#i just share his fascination with tech and programming and its a big reason why he's one of my fav characters obvs
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UEFI hacking malware
Security researchers are alarmed: the already-notorious Trickbot malware has been spottied probing infected computers to find out which version of UEFI they're running. This is read as evidence that Trickbot has figured out how to pull off a really scary feat.
To understand why, you have to understand UEFI: a fascinating, deep, philosophical change to our view of computers, trust, and the knowability of the universe. It's a tale of hard choices, paternalism, and the race to secure the digital realm as it merges with the physical.
Computers were once standalone: a central processing unit that might be augmented by some co-processors for specialized processes, like a graphics card or even a math co-processor.
These co-pros were subordinate to the CPU though. You'd turn on the computer and it would read a very small set of hardcoded instructions telling it how to access a floppy disk or other storage medium for the rest of the boot sequence, the stuff needed to boot the system.
The hardwired instructions were in a ROM that had one job: wake up and feed some instructions to the "computer" telling it what to do, then go back to sleep. But there's a philosophical conundrum here.
Because the world of computing is adversarial and networked computing is doubly so: there are people who want your computer to do things that are antithetical to your interests, like steal your data or spy on you or encrypt all your files and demand ransom.
To stop this, you need to be able to examine the programs running on your computer and terminate the malicious ones. And therein lies the rub: when you instruct your computer to examine its own workings, how do you know if you can trust it?
In 1983, Ken Thompson (co-creator of C, Unix, etc) was awarded a Turing Award ("computer science's Nobel Prize"). He gave a fucking bombshell of an acceptance speech, called "Reflections on Trusting Trust."
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
Thompson revealed that he had created a backdoor for himself that didn't just live in Unix, but in the C compiler that people made to create new Unix systems.
Here's what that means: when you write a program, you produce "high-level code" with instructions like "printf("Hello, World!");". Once your program is done, you turn it into machine code, a series of much shorter instructions that your CPU understands ("mov dx, msg" etc).
Most programmers can't read this machine code, and even for those who can, it's a hard slog. In general, we write our code, compile it and run it, but we don't examine it. With nontrivial programs, looking at the machine code is very, very hard.
Compilers are treated as intrinsically trustworthy. Give 'em some source, they spit out a binary, you run the binary. Sometimes there are compiler bugs, sure, and compiler improvements can be a big deal. But compilers are infrastructure: inscrutable and forgotten.
Here's what Thompson did: he hid a program in his compiler that would check to see whether you were compiling an operating system or a compiler. If you were compiling an OS, it hid a secret login for him inside of it.
If you were compiling a compiler, it hid the program that looked for compilers or operating systems inside of it.
Think about what this means: every OS you compiled had an intentional security defect that the OS itself couldn't detect.
If you suspected that your compiler was up to no good and wrote your own compiler, it would be compromised as soon as you compiled it. What Thompson did was ask us to contemplate what we meant when we "trusted" something.
It was a move straight out of Rene Descartes, the reasoning that leads up to "I think therefore I am." Descartes' "Discourse on the Method" asks how we can know things about the universe.
He points out that sometimes he thinks he senses something but is wrong - he dreams, he hallucinates, he misapprehends.
If all our reasoning depends on the impressions we get from our senses, and if our senses are sometimes faulty, how can we reason at all?
Descartes wants a point of certainty, one thing he *knows* to be absolutely true. He makes the case that if you can be certain of one thing, you can anchor everything else to this point and build up a massive edifice of trustable knowledge that all hangs off of this anchor.
Thompson is basically saying, "You thought you had descartesed your way into a trustable computing universe because of the axiom that I would never poison your lowest-level, most fundamental tools.
"*Wrong*.
"Bwahahahaha."
(But, you know, in a nice way: an object lesson to serve as a wake-up call before computers fully merged with the physical world to form a global, species-wide digital nervous system whose untrustworthy low-level parts were foolishly, implicitly trusted).
But processors were expensive and computers were exploding. PCs running consumer operating systems like Windows and Mac OS (and more exotic ones like GNU/Linux and various Unices) proliferated, and they all shared this flawed security model.
They all relied on the operating system to be a faithful reporter of the computer's internals, and operated on the assumption that they could use programs supervised by the OS to detect and terminate malicious programs.
But starting in 1999, Ken Thompson's revenge was visited upon the computing world. Greg Hoglund released Ntrootkit, a proof-of-concept malware that attacked Windows itself, so that the operating system would lie to antivirus programs about what it was doing and seeing.
In Decartesspeak, your computer could no longer trust its senses, so it could no longer reason. The nub of trust, the piton driven into the mountainface, was made insecure and the whole thing collapsed. Security researchers at big companies like Microsoft took this to heart.
In 2002, Peter Biddle and his team from Microsoft came to EFF to show us a new model for computing: "Trusted Computing" (codenamed "Palladium").
https://web.archive.org/web/20020805211111/https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2002/jul02/0724palladiumwp.asp
Palladium proposed to give computers back their nub of Descartesian certainty. It would use a co-processor, but unlike a graphics card or a math co-pro, it would run before the CPU woke up and did its thing.
And unlike a ROM, it wouldn't just load up the boot sequence and go back to sleep.
This chip - today called a "Secure Enclave" or a "Trusted Platform Module" (etc) - would have real computing power, and it would remain available to the CPU at all times.
Inside the chip was a bunch of cool cryptographic stuff that provided the nub of certainty. At the start of the boot, the TPM would pull the first stages of the boot-code off of the drive, along with a cryptographic signature.
A quick crypto aside:
Crypto is code that mixes a key (a secret known to the user) with text to produce a scrambled text (a "ciphertext") that can only be descrambled by the key.
Dual-key crypto has two keys. What one scrambles, the other descrambles (and vice-versa).
With dual-key crypto, you keep one key secret (the "private key") and you publish the other one (the "public key"). If you scramble something with a private key, then anyone can descramble it with your public key and know it came from you.
If you scramble it *twice*, first with your private key and then with your friend's public key, then they can tell it came from you (because only your private key's ciphertexts can be descrambled with your public key).
And *you* can be certain that only they can read it (because only their private key can descramble messages that were scrambled with their public key).
Code-signing uses dual-key crypto to validate who published some code.
Microsoft can make a shorter version of its code (like a fingerprint) and then you scramble it with its private key. The OS that came with your computer has a copy of MSFT's public key. When you get an OS update, you can descramble the fingerprint with that built-in key.
If it matches the update, then you know that Microsoft signed it and it hasn't been tampered with on its way to you. If you trust Microsoft, you can run the update.
But...What if a virus replaces Microsoft's public keys with its own?
That's where Palladium's TPM comes in. It's got the keys hardcoded into it. Programs running on the CPU can only ask the TPM to do very limited things like ask it to sign some text, or to check the signature on some text.
It's a kind of god-chip, running below the most privileged level of user-accessible operations. By design, you - the owner of the computer - can demand things of it that it is technically capable of doing, and it can refuse you, and you can't override it.
That way, programs running even in the most privileged mode can't compromise it.
Back to our boot sequence: the TPM fetches some startup code from the disk along with a signature, and checks to see whether the OS has been signed by its manufacturer.
If not, it halts and shows you a scary error message. Game over, Ken Thompson!
It is a very cool idea, but it's also very scary, because the chip doesn't take orders from Descartes' omnibenevolent God.
It takes orders from Microsoft, a rapacious monopolist with a history of complicity with human rights abuses. Right from that very first meeting the brilliant EFF technologist Seth Schoen spotted this (and made the Descartes comparison):
https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html
Seth identified a way of having your cake and eating it too: he proposed a hypothetical thing called an "owner override" - a physical switch that, when depressed, could be used to change which public keys lived in the chip.
This would allow owners of computers to decide who they trusted and would defend them against malware. But what it *wouldn't* do is defend tech companies shareholders against the owner of the computer - it wouldn't facilitate DRM.
"Owner override" is a litmus test: are you Descartes' God, or Thompson's Satan?
Do you want computers to allow their owners to know the truth? Or do you want computers to bluepill their owners, lock them in a matrix where you get to decide what is true?
A month later, I published a multi-award-winning sf story called "0wnz0red" in Salon that tried to dramatize the stakes here.
https://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/
Despite Seth's technical clarity and my attempts at dramatization, owner override did not get incorporated into trusted computing architectures.
Trusted computing took years to become commonplace in PCs. In the interim, rootkits proliferated. Three years after the Palladium paper, Sony-BMG deliberately turned 6m audio CDs into rootkit vectors that would silently alter your OS when you played them from a CD drive.
The Sony rootkit broke your OS so that any filename starting with $SYS$ didn't show up in file listings, $SYS$ programs wouldn't show up in the process monitor. Accompanying the rootkit was a startup program (starting with $SYS$) that broke CD ripping.
Sony infected hundreds of thousands of US gov and mil networks. Malware authors - naturally enough - added $SYS$ to the files corresponding with their viruses, so that antivirus software (which depends on the OS for information about files and processes) couldn't detect it.
It was an incredibly reckless, depraved act, and it wasn't the last. Criminals, spies and corporations continued to produce rootkits to attack their adversaries (victims, rival states, customers) and trusted computing came to the rescue.
Today, trusted computing is widely used by the world's largest tech companies to force customers to use their app stores, their OSes, their printer ink, their spare parts. It's in medical implants, cars, tractors and kitchen appliances.
None of this stuff has an owner override. In 2012, I gave a talk to Google, Defcon and the Long Now Foundation about the crisis of owner override, called "The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing."
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/08/23/the-coming-civil-war-over-general-purpose-computing/
It proposed a way that owner override, combined with trusted computing, could allow users to resist both state and corporate power, and it warned that a lack of technological self-determination opened the door to a parade of horribles.
Because once you have a system that is designed to override owners - and not the other way around - then anyone who commands that system can, by design, do things that the user can't discern or prevent.
This is the *real* trolley problem when it comes to autonomous vehicles: not "who should a car sacrifice in a dangerous situation?" but rather, "what happens when a car that is designed to sometimes kill its owner is compromised by Bad Guys?"
https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/car-wars
The thing is, trusted computing with an owner override is pretty magical. Take the Introspection Engine, a co-processor in a fancy Iphone case designed by Edward Snowden and Bunnie Huang. It's designed to catch otherwise undetectable mobile malware.
https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/2
You see, your phone doesn't just run Ios or Android; the part that interfaces with the phone system - be baseband radio - runs an ancient, horribly insecure OS, and if it is infected, it can trick your phone's senses, so that it can no longer reason.
The Introspection Engine is a small circuit board that sandwiches between your phone's mainboard and its case, making electrical contact with all the systems that carry network traffic.
This daughterboard has a ribbon cable that snakes out of the SIM slot and into a slightly chunky phone case that has a little open source hardward chip with fully auditable code and an OLED display.
This second computer monitors the electrical signals traveling on the phone's network buses and tells you what's going on. This is a user-accessible god-chip, a way for you to know whether your phone is hallucinating when it tells you that it isn't leaking your data.
That's why it's called an "Introspection Engine." It lets your phone perch at an objective remove and understand how it is thinking.
(If all this sounds familiar, it's because it plays a major role in ATTACK SURFACE, the third Little Brother book)
https://attacksurface.com
The reason the Introspection Engine is so exciting is that it is exceptional. The standard model for trusted computing is that it treats everyone *except* the manufacturer as its adversary - including you, the owner of the device.
This opens up many different sets of risks, all of which have been obvious since 1999's Ntrootkit, and undeniable since 2005's Sony Rootkit.
I. The manufacturer might not have your interests at heart.
In 2016, HP shipped a fake security update to its printers, tricking users into installing a system that rejected their third-party ink, forcing them to pay monopoly prices for HP products.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
II. An insider at the company may not have your interests at heart.
Multiple "insider threat" attacks have been executed against users. Employees at AT&T, T-Mobile, even Roblox have accepted bribes to attack users on behalf of criminals.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4ddw/hacker-bribed-roblox-insider-accessed-user-data-reset-passwords
III. A government may order the company to attack its users.
In 2017 Apple removed all working VPNs from its Chinese app stores, as part of the Chinese state's mass surveillance program (1m members of religious minorities were subsequently sent to concentration camps).
