse_ebooks is having a moment.

Of the accounts that follow me on Twitter, half are spambots. About 15% are companies or organizations whose social media interns found me on a list somewhere, and another 15% are something in between: not definitely bots, but not exactly humans. Whatever they are, they're not "listening" in any meaningful sense. Among the remaining group are some people I like, some people I like a lot, some people I don't know, and a bunch of technology PR professionals who don't really have a choice.

And as every sci-fi nerd knows, you totally need a tricked-out battleship if you're about to engage in serious battle.

To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense.

Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real?

As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship": the author (say, of the interactive immersive environment in which we actively participate by role-playing) no longer writes detailed story-line, s/he merely provides the basic set of rules (the coordinates of the fictional universe in which we immerse ourselves, the limited set of actions we are allowed to accomplish within this virtual space, etc.)