Apple's trusted computing prevents users from loading apps that aren't in its app stores, meaning that Apple's decisions about which apps you can run on your Iphone are binding on you, even if you disagree.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-vpn/apple-says-it-is-removing-vpn-services-from-china-app-store-idUSKBN1AE0BQ
IV. Third parties may exploit a defect in the trusted computing system and attack users in undetectable ways that users can't prevent.
By design, TPMs can't be field updated, so if there's a defect in them, it can't be patched.
Checkm8 exploits a defect in eight generations Apple's mobile TPM. It's a proof-of-concept released to demonstrate a vulnerability, not malware (thankfully).
https://checkm8.info/
But there have been scattered, frightening instances of malware that attacks the TPM - that suborns the mind of God so that your computer ceases to be able to reason. To date, these have all been associated with state actors who used them surgicially.
State actors know that the efficacy of their cyberweapons is tied to secrecy: once a rival government knows that a system is vulnerable, they'll fix it or stop using it or put it behind a firewall, so these tools are typically used parsimoniously.
But criminals are a different matter (and now, at long last, we're coming back to Trickbot and UEFI) (thanks for hanging in there).
UEFI ("You-Eff-Ee") is a trusted computing that computer manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized OSes from running on the PCs they sell you.
Mostly, they use this to prevent malicious OSes from running on the hardware they manufacture, but there have been scattered instances of it being used for monopolistic purposes: to prevent you from replacing their OS with another one (usually a flavor of GNU/Linux).
UEFI is god-mode for your computer, and a compromise to it would be a Sony Rootkit event, but 15 years later, in a world where systems are more widespread and used for more critical applications from driving power-plants to handling multimillion-dollar transactions.
Trickbot is very sophisticated malware generally believed to be run by criminals, not a government. Like a lot of modern malware, there's a mechanism for updating it in the field with new capabilities - both attacks and defenses.
And Trickbot has been observed in the wild probing infected systems' UEFI. This leads security researchers to believe that Trickbot's authors have figured out how to compromise UEFI on some systems.
https://www.wired.com/story/trickbot-botnet-uefi-firmware/
Now, no one has actually observed UEFI being compromised, nor has anyone captured any UEFI-compromising Trickbot code. The thinking goes that Trickbot only downloads the UEFI code when it finds a vulnerable system.
Running in UEFI would make Trickbot largely undetectable and undeletable. Even wiping and restoring the OS wouldn't do it. Remember, TPMs are designed to be unpatchable and tamper-resistant. The physical hardware is designed to break forever if you try to swap it out.
If this is indeed what's going on, it's the first instance in which a trusted computing module was used to attack users by criminals (not governments or the manufacturer and its insiders). And Trickbot's owners are really bad people.
They've hired out to the North Korean state to steal from multinationals; they've installed ransomware in big companies, and while their footprint has waned, they once controlled 1,000,000 infected systems.
You can check your UEFI to see if it's vulnerable to tampering:
https://eclypsium.com/2019/10/23/protecting-system-firmware-storage/
and also determine whether it has been compromised:
https://eclypsium.com/2020/10/14/protecting-your-organizations-from-mosaicregressor-and-other-uefi-implants/
But this isn't the end, it's just getting started. As Seth Schoen warned us in 2002, the paternalistic mode of computing has a huge, Ken Thompson-shaped hole in it: it requires you trust the benevolence of a manufacturer, and, crucially, they know you don't have a choice.
If companies knew that you *could* alter whom you trusted, they would have to work to earn and keep your trust. If governments knew that ordering a company to compromise on TPMs, they'd understand that their targets would simply shift tactics if they made that order.
Some users would make foolish decisions about whom to trust, but they would also have recourse when a trusted system was revealed to be defective. This is a fight that's into its third decade, and the stakes have never been higher.
Sadly, we are no closer to owner override than we were in 2002.
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EXHIBITION OF FORCE
In 2016 Arden Sherman and Julian Myers-Szupinska published “Exhibition of Force,” a review of the reopened SFMOMA, on the blog of The Exhibitionist, a journal about exhibition making, which was taken offline in 2017. We are retrieving that review here, as it speaks to the longer history of the current crisis at that museum.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has been closed for major renovations for the last three years. Designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, the new building, a hybrid of the 1995 building designed by Mario Botta and the white wavy tower designed by the Scandinavian architects, opens to the public this weekend.
The impetus for this renovation can be credited, in large part, to the donations of Doris and Donald Fisher, the progenitors of Gap Inc. The fortune accumulated from their clothing empire allowed the couple to become philanthropists, art collectors, and SFMOMA board members. After a long-bruited (but eventually abandoned) plan for the Fishers to build their own museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, the family negotiated a hundred-year “loan” of their vaunted collection to the museum, as well as a massive donation to a capital campaign that would allow for a $305 million building expansion to accommodate it. The museum subsequently raised a comparable amount to bolster its endowment and operating costs. The revamped institution held a sequence of opening events in April and May — press and member previews, a glitzy gala — that culminates with its May 14, 2016, reopening to the general public.
Bay Area institutions keyed a number of events to SFMOMA’s reopening to take advantage of increased visibility and visitors, among them the Parking Lot Art Fair at Fort Mason, various gallery openings and performances, and the Open Engagement conference at the Oakland Museum of California. That last, an annual conference of socially engaged artists and activists, took “power” as its theme. This was partly an homage to the history of organizers and radicals in the Bay Area (e.g., Black Power) but perhaps also a pointed riposte to the current tech boom in San Francisco (i.e., “money power”), which has occasioned skyrocketing rents and a massive reorganization of the city’s social ecology over the last several years.
The lens of “power” is a useful way to think about the new SFMOMA’s elaborate and overwhelming opening gambit. Take, for example, the architecture. When Mario Botta designed SFMOMA’s downtown San Francisco building in 1995, he took seriously the task of making a space where people were not intimidated and where art would be the star — even if the stately black marble of the Botta atrium and staircase was ultimately a peculiar way to enter (the new museum keeps the Botta marble but replaces his staircase with a lighter zigzag). The Snøhetta addition, too, focuses on the art, but does so at a massively enlarged scale: the new SFMOMA is two and a half times its former size and has more square footage than the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a city ten times the size of San Francisco. The result is something like a sprawling, seven-story, two-building mega-mansion: a huge feat, but one that feels endless rather than bountiful.
This building squares with the city’s new ambitions for itself. The two buildings hitched together, the somber Botta and the sleek Snøhetta, signal a sort of timetable of the city’s own history, and track an extreme influx of money in recent years. Such an architectural “twofer” confesses San Francisco’s specific brand of preservationism while also trumpeting its will to international and institutional power — and precisely in a neighborhood historically referred to as “skid row.”
The contents of this building, the expanded collection, signal a different sort of power. Museum collections are of course vital ways for regular viewers to see historically important works of art, and better that they are available to the public than squirreled away in collectors’ homes. And of course a museum’s holdings become a fundament of the institution’s identity. But this issue is complicated in the new SFMOMA by the branding of the works to particular donors — especially the two floors allotted for the Fishers’ collection and the one for Peter and Mimi Haas. Interestingly, the Haas works represent another fortune derived from jeans: Peter Haas was president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co. from 1976 until his death in 2005. This means that pretty much anyone with a pair of pants in their closet has something like an investor’s share in the museum’s collections.
These galleries retain the blue-chip outlines of their moneyed collectors. For the Fishers, this means postwar American and German abstraction, almost universally by white men, barring a single room of paintings by Agnes Martin. And for the Haases, it means rambunctious pop by a somewhat more diverse cohort of artists — a collection that feels rather more familiar for an “international museum.” And like the architecture, these collections too exhibit a certain divided personality: given pride of place in the new galleries, they nevertheless reproduce the tastes and purchasing strategies of their CEO collectors, whose predilections may not always align with the museum’s own “objective” priorities — though at SFMOMA the two priorities have now become hard to disentangle.
This is especially true with the Fisher collection. If their unambitious love of Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol is vindicated by the history of art, it is vitiated by redundancies among big sign-value works throughout the museum, both within each floor and among the various “exhibitions” in which these artists make repeat appearances. The works become hard to distinguish from one another; each one signals the same sign-value, of importance plus ownership. Making one’s way through the museum one is constantly struck with déjà vu. In which room, or floor, did I see the blue Kelly painting? Did I already see that Warhol? What should we gather from these recurrences? That is, except for the co-presence of all these treasures.
The works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, many installed in the same spot as before the renovation, are varied in comparison, and feel distinct from the Fisher trove, not least because they have a greater number of works by artists of color, and by women. The galleries devoted to photography are excellent, too, and include works by younger and more experimental artists. And the works on view from the museum’s Campaign for Art initiative — assembled since 2009 by a wider range of donors, and including three thousand works to date — incorporate more pieces by living artists and artists from California, some of whom donated their own works to the collection.
Such works have a reason to be here. More so, at least, than those resulting from the Fishers’ proclivity for Germans, which, in a perplexing turn, gives SFMOMA particularly strong holdings in postwar German artists such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer. But why exactly do major stores of these artists belong in San Francisco, aside from the Fishers’ fascination with them? Kiefer in particular is poorly served by being so abstracted from the German history in which his Wagnerian dramatism has ambiguous force. In San Francisco, and presented without mediation as such, they read as merely apocalyptic decor. One can only wonder why corporate CEOs have an affinity for this stuff.
Two more aspects of power come to mind. One is that of audience: Just which public does this new museum address? With admission set at a steep $25 and tightly timed timeslots for gallery access, will this institution appeal to a local audience, or largely to tourists for whom this sticker shock won’t matter so much? Major expansions at other institutions have not reliably led to expanded audiences, local or touristic, and it is not sure what will happen in this case, either. SFMOMA’s free admission for those under eighteen is a salutary countermove. Even better is an ongoing collaboration between the education and curatorial departments under the rubric of Public Dialogue, which aims to build partnerships with community galleries and public libraries. Such programs promise to continue the vision of the museum’s founders, which hoped to make the museum a vital part of the cultural life of city residents. But this is a long game, and it is hard to tell just how much it will engage Bay Area audiences on a deep and meaningful level.
And this affirmation of “city residents” rests on an anxious precipice in today’s San Francisco, where citizenship and residency are increasingly attenuated. Perhaps, given the extreme dislocations that characterize the city today, with warehouse districts now serving as tent cities for homeless post-residents, the museum ought to hold a “displaced residents day?” One has to wonder what they, or we, should think about when looking at a work like Charles Ray’s Sleeping Woman (2012) — which, as the wall text helpfully explains, speaks to how homeless people are frequently ignored or invisible in society. Ray’s work calls to mind another “gap,” that between rich and poor, between those included in San Francisco’s current boom and those ejected from it. This disparity is hardly invisible in San Francisco these days, but rather is a harsh and inescapable part of daily life.
Furthermore, moments of strategic generosity as described above are balanced uneasily against the power of money in the museum as it stands (the value of the expanded collection has been estimated at a billion dollars). One must nevertheless mark a circular logic to this extraordinary concentration of value: the Fishers and others gave SFMOMA money to expand, while the very reason the museum needed to expand was to house the Fishers’ “loan.” And so SFMOMA is the channel through which this money coursed, while accumulating comparatively little capital, intellectual or otherwise, of its own, independent of its lenders. In some weird sense, therefore, the power of money in this case may be more marginal than it appears. Perhaps the best we can hope, then, is that this perpetual motion machine now locked onto the old museum might spin off more programs like Public Dialogue, and worthwhile exhibitions off the main, collector-driven concourse — and that there is still a local audience in San Francisco interested in seeing them.
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Arden Sherman is Curator at Hunter East Harlem Gallery, a multi-disciplinary space for art exhibitions and socially-minded projects located in Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work in New York City. Julian Myers-Szupinska was senior editor of The Exhibitionist, and is a member of grupa o.k. Photo: Charles Ray, Sleeping Woman, 2012, installation view, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photograph by Julian Myers-Szupinska.
#SFMOMA#julian myers-szupinska#arden sherman#fisher collection#museum#art#grupa o.k.#exhibition#art writing
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FusionFall Writing Prompts: Oct. 2019, Prompt #2:
Dexter and Mandark are getting help from… Albedo? That doesn’t bode well… But a new upgrade to your Spinal-ARCH sounds amazing. If you help with testing, you’ll be one of the first to try the device’s improved ability to mimic certain alien species. Will it be worth it?
I have ideas for both prompts this month, but I’m starting with this one since it’s the longer of the two and there’s some ideas I’m eager to explore in it. Should be divided into four or five parts total, depending on whether or not I’ll keep the middle ones shorter. Enjoy!
It wasn't normal. The summons had been sent out to nearly every research participant shared between Dexlabs and Mandark Industries—and the rivaling boy geniuses that ran each company may very well have called everyone to Tech Square if it wasn't for the war keeping so many of them busy. Summoning this many research participants at once meant only one of two things: A disaster or a breakthrough.
Silya's muscles tensed as her Spinal-ARCH reconnected. For not the first time she was glad that she had missed most of the device's initial testing phases, before a salve had been developed to numb the flesh as it attached itself to a person's back—adhesive plates of a strong, but flexible alien alloy pressing against skin and thin needles piercing through it to reach bone. It wasn't quite as painful as it sounded, but she released a habitual, baited breath all the same. Then she stretched to make sure it had locked on properly, rolling her shoulders and shrugging on a plain tank.
Outside of routine inspections and repairs, she wasn't used to taking the device off. She probably should have more often than she did, but once it was on it was comfortable enough to forget about easily. Her Spinal-ARCH may as well have been a part of her own body. A sidelong glance at the other young women in the locker room—curled lips, terse shoulders, and faint shudders all reflecting a distinct unfamiliarity—hinted that the lax sense of protocol was mutually shared.
Every research participant's Spinel-ARCH had been updated: Increased data, improved storage, and a new program developed to better filter Imaginary Energy. It had been a long while since the last large update and Spinel-ARCHs were already widely distributed among Fusion Fighters as a part of their standard gear. After a day with them off as the alterations were made, everyone was curious about the two-week long tests that awaited them.
Which would begin immediately. Walls of blue-tinted steel surrounded the research participants from every angle as they followed one another out of the locker rooms and into a wide gymnasium. A fenced walkway two stories above wrapped around its perimeter. There, Dexter looked over the crowd with Computress at his side and a tablet in hand. A few minutes passed as the last stragglers entered, then the boy-genius waved them all to attention:
“Greetings, everyone! Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he began, examining data as he spoke, “By now, you all should have received and reattached your Spinal-ARCHs. I will be brief: This latest update to the device should allow you take on full transformations of certain alien species.”
After he typed some control onto the tablet, two tiny drones hovered close to the wall to project a sequence of holographic models that were recognizable to almost everyone present, nicknames given by a certain hero reciting in their minds: Big Chill, Way Bad, Ghostfreak, Ampfibian—alien forms all somewhat altered to better fit a humanoid frame. An excited murmur fell over the crowd.
Dexter noticeably stood a little straighter as he continued, “You will note that these are not perfect transformations. As these forms will encase around your physical bodies, they will mimic your physical limits. However, I am pleased to announce that—in each form—you may experience different enhancements through the manipulation of imaginary energy. Testing these enhancements will be the primary objective for this week’s experiments. Today, you are free to explore each of the transformations for yourselves as my scientists and I monitor your progress.”
The quiet chatter between the research participants increased. Silya looked away from the holograms still flashing through the different alien forms to her own hands. Nearly every Fusion Fighter wanted to explore the limits of their imaginary energy: She was no different. There were a few, rare full transformations in the Spinal-ARCHS datalogs, but for the most part transformations were restricted to minor extensions from their bodies—tentacles that lacked complete coordination or wings that couldn’t actually support them because they simply weren’t strong enough. If Dexter and Mandark had really found a way to expand on their current abilities…
All of a sudden, Computress tapped Dexter on the shoulder, giving him a slight, reprimanding look. The redhead blinked at the android before his proud expression somewhat hardened. He raised a hand to silence the crowd once more. “I feel I should mention,” he frowned, “that this update is—in part—thanks to the cooperation of the Galvan scientist Albedo, whose specialization in alien technology benefited our research for these new transformations. Given his history with Ben Tennyson, however, I understand should anyone have their reservations. You may leave the experiments at any time with your Spinal-ARCH redacted to its previous update, but if you do so now please exit outside before we begin momentarily.”
Saying that some of them had ‘reservations’ was putting it lightly. The very mention of the false Ben’s name sent many into a bewildered, bitter chatter of suspicion. Even most those who weren’t major fans of the teenage hero had heard of the Galvan: He was slated along with all the other large reports of villains who had sided with the Fusion Fighters for one reason or another. Some even had the displeasure of meeting him in-person. Why Dexter or Mandark would team up with him was beyond them.
However, for all of their wariness against Albedo, they did trust Dexter. There was no telling what was happening over at Mandark Industries—where Mandark’s own group of lab rats was likely receiving the same kind of speech—but only a handful of people squirmed through the crowd to exit the gym from the right. As the doors opened, they could see a small group of Dexbots waiting for them. Luckily for Dexter, their numbers were shockingly about the same.
Silya was surprised that she herself stayed rooted were she stood, her fists gripped tightly to her sides. The more reserved, rational side of her mind cursed her, but she wanted this. She became a research participant at Dexlabs for two reasons: The pay was great and the potential to explore groundbreaking territory all too tempting. It came with big risks, but just as big rewards. For her own ambitions, she hopes one of those rewards would include gaining better mastery over her own imaginary energy.
Whatever their reasons—loyalty, curiosity, insanity—the bulk of the research participants stayed behind. Most all of them weren’t new to questionable or unorthodox tests: Their bosses had already weeded out anyone who would shrink back at their mad science several times over. Some of them had handled prototype explosives, dipped in vats of fusion matter, and travelled through time. They weren’t the sort anyone could chase away easily.
Dexter knew that all too well, and once again grinned at those who remained. He pressed a few more controls on his tablet and the gymnasium slowly began to alter while the group watched on, unphased. On the left side of the gym, platforms and poles rose from the floor in a kind of miniature obstacle course; targets popped out from behind hidden panels along the wall; the sliding door to the storage closet unlocked, giving them access to everything contained within.
“Take each of the transformations slowly,” he instructed, “and take note of any physical changes that may occur. Each of you will need to submit a full report of your experiences before you leave the lab. You may use any of the equipment, but should you experience any pain or discomfort at any point, speak to one of the Dexbots present immediately.”
With that, the research participants split up. Silya glanced at the still-looping hologram footage. The Big Chill form was the closest to her usual transformations: All types of wings—while difficult for those without experience to summon—were popular among most Fusion Fighters. To this day no one could actually fly with them, but they could give a bit of a lift and added protection when one had to jump from extreme heights.
A faint tingle dully thrummed along the slope of her back as the Spinal-ARCH activated, already hijacking messages from her brain to her spine and throughout her nerve fibers. She envisioned a set of wings fluttering gently behind her; softer than what she was used to, lighter, moth-like. Sure enough, they emerged from a split-second spectacle of light as her imaginary energy concentrated into a solid form—fitted on top of her clothes and the device, but mentally cabled to her nervous system like any other part of her body. If it weren’t for the way they fit over the fabric, it’d be impossible to tell that they weren’t a true part of her.
She was surprised by how dense the wings felt though, especially compared to what she was used to. The lack of true substance was what made their instability so frustratingly obvious her. For the moment, Silya tried to brush it from her mind: She wanted to complete the transformation before anything.
It took a few minutes. She watched in fascination as her imaginary energy continued to materialize, black and blue plates shifting over her like a thin, flexible suit of armor. They ran over her arms, her legs, her torso until they lastly began to fit along the more subtle angles of her face. She held her breath—this part was new, and she had to clasp onto the vision of a helmet to keep her concentration from breaking. A strange filter that barely stained everything a faint green settled over her eyes as the ‘mask’ finished constructing itself.
To ensure a complete, stable transformation it was often better for Fusion Fighters to watch them take shape whenever they experimented with something new. Fortunately, the gym had a series of wide mirrors along part of one wall, where a crowd had already gathered. Not everyone went ahead with the full transformations, but nearly everyone who had was over there. Silya jogged the short distance to them, brushing shoulders to reach an empty frame, and stared at her own reflection. The sight of the apparition before her was jarring, but besides a few mistakes—which quickly patched over themselves to match each of her mental corrections—it seemed perfect. There she was, a strange, human copy of the Necrofriggian race; shorter, with a more feminine waist and eyes dipped closer to their true peridot color instead of the bold lime or malachite the species was better known for.
Her heart leapt. There were a few other ‘whole’ transformations within the datalogs, but most of them seemed off in some way or another to her so she rarely used them. This was the sort of big step she wanted to take…
Again though, she noticed something strange. In her excitement, her wings gave an instinctual flap. Silya felt her body actually rock in place at the motion, not expecting the subtle force behind it. Reaching back across her shoulder, her fingertips gently traced the edge of one wing. She actually felt as though there were nerves under it, twitching at the new sensation. It did feel more real than any of her past attempts, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly how that was the case.
Startled shouts rose over the casual ambience of the gym. Although at different phases, around a third of the research participants who had activated their Spinal-ARCHs also started out with the Big Chill transformation. One of the other girls who had only summoned her wings thus far tested them out with a few, powerful flaps—and was apparently just as unprepared for the force behind them. It threw her body forward and the people around her moved away to avoid a near collision. She stumbled, but caught herself.
Or rather, her wings did. Clumsily, yes, but they clearly pulled her back, dragging her a few centimeters with her toes lightly grazing the floor. Those nearby looked at her in astonishment, the girl hardly able to make sense of what happened herself.
It took seconds for the others to begin to test out the strengths of their wings. Silya gently moved her own and smiled along to the excited chatter that picked up once again as each person made little discoveries to their new transformations. The awkward, uncoordinated handling could easily be blamed on a lack of practice, but they did feel like they truly were a part of her—the product of a second skin. She looked up to where Dexter still stood watching them over the walkway railing to find the boy-genius practically grinning from ear to ear with pride. Enhancements… she shook her head, That’s the understatement of the year.
It was times like these when she loved her employer’s mad science.
Silya didn’t even bother touching the equipment for now. She just found a relatively empty, little corner of the gym to continue practicing her dexterity with her new ‘body.’ She only wished she could practice longer with it, but she didn’t want to risk straining the device or herself yet and she’d need to make time to test out the other forms before the day’s experiments ended. Guess the third scientist’s the charm—even if Albedo’s a crook.
All-in-all, things were looking up.
END OF PART ONE
Continue: https://silyabeeodess.tumblr.com/post/188177587074/fusionfall-writing-prompts-oct-2019-prompt-2
#fusionfall#fusionfall fic#Dexter#Dexter's Laboratory#dexlabs#research participants#spinel-arch#fusionfall retro#computress#ben 10#video games
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Home for Christmas: Birth, Endings and Marriage | #18 | December 2019
I returned from Mongolia to the States for 12 days this winter! It’s the first of my three stories picking up from my adventures away.
With a confluence of reasons to see the States this year, plus some for China, this felt like the perfect Christmas journey. I open with Advent meeting my baby nephew, then Christmas among my family in Vegas before my travel to Reno (my college town) for a wedding and my return to Vegas. Then I left to China.
Settling In: Stateside Once More
Having set a new record for days outside the U.S., my late-December return marked nearly seven months overseas.
Upon returning to the state my family occupied, Nevada, I learned its population just passed 3 million. My state’s population nearly matched Mongolia’s! But with the Vegas Valley, its population hits nearly twice Mongolia’s capital.
But as for temperatures, comparisons stop there. By the time I reached Vegas, I’d shed my puffy winter coats and stuffed them in my backpack. Vegas sat at a toasty 15°C (59°F), compared to Mongolia’s -30°C (-22°F). And Vegas friends said their weather felt cold!
Reunited in Vegas
My first days back at the house, caught up with my four siblings who reassembled. And I ate copious amounts of food, of which I’ll write a couple blog stories from now.
I would bring music, photos, some of my journals, travel souvenirs, Bibles and letters as keepsakes for my continued service in Mongolia. Special thanks to my 23-year-old brother for helping me through my college boxes in the garage.
I love rainy days. They remind me of Mom, too, at times.
My older brother gave me plenty tech support, including helping me get downtown to replace my Surface that’s been faulty since Dad bought it three years ago. (Free upgrade!) I also backed up files to cloud storage I could access from Mongolia.
I also kicked up a K-Pop playlist with recommendations from friends and my 18-year-old youngest bro. The list used to just have songs I encountered at Kiwanis CKI events and a few from my 17-year-old Mongolian host sister. I felt needing K-Pop’s positive vibes and high-energy, as opposed to American pop’s tendency toward symping. Why dwell in darkness when I have the light?
But here’s the key reason I came back to Vegas early. I needed to sort through our late mother’s belongings. I’ll touch on this during the next blog story, about my return to China. Thank you to those who supported me through the sorting.
Baby Wally
I returned home for Christmas for a huge reason—to finally meet my nephew, Wally!
Squishy baby Wally came from Ohio with my 42-year-old half-brother and my sister-in-law one night, the fourth week of Advent.
Meeting them the next morning felt amazing.
I’m an early riser, and his family was still on Eastern Standard Time. After finishing hard drive backups upstairs, I walked downstairs to the kitchen, where Wally stared at me from his rolling chair a long time. He was eight months old.
I loved his marshmallow hands and how he babbled both incomprehensible murmurs I repeated back to him and vaguely word-seemingly things like, “dada.” I probably only held him a couple times, but we made up for that with how long others held him while he continued to gaze at me.
My brother said Wally really liked me.
I mentioned a little how the toddlers at the orphanage, too, seemed fascinated by me. Someone somewhere told me babies, kittens and puppies must sense goodness in people.
Christmas in America
Leading up to Christmas, my family attended Simbang Gabi, a Filipino Catholic celebration during Advent. Since Dad had my siblings and I come, we also got to see the Filipino family ours has evidently spent time with. It reminded me somewhat of the Feast of Santo Niño I attended three years ago in Reno.
I loved getting to experience at a beautiful church the whole Mass in English—my first back in the States. The Filipino pastor gave a very Vegas homily, in how our vibrant Catholic community sets an example for this city. The Mass also featured a presider I recalled would sometimes say Mass at our church we’d attended since moving to Nevada a decade before. Afterward, we enjoyed a reception featuring copious amounts of Filipino food and music, per usual.
Midnight Mass
As is Christmas tradition, my family attended Midnight Mass at church. But this year, my 20-year-old sister drove so we could attend carols early. Our music even included hymns from Afro-Caribbean traditions, in addition to choral classics. I recorded clips from caroling and shared with fellow Peace Corps Catholics and Mongolian friends. I wore my silver Mongolian дээл, since this could be the only year I’m back for Christmas while a Peace Corps Volunteer.
During Mass, I remembered baby Wally when our new pastor spoke of baby Jesus. (Our past priest announced his relocation during my final Mass in the States seven months ago.) Anyway, babies are outstandingly helpless. They require others to survive and thrive. And humans seem biologically programmed to love and care about infants.
Yet I considered Easter Vigil (my favorite Mass), too, since our Midnight Mass began with a hymn like, “The Exultant.” So I felt somber, considering what mankind one day does to who was once this poor infant.
After Mass, I greeted a high school friend who’s stayed involved in Kiwanis Circle K International at UNLV and still sings in our local church’s choir. Like many, he felt astonished I could come home from Peace Corps but gleeful nonetheless.
Full Families
On Christmas Day, my visiting siblings, my younger siblings and I continued the movie-going tradition, seeing, “Knives Out.” I found it delightful, with heartwarming heroes and a clever cat-and-mouse adventure with contemporary themes. I loved its art. Plus Craig and Evans were hilariously not playing James Bond and Captain America.
That evening, our family had a wonderful dinner, with the Filipina family over. Unfortunately, my youngest brother decided to schedule for work that night, which aggravated Father. But, we still had a nice time. I like how my siblings’ ages merge well with their ages. (From oldest to youngest goes: their oldest sister, my older brother, me, their second oldest sister, my younger sister, my youngest sister, their youngest sister, my youngest brother.)
Plus, my half-brother, his wife and their son also attended. He sincerely thanked the other family’s mother that our dad had someone new in his life. I smiled, agreeing. It reminded me the speech he gave years ago in getting to know my mom.
The guest family’s oldest and second oldest sisters brought their boyfriends, and my older bro brought his girlfriend, too. We’d such a large Christmas dinner that we used the kitchen island counter space for food, then the dining room and ping pong tables for eating.
Following our meal, we exchanged gifts I’ll cover when I describe what I brought back to Mongolia.
Returning to Reno
After Christmas and further friend adventures (I’ll cover in a couple blogs from now), I flew up to Reno, my undergraduate city of four years. We’d a wedding coming.
I felt amazed to boomerang from my high school city to college town and back before my return to Asia. Even in Vegas’ airport, I saw college friends I hadn’t seen in years! Rather, they saw me, while I video called my professional mentor. They joked that they would have thrown Chex Mix at me, but they weren’t sure we had that kind of relationship. I would have loved it, haha.
On the flight, my friends gifted me two palm-fulls of Chex Mix. I felt elated. After take-off, I felt pleasantly surprised to hear and understand small talk around me. People behind me chatted about EDM music careers. From the window on my right, I saw how Nevada’s snowy mountains looked steeper than Mongolia’s. I continued rehearsing my wedding reading I copied down, Romans 12:1-2, 9-18.
As the flight neared landing, I gazed out the window and saw the familiar Sparks hill where the house my college friends and I rented stands. After landing, I felt weird somewhat recognizing the faces of uni students around in the airport. With a Reno-Sparks population over 500 thousand, though, “The Biggest Little City” stands five times larger than the “big” city where I serve in Mongolia.
Here to Serve
Just as I disembarked my plane began a funeral service across town for the mother of someone close to us all. While I didn’t have to come, I wanted to. I remembered how touched I felt by those who came to Mom’s funeral, even if they only met her briefly.
When I arrived, somewhat dazed, in the lobby, the soon-to-be-weds spotted me from the pews and walked out to greet me. They brought me to sit with them, beside other parishioners from our church I hadn’t been with in seven months. As the eulogies concluded, and our priest blessed the casket with the family, we sang together.
I felt at ease among such close friends. The service felt a warm reintroduction to my college town community. For, my trip home wasn’t meant quite for me. I meant to support.
First Wedding Party
That night, I reunited with and met the many of our wedding party for rehearsals. Rehearsals went smoothly. Afterward, the wedding party enjoyed pizza and wings with the bride and groom. I felt gleeful to catch up with some of my favorite faithful folks from my final years at university.
Between wedding rehearsals and Sunday Mass, I reunited with the choir I knew and loved singing with four years, including my confirmation sponsor. Even our instrumentalist who’d since left for graduate school returned to play. Just like old times.
That weekend, I also attended my first bachelors’/bachelorettes’ party. I felt much more relaxed among these people I’d known a while. I enjoyed the added benefit of having no college coursework to distract me from being present to those there. I felt honored to partake in the wedding tradition among such fun people.
Christian Love
The Monday morning of the wedding, one of our choir members had a family emergency, and I received the appointment to cantor our psalm, “To You O God, I Lift Up My Soul.” So I started rehearsing from the morning-of.
I wore the most eclectic outfit, including a normal pair of black slacks I’d known since high school in Vegas (before 2015), the golden silk shirt I bought in Beijing the 2017 week I first met Chinese relatives and the black suit jacket I bought in my Mongolian city for Teachers’ Day 2019. What a coincidence they asked me to wear golden colors, a suit and something traditional if I liked. These came together with my Reno boutonnière to form, for me, among my most meaningful outfits.
As the hours neared showtime, our jazz cue began, and I transitioned from greeting guests at the door and choir rehearsal to assembling for the procession in. I walked in with a close friend, who I loved chatting with. I especially loved the ringbearers with the rings on their sabers. Most special, our wedding party had front-row seats to witnessing the bride’s beautiful entry and seeing the heartfelt betrothals. I felt like such a cheerleader.
I stepped up to the ambo for what the groom called his favorite psalm. I prayed for the Holy Spirit to let me be the vessel. I sang with a little soul, yay. Seeing the couple’s and my choir members’ cheer gave me strength all the way to my high-note finish.
Then I closed the songbook I borrowed from the Grand Knight, prepared the mic once more, probably gave a curt smile, and began the reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans.
In Mongolia’s capital for the Peace Corps conferences, one night at dinner, one of my Catholic friends asked me my favorite Bible verse. I said, "Oh, I love these readings from Saint Paul, since he was my confirmation Saint. And reading his readings feels like reading a cosmic ancestor of mine. Especially, 'Do not conform yourselves to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind'" (Romans 12:2). After that, I went to help my student and a teacher apply for summer fellowships to the U.S. that were due the next days. After finishing those a few hours, I finally opened the bride-to-be’s message to see exactly which Paul reading she sent me. As I got midway through reading it aloud to a friend, I realized this was Romans 12 and went, "OH MY GODDDD."
What a sacrament. I felt great hope that taking my time with relationships will lead to extraordinary joy. Choir members congratulated me on an amazing psalm. After Mass, our priest commended me as having delivered the best reading of Romans 12:1-2, 9-18 he’d ever heard. I felt stunned.
The wedding reception felt wonderful. I spent most of my time with the fencing group. I enjoyed their fellowship, and they enjoyed my energy. I’d spend my days up to New Year’s among the newlyweds and their family still.
Las Vegas and Nevada Grow on Me
Given the subtle ways Nevada reminds me of Mongolia, I felt myself starting to feel more at-home in the Sagebrush State than when I left. From Vegas to Reno and around.
I used to loathe telling people I’m from Vegas, actually. I usually note it as the city where my family lives. But, after seven months in Mongolia, I feel like even Vegas has its charm. Hearing Panic! At The Disco on a mall radio felt right at home.
Vegas lights appeal to many from many places—especially Asia, reports say. And that’s special. Mom liked this city.
Up next is my New Year’s 2020 experience,
followed by my return to Mongolia through Beijing, China.
You can read more from me here at DanielLang.me :)
#Peace Corps#Mongolia#memoir#story#Catholic#wedding#memoryLang#USA#Christmas#newyear#holiday#love#blessed#funeral#service#baby#winter#Reno#lasvegas#nevada
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Alice Lloyd George Contributor
Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.
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Solving the mystery of sleep
A conversation with Dean Kamen on the myth of “Eureka!”
From Elon’s Neuralink to Bryan Johnson’s Kernel, a new wave of businesses are specifically focusing on ways to access, read and write from the brain.
The holy grail lies in how to do that without invasive implants, and how to do it for a mass market.
One company aiming to do just that is New York-based CTRL-labs, who recently closed a $28 million Series B. The team, comprising over 12 PHDs, is decoding individual neurons and developing an electromyography-based armband that reads the nervous signals travelling from the brain to the fingers. These signals are then translated into desired intentions, enabling anything from thought-to-text to moving objects.
Scientists have known about electrical activity in the brain since Hans Berger first recorded it using an EEG in 1924, and the term “brain computer interface” (BCI) was coined as early as the 1970s by Jacques Vidal at UCLA. Since then most BCI applications have been tested in the military or medical realm. Although it’s still the early innings of neurotech commercialization, in recent years the pace of capital going in and company formation has picked up.
For a conversation with Flux I sat down with Thomas Reardon the CEO of CTRL-labs and discussed his journey to founding the company. Reardon explained why New York is the best place to build a machine learning based business right now and how he recruits top talent. He shares what developers can expect when the CTRL-kit ships in Q1 and explains how a brain control interface may well make the smartphone redundant.
An excerpt is published below. Full transcript on Medium.
AMLG: I’m excited to have Thomas Reardon on the show today. He is the co-founder and CEO of CTRL-labs a company building the next generation of non-invasive neural computing here in Manhattan. He’s just cycled from uptown — thanks for coming down here to Chinatown. Reardon was previously the founder of a startup called Avegadro, which was acquired by Openwave. He also spent time at Microsoft where he was project lead on Internet Explorer. He’s one of the founders of the Worldwide Web Consortium, a body that has established many of the standards that still govern the Web, and he’s one of the architects of XML and CSS. Why don’t we get into your background, how you got to where you are today and why you’re the most excited to be doing what you’re doing right now.
W3 is an international standards organization founded and led by Tim Berners Lee.
TR: My background — well I’m a bit of an old man so this is a longer story. I have a commercial software background. I didn’t go to college when I was younger. I started a company at 19 years old and ended up at Microsoft back in 1990, so this was before the Windows revolution stormed the world. I spent 10 years at Microsoft. The biggest part of that was starting up the Internet Explorer project and then leading the internet architecture effort at Microsoft so that’s how I ended up working on things like CSS and XML, some of the web nerds out there should be deeply familiar with those terms. Then after doing another company that focused on the mobile Internet, Phone.com and Openwave, where I served as CTO, I got a bit tired of the Web. I got fatigued at the sense that the Web was growing up not to introduce any new technology experience or any new computer science to the world. It was just transferring bones from one grave to another. We were reinventing everything that had been invented in the 80s and early 90s and webifying it but we weren’t creating new experiences. I got profoundly turned off by the evolution of the Web and what we were doing to put it on mobile devices. We weren’t creating new value for people. We weren’t solving new human problems. We were solving corporate problems. We were trying to create new leverage for the entrenched companies.
So I left tech in 2003. Effectively retired. I decided to go and get a proper college education. I went and studied Greek and Latin and got a degree in classics. Along the way I started studying neuroscience and was fascinated by the biology of neurons. This led me to grad school and doing a Ph.D. which I split across Duke and Columbia. I’d woken up some time in like 2005 2006 and was reading an article in The New York Times. It was something about a cell and I scratched my head and said, we all hear that term we all talk about cells and cells in the body, but I have no idea what a cell really is. To the point where a New York Times article was too deep for me, and that almost embarrassed me and shocked me and led me down this path of studying biology in a deeper almost molecular way.
AMLG: So you were really in the heart of it all when you were working at Microsoft and building your startup. Now you are building this company in New York — we’ve got Columbia and NYU and there’s a lot of commercial industries — does that feel different for you, building a company here?
TR: Well let’s look at the kind of company we’re building. We’re building a company which is at its heart about machine learning. We’re in an era in which every startup tries to have a slide in their deck that says something about ML, but most of them are a joke in comparison. This is the place in the world to build a company that has machine learning at its core. Between Columbia and NYU and now Cornell Tech, and the unbelievably deep bench of machine learning talent embedded in the finance industry, we have more ML people at an elite level in New York than any place on earth. It’s dramatic. Our ability to recruit here is unparalleled. We beat the big five all the time. We’re now 42 people and half of them are Ph.D. scientists. For every single one of them we were competing against Google, Facebook, Apple.
AMLG: Presumably this is a more interesting problem for them to work on. If they want to go work at Goldman in AI they can do that for a couple of years, make some dollars and then come back and do the interesting stuff.
TR: They can make a bigger salary but they will work on something that nobody in the rest of the world will ever get to hear about. The reason why people don’t talk about all this ML talent here is when it’s embedded in finance you never get to hear about it. It’s all secret. Underneath the waters. The work we’re doing and this new generation of companies that have ML at their core — even a company like Spotify is, on the one hand fundamentally a licensing and copyright arbitrage company, but on the other hand what broke out for Spotify was their ML work. It was fundamental to the offer. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening in New York again and again now. There’s lots of companies — like a hardware company — that would be scary to build in New York. We have a significant hardware component to what we’re doing. It is hard to recruit A team world-class hardware folks in New York but we can get them. We recently hired the head of product from Peloton who formerly ran Makerbot.
AMLG: We support that and believe there’s a budding pool here. And I guess the third bench is neuro, which Columbia is very strong in.
Larry Abbott helped found the Center of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia
TR: Yes as is NYU. Neuroscience is in some sense the signature department at Columbia. The field breaks across two domains — the biological and the computational. Computational neuroscience is machine learning for real neurons, building operating computational models of how real neurons do their work. It’s the field that drives a lot of the breakthroughs in machine learning. We have these biologically inspired concepts in machine learning that come from computational neuroscience. Colombia has by far the top computational neuroscience group in the world and probably the top biological neuroscience group in the world. There are five Nobel Prize winners in the program and Larry Abbott the legend of theoretical neuroscience. It’s its an unbelievably deep bench.
AMLG: How do you recruit people that are smarter than you? This is a question that everyone listening wants to know.
Patrick Kaifosh, Thomas Reardon, Tim Machado the co-founders of CTRL-labs
TR: I’m not dumb but I’m not as smart as my co-founder and I’m not as smart as half of the scientific staff inside the company. I affectionately refer to my co-founder as a mutant. Patrick Kaifosh, who’s chief scientist. He is one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever known. Patrick is one of those generational people that can change our concept of what’s possible, and he does that in a first principles way. The recruiting part is to engage people in a way that lets them know that you’re going to take all the crap away that allows them to work on the hardest problems with the best people.
AMLG: I believe it and I’ve met some of them. So what was the conversation with Kaifosh and Tim when when you first sat down and decided to pursue the idea?
TR: So we were wrapping up our graduate studies, the three of us. We were looking at what it would be like to stay in academia and the bureaucracy involved in trying to be a working scientist in academia and writing grants. We were looking around at the young faculty members we saw at Columbia and thought, that doesn’t look like they’re having fun.
AMLG: When you were leaving Columbia it sounds like there wasn’t another company idea. Was it clear that this was the idea that you wanted to pursue at that time?
TR: What we knew is we wanted to do something collaborative. We did not think, let’s go build a brain machine interface. We don’t actually like that phrase, we like to call them neural interfaces. We didn’t think about neural interfaces at all. The second idea we had, an ingredient we put into the stew and started mixing up was, was that we wanted to leverage experimental technologies from neuroscience that hadn’t yet been commercialized. In some sense this was like when Genentech was starting in the mid 70s. We had found the crystal structure of DNA back in the late 40s, there had been 30 years of molecular biology, we figured out DNA then RNA then protein synthesis then ribosome. Thirty years of molecular biology but nobody had commercialized it yet. Then Genentech came along with this idea that we could make synthetic protein, that we could start to commercialize some of these core experimental techniques and do translation work and bring value back to humanity. It was all just sitting there on the shelf ready to be exploited.
We thought OK what are the technologies in neuroscience that we use at the bench that could be exploited? For instance spike sorting, the ability to listen with a single electrode to lots of neurons at the same time and see all the different electrical impulses and de-convolve them. You get this big noisy signal and you can see the individual neurons activity. So we started playing with that idea, lets harvest the last 30 or 40 years of bench experimental neuroscience. What are the techniques that were invented that we could harvest?
AMLG: We’ve been reading about these things and there’s been so much excitement about BMI but you haven’t really seen things in market things that people can hack around with. I don’t know why that gap hasn’t been filled. Does no one have the balls to go take these off the shelf and try and turn them into something or is it a timing question?
The brain has upper motor neurons in the cortex which map to lower motor neurons in the spinal cord, which send long axons down to contact the muscles. They release neurotransmitters that turn individual muscle fibres on and off. Motor units have 1:1 correspondence with motor neurons. When motor neurons fire in the spinal cord, an output signal from the brain, you get a direct response in the muscle. If those EMG signals can be decoded, then you can decode the zeros and ones of the nervous system — action potential
TR: Some of this is chutzpah and some of it is timing. The technologies that we are leveraging weren’t fully developed for how we’re using them. We had to do some invention since we started the company three years ago. But they were far enough along that you could imagine the gap and come up with a way to cross the gap. How could we, for instance, decode an individual neuron using a technology called electromyography. Electromyography has been around for probably over a century and that’s the ability to —
AMLG: Thats what we call EMG.
TR: EMG. Yes you can record the electrical activity of a muscle. EKG electrocardiography is basically EMG for the heart alone. You’re looking at the electrical activity of the heart muscles. We thought if you improve this legacy technology of EMG sufficiently, if you improve the signal to noise, you ought to be able to see the individual fibers of a muscle. If you know some neuroanatomy what you figure out is that the individual fibers correspond to individual neurons. And by listening to individual fibers we can now reconstruct the activity of individual neurons. That’s the root of a neural interface. The ability to listen to an individual neuron.
EEG toy “the Force Trainer”
AMLG: My family are Star Wars fans and we had a device one Christmas that we sat around playing with, the force trainer. If you put the device around your head and stare long enough the thing is supposed to move. Everything I’ve ever tried has been like that has been like that Force Trainer, a little frustrating —
TR: Thats EEG, electroencephalography. That’s when you put something on your skull and record the electrical activity. The waves of activity that happen in the cortex, in the outer part of your brain.
AMLG: And it doesn’t work well because the skull is too thick?
TR: There’s a bunch of reasons why it doesn’t work that well. The unfortunate thing is that when most people hear about it that’s one of the first things they think about like, oh well all my thinking is up here in the cortex right underneath my skull and that’s what you’re interfacing with. That is actually —
AMLG: A myth?
TR: Both a myth and the wrong approach. I’m going have to go deep on this one because it’s subtle but important. The first thing is let’s just talk about the signal qualities of EEG versus what we’re doing where we listen to individual neurons and do it without having to drill into your body or place an electrode inside of you. EEG is trying to listen to the activity of lots of neurons all at the same time tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of neurons and kind of get a sense of what the roar of those neurons is. I liken it to sitting outside of Giant Stadium with a microphone trying to listen to a conversation in Section 23 Row 4 seat 9. You can’t do it. At best you can tell is that one of the teams scored you hear the roar of the entire stadium. That’s basically what we have with EEG today. The ability to hear the roar. So for instance we say the easiest thing to decode with EMG is surprise. I could put a headset on you and tell if you’re surprised.
AMLG: That doesn’t seem too handy.
TR: Yup not much more than that. Turns out surprise is this global brain state and your entire brain lights up. In every animal that we do this in surprise looks the same — it’s a big global Christmas tree that lights up across the entire brain. But you can’t use that for control. And this cuts to the name of our company, CTRL-labs. I don’t just want to decode your state. I want to give you the ability to control things in the world in a way that feels magical. It feels like Star Wars. I want you to feel like the Star Wars Emperor. What we’re trying to do is give you control and a kind of control you’ve never experienced before.
The MYO armband by Canadian startup Thalmic Labs
AMLG: This is control over motion right? Maybe you can clarify — where I’ve seen other companies like MYO, which was an armband, it was really motion capture where people were capturing how you intended to gesture, rather than what you were thinking about?
TR: Yeah. In some sense we’re a successor to MYO (Thalmic Labs) — if Thalmic had been built by neuroscientists you would have ended up on the path that we’re on now.
Thomas Reardon demonstrating Myo control
We have two regimes of control, one we call Myo control and the other we call Neuro control. Myo control is our ability to decode what ultimately becomes your movements. The electrical input to your muscles that cause your muscles to contract, and then when you stop activating them they slowly relax. We can decode the electrical activity that goes into those muscles even before the movement has started and even before it ends and recapitulate that in a virtual way. Neuro control is something else. It’s kind of exotic and you have to try it to believe it. We can get to the level of the electrical activity of neurons — individual neurons — and train you rapidly on the order of seconds to control something. So imagine you’re playing a video game and you want to push a button to hop like you’re playing Sonic the Hedgehog. I can train you in seconds to turn on a single neuron in your spinal cord to control that little thing.
AMLG: When I came to visit your lab in 2016 the guy had his hand out here. I tried it — it was an asteroid field.
TR: Asteroids, the old Atari game.
Patrick Kaifosh playing Asteroids — example of Neuro Control [from CTRL-labs, late 2017]
AMLG: Classic. And you’re doing fruit ninja now too? It gets harder and harder.
TR: It does get harder and harder. So the idea here is that rather than moving you can just turn these neurons on and off and control something. Really there’s no muscle activity at that point you’re just activating individual neurons, they might release a little pulse, a little electrical chemical transmission to the muscle, but the muscle can’t respond at that level. What you find out is rather than using your neurons to control say your five fingers, you can use your neurons to control 30 virtual fingers without actually moving your hand at all.
AMLG: What does that mean for neuroplasticity. Do you have to imagine the third hand fourth hand fifth hand, or your tail like in Avatar?
TR: This is why I focus on the concept of control. We’re not trying to decode what you’re “thinking.” I don’t know what a thought is and there’s nobody in neuroscience who does know what a thought is. Nobody. We don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t know what thoughts are. They don’t exist in one part of the brain. Your brain is one cohesive organ and that includes your spinal cord all the way up. All of that embodies thought.
Inside Out (2015, Pixar). Great movie. Not how the brain, thoughts or consciousness work
AMLG: That’s a pretty crazy thought as thoughts go. I’m trying to mull that one over.
TR: It is. I want to pound that home. There’s not this one place. There’s not a little chair (to refer to Dan Dennett) there’s not like a chair in a movie theater inside your brain where the real you sits watching what’s happening and directing it. No, there’s just your overall brain and you’re in there somewhere across all of it. It’s that collection of neurons together that give you this sense of consciousness.
What we do with Neuro Control and with CTRL-kit the device that we’ve built is give you feedback. We show you by giving you direct feedback in real time, millisecond level feedback, how to train a neuron to go move say a cursor up and down, to go chase something or to jump over something. The way this works is that we engage your motor nervous system. Your brain has a natural output port — a USB port if you will — that generates output. In some sense this is sad for people, but I have to tell you your brain doesn’t do anything except turn muscles on and off. That’s the final output of the brain. When you’re generating speech when you’re blinking your eyes at me when you’re folding your hands and using your hands to talk to me when you’re moving around when you’re feeding yourself. Your brain is just turning muscles on and off. That’s it. There is nothing else. It does that via motor neurons. Most of those are in your spine. Those motor neurons, it’s not so much that they’re plastic — they’re adaptive. So motor control is this ability to use neurons for very adaptive tasks. Take a sip of water from that bottle right in front of you. Watch what you’re doing.
Intention capture — rather than going through devices to interact, CTRL-labs will take the electrical activity of the body and decode that directly, allowing us to use that high bandwidth information to interact with all output devices. [Watch Reardon’s full keynote at O’Reilly]
AMLG: Watch me spill it all over myself —
TR: You’re taking a sip. Everything you just did with that bottle you’ve never done that before. You’ve never done that task. In fact you just did a complicated thing, you actually put it around the microphone and had to use one hand then use the other hand to take the cap off the bottle. You did all of that without thinking. There was no cognitive load involved in that. That bottle is different than any other bottle, its slippery it’s got a certain temperature, the weight changes. Have you ever seen these robots try to pour water. It’s comical how difficult it is. You do it effortlessly, like you’re really good —
AMLG: Well I practiced a few times before we got here.
TR: Actually you did practice! The first year two years of your life. That’s all you were doing was practicing, to get ready for what you just did. Because when you’re born you can’t do that. You can’t control your hands you can’t control your body. You actually do something called motor babbling where you just shake your hands around and move your legs and wiggle your fingers and you’re trying to create a map inside your brain of how your body works and to gain control. But gain flexible, adaptive control.
AMLG: That’s the natural training that babies do, which is sort of what you’re doing in terms of decoding ?
TR: We are leveraging that same process you went through when you were a year to two years old to help you gain new skills that go beyond your muscles. So that was all about you learning how to control your muscles and do things. I want to emphasize what you did again is more complex than anything else you do. It’s more complex than language than math than social skills. Eight billion people on earth that have a functioning nervous system, every other one of them no matter what their IQ can do it really well. That’s the part of the brain that we’re interfacing with. That ability to adapt in real time to a task skillfully. That’s not plasticity in neuroscience. It’s adaptation.
AMLG: What does that mean in terms of the amount of decoding you’ve had to do. Because you’ve got a working demo. And I know that people have to train for their own individual use right?
Myo control attempts to understand what each of the 14 muscles in the arm are doing, then deconvolve the signal into individual channels that map out to muscles. If they can build an accurate online map CTRL-labs believes there is no reason to have a keyboard or mouse
TR: In Myo control it works for anybody right out of the box. With Neuro control it adjusts to you. In fact the model that’s built is custom to you, it wouldn’t work on anybody else it wouldn’t work on your twin. Because your twin would train it differently. DNA is not determinative of your nervous output. What you have to realize is we haven’t decoded the brain — there’s 15 billion neurons there. What we’ve done is created a very reduced but highly functional piece of hardware that listens to neurons in the spinal cord and gives you feedback that allows you to individually control those neurons.
When you think about the control that you exploit every day it’s built up of two kinds of things what we call continuous control — think of that as a joystick, left and right, and much left how much right. Those are continuous controls. Then we have discrete controls or symbols. Think of that as button pushing or typing. Every single control problem you face, and that’s what your day is filled with whether taking a sip of water walking down the street getting in a car driving a car. All of the control problems reduce to some combination of continuous control (swiping) and discrete control (button pushing.) We have this ability to get you to train these synthetic forms of up down left right dimensions if you will, that allows you to control things without moving but then allow you to move beyond the five fingers in your hand and get access to say 30 virtual fingers. What that opens up? Well think about everything you control.
AMLG: I’m picturing 30 virtual fingers right now —and I do want to get into VR, there’s lots of forms one can take in there. The surprising thing to me in terms of target uses and there’s so many uses you can imagine for this in early populations, was that you didn’t start the company for clinical populations or motor pathologies right? A lot of people have been working on bionics. I have a handicapped brother— I’ve been to his school and have seen the kids with all sorts of devices. They’re coming along, and obviously in the army they’ve been working on this. But you are not coming at it from that approach?
TR: Correct. We started the company almost ruthlessly focused on eight billion people. The market of eight billion. Not the market of a million or 10 million who have motor pathologies. In some sense this is the part that’s informed by my Microsoft time. So in the academy when you’re doing neuroscience research almost everybody focuses on pathologies, things that break in the nervous system and what we can do to help people and work around them. They’ll work on Parkinsons or Alzheimers or ALS for motor pathologies. What commercial companies get to do is bring new kinds of deep technology to mass markets, but which then feed back to clinical communities. By pushing and making this stuff work at scale across eight billion people, the problems that we have to solve will ultimately be the same problems that people who want to bring relief to people with motor pathologies need to solve. If you do it at scale lots of things fall out that wouldn’t have otherwise fallen out.
AMLG: It’s fascinating because you’re starting with we’re gonna go big. You’ve said you would like your devices, whether sold by you or by partners, to be on a million people within three or four years. A lot of things start in the realm of science but don’t get commercialized on a large scale. When you launched Explorer, at one point it had 95 percent market share so you’ve touched that many people before —
Internet Explorer browser market share, 2002–2016
TR: Yes and it’s addicting, when you’ve been able to put software into a billion plus hands. That’s the kind of scale that you want to work on and that’s the kind of impact that I want to have and the team wants to have.
AMLG: How do you get something like this to that scale?
TR: One user at a time. You pick segments in which there are serious problems to solve and proximal problems. You’ve talked about VR. We think we solve a key problem in virtual reality augmented reality mixed reality. These emerging, immersive computing paradigms. No immersive computing technology so far has won. There is no default. There’s no standard. Nobody’s pointing at any thing and saying “oh I can already see how that’s the one that’s going to win.” It’s not Oculus it’s not Microsoft Hololens it’s not Magic Leap. But the investment is still happening and we’re now years into this new round of virtual realities. The investment is happening because people still have a hunger for it. We know we want immersive computing to work. What’s not working? It’s kind of obvious. We designed all of these experiences to get data, images, sounds into you. The human input problem. These immersive technologies do breakthrough work to change human input. But they’ve done nothing so far to change human output. That’s where we come in. You can’t have a successful immersive computing platform without solving the human output problem of how do I control this? How do I express my intentions? How do I express language inside of virtual reality? Am I typing or am I not typing?
AMLG: Everyone’s doing the iPad right now. You go into VR and you’re holding a thing that’s mimicking the real world.
TR: What we call skeuomorphic experiences that mimic real life, and that’s terrible. The first developer kits for the Oculus Rift you know shipped with an Xbox controller. Oh my god is that dumb. There’s a myth that the only way to create a new technology is to make sure it has a deep bridge to the past. I call bullshit on that. We’ve been stuck in that model and it’s one of the diseases of the venture world, “we’re Uber for neurons” and it’s Uber for this or that.
AMLG: Well ironically people are afraid to take risks in venture. If you suddenly design a new way of communicating or doing human output it’s, “that’s pretty risky, it should look more like the last thing.”
TR: I’m deeply thankful to the firms that stepped up to fund us, Spark and Matrix and most recently Lux and Google Ventures. We’ve got venture folks who want to look around the bend and make a big bet on a big future.
via TechCrunch
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Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about Reddit for this very site. Before it published, I was sure it was going to be my Best Post Ever. I cleared my morning to handle the massive influx of comments.
Crickets.
Netting just over 400 shares, it was – by CMI’s standards – a dud.
I’ve since learned that confessing my undying love of Reddit to non-redditors creeps people out. Reddit has a strange and even repellant interface, though its engineers are working on a friendlier site redesign now. And when Reddit makes the news, it’s usually a story about the site’s trolls or less attractive underbelly (such as when redditors harassed innocent bystanders after the Boston Marathon bombing, implying they might be the bomber based on appearance alone).
If you’re not currently using Reddit, I’m going to try to convince you to change your ways. But before I do, here’s a Reddit 101 for those of you not familiar with the site.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is a collection of thousands of subreddits, communities built around a particular topic or idea. Some subreddits (called “subs”) are massive in size and scope (r/technology), while others can be pretty arcane (r/overlanding).
If you have a hobby, there’s a subreddit for that. If you have a problem, there’s a subreddit to help you cope. And there are thousands of subreddits devoted to things you didn’t know you wanted to know about (but do!), such as r/accidentalrenaissance or r/AnimalsBeingJerks. Each subreddit has its own rules, moderators, and vibe based on the people who subscribe to it.
Each subreddit has its own rules, moderators, and vibe based on the people who subscribe. @clare_mcd #Reddit
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If you visit the site when you’re not signed in to a Reddit account, your “front page” will be a collection of popular posts from across the site – and that’s what usually turns new visitors off. As a little experiment, I took a peek at the top few posts on “popular” to see what a non-user would encounter when visiting Reddit for the first time (timestamp: 3:20 pm on 4/24/18). Let’s just say the editors of this blog would not allow me to post what I saw.
To understand why Reddit is awesome, you need to open an account. Without one, your view will default to what is interesting to the average user (my guess: a 20-year-old guy, living at home, eating Hot Pockets). Once you have an account, you can choose subs to join and customize what you see on your front page. That means fewer pictures from r/aww and r/BikiniBottomTwitter, and more posts from the communities you enjoy. Whenever I hear people say, “I don’t get it,” it’s because they haven’t joined subs that interest them.
To understand why @reddit is awesome, you need to open an account. @clare_mcd Read more>>
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Reddit for Marketing? Tempting …
We’ve gathered here, however, not to talk about Reddit in general but to explain Reddit for marketing. I find it fascinating that most content marketers don’t understand just how popular Reddit really is.
The numbers speak for themselves. A list of the top websites in the world, compiled by Alexa, shows Reddit comes in sixth, just behind Wikipedia. (Alexa’s rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the trailing 3 months.) Even more amazing? Reddit’s average for daily time on site is more than 15 minutes, crushing the sites above it in the rankings, including Facebook and YouTube.
Of the top websites in the world, @reddit comes in 6th behind @Wikipedia via @AlexaInternet. Read more>>
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In the last 30 days, Reddit had nearly 60 million unique visitors from the U.S. alone, more than 1 billion visits, and over 8 billion pageviews. Holy cr@p; that’s a lot.
And Alexa confirms what I knew already from hanging around on Reddit: The audience skews young, male, and more educated than the average Internet user. (Individual subreddits differ significantly, of course.)
If Reddit’s audience is so massive and engaged, why don’t we hear marketers talking about it?
The #Reddit audience is massive, but it's hard for marketers to make inroads, says @clare_mcd. @AlexaInternet
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But it’s fraught with peril
So far, it’s been exceedingly hard for marketers to make any inroads on Reddit – and that’s good.
Reddit (warning: massive generalization incoming) thinks of itself as different and better than more brazenly commercial sites like Facebook. There’s a knee-jerk suspicion of anything promotional or covertly self-interested in large part because the culture values the community over the commodity. That means marketers who go on Reddit to plug a product or idea are verbally disemboweled. There are legendary cases of famous people doing Reddit for AMAs (“Ask Me Anything” interviews) and bombing terrifically because they just didn’t understand the community’s unwritten rules. (You can read about some of these bombs in my earlier post.)
Marketers who go on @reddit to plug a product or idea are verbally disemboweled. @clare_mcd #socialmedia
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Reddit has tried recently to push marketers into sponsored content, though I’m not convinced that’s working out well either.
A few weeks ago, QuickBooks organized a sponsored AMA with Julie Gordon White, an author and speaker who specializes in women entrepreneurs. There wasn’t anything wrong with the attempt; Julie seems like a likeable and interesting woman, and the microsite created by QuickBooks was decent. But with a measly three upvotes after three days, it’s clear something wasn’t clicking. (The conversation thread on the AMA was also fairly anemic, through no fault of Julie’s.)
The right way to use Reddit for marketing
Therein lies the big problem: On a site where all users are anonymized (which tends to embolden snarky behavior) and where there’s a general disdain for marketing, what’s the role for marketers?
What’s our role on a site like #reddit, where there’s general disdain for #marketing, asks @clare_mcd.
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The answer: Research, young grasshopper.
Reddit is a veritable gold mine of information relevant to your area of expertise, your audience, and your business. The number of subreddits on Reddit is so vast, it’s impossible NOT to find a community that matches your audience and its interests. Are your buyers statisticians? Hang out on r/AskStatistics, r/badstats, r/dataisbeautiful, and r/samplesize. Do you need to attract young programmers to your company? Why not join r/learnprogramming, r/programming and r/machinelearning? Interested in launching a new recipe microsite (poor timing .. but OK!)? Check out the most popular content on r/GifRecipes.
No matter what community you join, you can sort posts in a dozen ways to find the information you need. The best way to check and see if a sub is right for you is to sort by “Top – All Time.” You’ll quickly see what the community is all about.
And outside of the subs that match up with your business audience, you’ll find other cool subs to satisfy your learning needs:
To find new ideas about visualizing information and creating infographics, try r/Infographics, r/visualization, and r/dataisbeautiful
To find out how to untether yourself from your desk and work remotely from beautiful locales around the world, try r/digitalnomad
To brainstorm social and search ideas with others on the frontline, try r/socialmedia and r/seo
To keep tabs on emerging ideas and novel tech applications, try r/technology, r/Futurology, and r/tech
To brighten your life (there’s absolutely no professional reason to visit this sub), try r/reallifedoodles
The most important rule to observe
If you’re visiting a sub because it’s interesting from a marketing perspective rather than from a personal perspective, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Listen without speaking (or typing).
If you really can’t help yourself and need to share something (whether a post or a comment), I advise you to:
Hang out as a subscriber for a while before you share
Read the sub’s guidelines in the righthand sidebar to ensure that you’re not running afoul of the rules
Keep your mouth shut in #reddit subs until you read the guidelines, says @clare_mcd.
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Surprising rewards
If I still haven’t convinced you to road-test Reddit, consider this: When you join a community, there’s often a subtext or inside joke that you only understand after logging some time there. And much of my insider knowledge bleeds out into the real world – whether it’s understanding the subtext of my kids’ conversations or getting the joke in Twitter conversations. It’s as if Reddit is a middle-aged mom code-breaking tool to help me understand my older kids.
Just the other day I told my 18-year-old son to be careful driving that night because … you know… 420. His eyes widened into white orbs of surprise. My response?
“Reddit, honey.”
Here’s a code you won’t have to break: Use BLOG100 to save $100 when you register for Content Marketing World, which takes place Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. But hurry: Early Bird rates expire May 31.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
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Low calorie Food : Fitness goals
New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/low-calorie-food-fitness-goals/
Low calorie Food : Fitness goals
Each person now speak approximately KitKat and ready impatiently to try out the brand new recipe. No fitness gains for the general public — just a federal family members triumph for Nestle.
Even extra disturbing, though, are the attempts to update the unlimited amount of sugar in many of our food and drink through lacing them with synthetic sweeteners — a lot of which come with their personal traumatic health warnings.
Tesco, as an instance, becomes extensively lauded for responding to the threatened sugar tax on soft drinks through cutting the quantity of sugar in all 251 of its personal brand drinks.’
food
Those beverages now comprise less than 5g of sugar in line with 100ml — the level at which the levy is meant to kick in — and we will assume many other manufacturers to comply with a match.
Indeed, Coca-Cola says next month it’ll launch a brand new recipe for Fanta, with its sugar content decreased by a third — though the recipe has no longer been revealed.
Responding to the circulate, fitness Minister Nicola Blackwood joined Britain’s fitness and weight problems charities in applauding the store for its innovation.
‘it is outstanding to see Tesco main the field by reducing the level of sugar in their personal brand drinks,’ she gushed. ‘it is proof taking added sugar out of drinks is feasible and in keeping with what customers want.’
But in a standard enterprise pass, Tesco is replacing sugar with something that may be at least as horrific for us — a sweetener called sucralose.
This first rate-sweet, low-calorie food — that’s up to 650 instances sweeter than sugar — has been delivered to the beverages to make up for the sizeable amount of sugar that’s been removed.
Of direction, these varieties of synthetic sweeteners are imagined to assist us to shed pounds. But evidence from an extensive range of scholarly studies now indicates that they don’t. In reality, they could truly make some people pile on pounds.
That is due to the fact those synthetic substitutes can intrude with our metabolisms in diffused, but now and then dangerous approaches. Some of them May additionally even increase our hazard of developing kind two diabetes.
In January, a document via researchers at Imperial University London warned that ‘a long way from assisting to clear up the worldwide weight problems crisis, synthetic sweeteners are a potential hazard issue for noticeably common persistent sicknesses.’
Indeed, one American observer determined that folks that drink food plan soda at least as soon as an afternoon have a two-thirds greater risk of growing kind two diabetes than people who don’t devour weight loss program liquids.
Some other big examine — which observed heaps of humans for ten years — found those who drank more than 21 weight loss plan drinks every week were at two times the danger of turning into the overweight or obese. And the other eating regimen soda human beings drank, the spare the risk.
Defenders of artificial sweeteners argue they eat up by way of people who have unhealthy lifestyles, which twists the information. However, Studies in the Magazine Gut Microbes has advised there is extra to it than this.
It determined that chemicals in synthetic sweeteners together with sucralose, saccharin and aspartame May also intrude with the critical stability of bacteria in our Intestine.
Using excessive-tech trying out strategies, Israeli researchers determined the synthetic sweeteners can kill off microorganism that preserves our metabolisms healthful. Additionally, they enable unhealthy bacteria linked with diabetes to thrive.
As an result, consumers of synthetic sweeteners suffered a large reduction in their our bodies’ capacity to manipulate blood sugar tiers. That is one of the main signs and symptoms of developing diabetes.
In tests on 381 people, the researchers discovered that now not handiest did members’ capacity to modify blood sugar lessen, But their weight and blood strain rose in a potentially dangerous way.
Worryingly, that isn’t the only manner sweeteners had been located to threaten our health.
When we consume meals that have been artificially sweetened, it seems our brains are not fooled. Having tasted the sweetness, they are left craving the real energy that they anticipate from sugar.
When no calories arrive, our minds are left yearning sugary food and drinks greater than ever, Research via Yale University located. In impact, our minds say: ‘Adequate; I were given the wonder, But wherein are the energy?’
Measure Calories
Because of this ‘cheated of calories’ effect, sweeteners Might also even motive hyperactivity and insomnia, a separate study determined. Our calorie-hungry brains positioned us right into a restless, starving Kingdom until we assuage them via snacking on properly sugary foods, indicates this Studies.
Insomnia itself is a purpose of obesity, as sleeplessness reasons our appetite hormones to run insurrection.
Even without The use of synthetic sweeteners, meals manufacturers can use Any other approach to cut sugar — But without benefiting our fitness. This centers on something known as the ‘bliss factor.’
Comfort-meals makers use this period to describe an actual ratio of sugar, fat, and salt which can make foods too fascinating to resist.
Meals that hit this ‘bliss point’ are desperate to stop ingesting — a few say they may be addictive.
Researchers at the College of California say meals containing these combinations of sugars, salts, and fats overstimulate the brain’s praise circuits, referred to as the endocannabinoid machine.
These may be thought of as the body’s own ‘herbal hashish,’ in line with their Studies. In different words, so correctly focused are those ratios that junk ingredients like those bought with the aid of McDonald’s can induce drug-like delight.
Crucially, even though producers need to reduce one of the ‘blisspoint’ components, raising either of the other can usually compensate and convey the same impact.
Curiously, the new KitKat seems to were reformulated along similar strains: its capability to remain so gratifying has been helped by using the addition of greater salt — raising its share of our endorsed daily consumption by way of 1 consistent with a cent.
It’s far clear the need to cut the state’s sugar addiction, in particular amongst more young generations, is extra than ever.
Most cancers Studies Uk says British teenagers on Common drink a tub complete of sticky liquids 12 months. They consume around 3 times the encouraged quantity of sugar every day; the primary supply of this being sugary drinks.
But the movements of Tesco and Nestle display that says from Public health England — that new suggestions for slicing sugar in merchandise together with chocolate bars will help reduce the variety of overweight kids inside the Uk by way of one 5th are constructive at satisfactory.
Leaving the meals industry to police itself is doomed to failure — because the KitKat reformulation suggests, and as former health secretary Andrew Lansley discovered out in 2011 while he left it to the industry to reduce salt in processed food, and nearly nothing became performed.
Similarly, the sugar tax answer for tender liquids appears condemned to be stymied via cynicism on the part of the enterprise.
In his new e-book, NPR reporter Richard Harris picks thru a hassle which could corrode the destiny fortunes of health Studies if it isn’t constant: the reproducibility crisis.
As a former fitness biomedical researcher, I might describe “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Technological know-how Creates Worthless Healing procedures, Crushes hope, and Wastes Billions” as a frustrating study — irritating and timely. Technical know-how is a pyramid. Researchers construct on every other’s findings, and this founding creed is based on being capable of replicate experiments performed by using different labs. However scientists in biomedicine are suffering to reproduce the work of others, hence the reproducibility disaster. And as Harris explains in 240 or so pages, the trouble is costing taxpayers:
Fitness goals
The problem of reproducibility in Biomedical Science has been simmering for many years. As some distance returned as the Sixties, scientists raised the alarm about pitfalls—for instance, warning that human cells extensively used in laboratory studies were Often by no means what they presupposed to be. In 2005, John Ioannidis posted a widely cited paper, titled “Why most published Studies Findings Are Fake,” that highlighted the substantial problems due to flimsy examine layout and evaluation.
At trouble is not absolutely that scientists are losing their time and our tax greenbacks; misleading Outcomes in Laboratory Studies are indeed slowing progress in the search for remedies and Cures. This painting is at the very heart of the advances in medication.
Fundamental Research — The use of animals, cells, and the molecules of existence consisting of DNA — famous the underlying biology of fitness and ailment. Tons of this endeavor is known as “Preclinical Studies” with the wish that discoveries will cause actual human studies (inside the health center). However, if these preclinical findings are profoundly wrong, scientists can spend years (not to mention untold millions of bucks) misplaced in dead ends.
Taken out of context, Harris’ ebook may be used to question the yearly $30 billion budget for the National Institutes of fitness, which supports 27 different institutes and facilities at the side of loads of hundreds at universities and groups. But the book is less a laundry listing of serious shortcomings and other a blueprint for ways to improve instructional Research on the complete.
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Pluralistic: 14 Mar 2020 (Free audio of Masque of the Red Death and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Ada Palmer on censorship, Women of Imagineering, Glitch unionizes, Tachyon/EFF Humble Bundle, Canada Reads postponed, data-caps and liquid bans paused, Star Wars firepits)
Today's links
Masque of the Red Death: Macmillan Audio gave me permission to share the audiobook of my end-of-the-world novella.
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: A new podcast audiobook of my 2005 end-of-the-world story.
Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship: Part of EFF's Speaking Freely project.
Glitch workers unionize: First-ever tech union formed without management opposition.
Women of Imagineering: A 384-page illustrated chronicle of the role women play in Disney theme-park design.
Tachyon celebrates 30 years of sff publishing with a Humble Bundle: DRM-free and benefits EFF.
Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition: Political satire is really hard, but The Juice makes it look easy.
TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps: Almost as though there was no reason for them in the first place.
CBC postpones Canada Reads debates: But you can read a ton of the nominated books online for free.
Star Wars firepits: 750lbs of flaming backyard steel.
This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019
Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading
Masque of the Red Death (permalink)
Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Masque of the Red Death" in 1842. It's about a plutocrat who throws a masked ball in his walled abbey during a plague with the intention of cheating death.
https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death
My novella "The Masque of the Red Death" is a tribute to Poe; it's from my book Radicalized. It's the story of a plute who brings his pals to his luxury bunker during civlizational collapse in the expectation of emerging once others have rebuilt.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250242334
Naturally, they assume that when they do emerge, once their social inferiors have rebooted civilization, that their incredible finance-brains, their assault rifles, and their USBs full of BtC will allow them to command a harem and live a perpetual Frazetta-painting future.
And naturally – to anyone who's read Poe – it doesn't work out for them. They discover that humanity has a shared microbial destiny and that you can't shoot germs. That every catastrophe must be answered with solidarity, not selfishness, if it is to be survived.
Like my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, the Masque of the Red Death has been on a lot of people's minds lately, especially since this Guardian story of plutes fleeing to their luxury bunkers was published. Hundreds of you have sent me this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/disease-dodging-worried-wealthy-jet-off-to-disaster-bunkers
I got the message. Yesterday, I asked my agent to see if Macmillan Audio would let me publish the audiobook of my Masque of the Red Death for free. They said yes, and asked me to remind you that the audiobook of Radicalized (which includes Masque) is available for your delectation.
I hope you'll check out the whole book. Radicalized was named one of the @WSJ's best books of 2019, and it's a finalist for Canada Reads, the national book prize. It's currently on every Canadian national bestseller list.
There's one hitch, though: Audible won't sell it to you. They don't sell ANY of my work, because I don't allow DRM on it, because I believe that you should not have to lock my audiobooks to Amazon's platform in order to enjoy them.
Instead, you can buy the audio from sellers like libro.fm, Downpour.com, and Google Play. Or you can get it direct from me. No DRM, no license agreement. Just "you bought it, you own it."
https://craphound.com/shop/
And here's the free Macmillan Audio edition of Masque of the Red Death, read with spine-chilling menace by the incredible Stefan Rudnicki, with a special intro from me, freshly mastered by John Taylor Williams. I hope it gives you some comfort.
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/
(Here's the direct MP3, too)
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_332_-_The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death.mp3
Ada Palmer on historical and modern censorship (permalink)
My EFF colleague Jillian C York's latest project is Speaking Freely, a series of interviews with people about free expression and the internet, including what Neil Gaiman memorably called "icky speech."
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html
The latest interview subject is the incomparable Ada Palmer: historian, sf writer, musician, and co-host of last year's U Chicago seminar series on "systems of information control during information revolutions," which I co-taught with her. Ada's interview synthesizes her historian's distance from the subject ("yes, this is my subject, and these people are terrible, and it's kind of fun in that way") with her perspective as a writer and advocate for free speech.
"One of the victims of censorship is the future capacity to tell histories of the period when censorship happened….. It renders that historical record unreliable… makes it easier for people to make claims you can't refute using historical sources… It's similar to how we see people invalidating things now—like 'that climate study wasn't really valid because it got funding from a leftist political group"—they're invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity its development.
"Pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press recognizes that it isn't possible to track down and destroy every copy of a thing…An Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one copy. The Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned."
Fascinating perspecting on whether nongovernmental action can really be called "censorship."
"The Inquisition wasn't the state – it was a private org like to Doctors Without Borders or Unicef, run by private orgs like the Dominicans and it often competed with the state." As she points out, everything the Inquisition did would be fine alongside the First Amendment, because it was entirely private action.
Next, Palmer talks about market concentration and how it abets this kind of private censorship. This is something I've written a lot about, see for example:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
"If you have a plural set of voices, then you're always going to have some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and some will only print radical ones."
And while the internet could afford many venues for speech, in practice a concentrated internet makes is plausible to accomplish the censor's never-realized dream: "You can make a program that can hunt down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it."
Tiny architectural choices make big differences here ("Architecture is politics" -Mitch Kapor). Amazon can update your Kindle books without your permission, Kobo can't. Amazon could delete every instance of a book on Kindles, but Kobo would need cooperation from its customers.
Palmer is just the latest subject of Jillian's series. You can read many other amazing interviews here:
https://www.eff.org/speaking-freely
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (permalink)
Over the past two weeks, hundreds of people have written to me to draw comparisons between the pandemic emergency and my 2005 story "When Sysamins Ruled the Earth" – an apocalyptic tale of network administrators who survive a civilizational collapse.
https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-Overclocked-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html
I started writing this story in the teacher's quarters at the Clarion Workshop, which was then hosted at MSU. It was July 6, 2005. I know the date because the next day was 7/7, when bombs went off across London, blowing up the tube train my wife normally rode to work. The attacks also took out the bus I normally rode to my office. My wife was late to work because I was in Michigan, so she slept in. It probably saved her life. I couldn't work on this story for a long time after.
Eventually, I finished it and sold it to Eric Flint for Baen's Universe magazine. It's been widely reprinted and adapted, including as a comic:
https://archive.org/details/CoryDoctorowsFuturisticTalesOfTheHereAndNow/mode/2up
I read this for my podcast 15 years ago, too, but the quality is terrible. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I should do a new reading. So I did, and John Taylor Williams mastered it overnight and now it's live.
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/when-sysadmins-ruled-the-earth-2/
There's a soliloquy in this where the protagonist reads a part of John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Rather than read it myself for the podcast, I ganked some of Barlow's own 2015 reading, which is fucking magnificent.
https://vimeo.com/111576518
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. I've spent a lot of imaginary time inhabiting various apocalypses, driven (I think) by my grandmother's horrific stories of being inducted into the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad, which began when she was 12.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. I've spent a lot of imaginary time inhabiting various apocalypses, driven (I think) by my grandmother's horrific stories of being inducted into the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad, which began when she was 12.
You can subscribe to the podcast here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
And here's the MP3, which is hosted by the @internetarchive (they'll host your stuff for free, too!).
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_331/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_331_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.mp3
Glitch workers unionize (permalink)
The staff of Glitch have formed a union. It seems to be the first-ever white-collar tech-workers' union to have formed without any objections from management (bravo, Anil Dash!).
https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/tech-workers-app-developer-glitch-vote-form-union-and-join-cwa-organizing-initiative
The workers organized under the Communications Workers of America, which has been organizing tech shops through their Campaign to Organize Digital Employees.
https://www.code-cwa.org/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIovDRsc-S6AIVCuDICh0rFQCMEAAYASAAEgJb1PD_BwE
"We appreciate that unlike so many employers, the Glitch management team decided to respect the rights of its workforce to choose union representation without fear or coercion."
Women of Imagineering (permalink)
Next October, Disney will publish "Women of Imagineering: 12 Careers, 12 Theme Parks, Countless Stories," a 384-page history of a dozen pioneering woman Imagineers.
https://thedisneyblog.com/2020/03/13/new-book-highlights-stories-from-the-women-of-walt-disney-imagineering/
Featured are Elisabete Erlandson, Julie Svendsen, Maggie Elliott, Peggy Fariss, Paula Dinkel, Karen Connolly Armitage, Katie Olson, Becky Bishop, Tori Atencio, Lynne Macer Rhodes, Kathy Rogers, and Pam Rank.
When I worked at Imagineering, the smartest, most talented, most impressive staff I knew were women (like Sara Thacher!). It's amazing to see the women of the organization get some long-overdue recognition.
Tachyon celebrates 30 years of sff publishing with a Humble Bundle (permalink)
For 30 years, @TachyonPub has been publishing outstanding science fiction, including a wide range of stuff that's too weird or marginal for the Big 5 publishers, like collections of essays and collections.
https://tachyonpublications.com/
Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to celebrate their 30th with a huge pay-what-you-like bundle that benefits EFF. There are so many great books in this bundle!
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/celebrating-25-years-scifi-fantasy-from-tachyon-books
Like Bruce Sterling's Pirate Utopia, Eileen Gunn's Stable Strategies, and books by Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, Jo Walton, Jane Yolen, Nick Mamatas, Kameron Hurley, Lauren Beukes, Lavie Tidhar and so many more!
I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle and I've followed all the ones since. This one is fucking amazeballs. Run, don't walk.
Honest Government Ads, Covid-19 edition (permalink)
Good political satire is hard, but @thejuicemedia's "Honest Government Ads" are consistently brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKRw8GAAtm27q4R3Q0kst_g
The latest is, of course, Covi9-19 themed. It is funny, trenchant, and puts the blame exactly where it belongs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hks6Nq7g6P4
If you like it, you can support their Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/TheJuiceMedia
TSA lifts liquid bans, telcos lift data caps (permalink)
Your ISP is likely to lift its data-caps in the next day or two. @ATT and @comcast already did.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74qzb/atandt-suspends-broadband-usage-caps-during-coronavirus-crisis
And TSA has decided that 12 ounces of any liquid labelled "hand sanitizer" is safe for aviation, irrespective of what's in the bottle.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21179120/tsa-hand-sanitizer-liquid-size-airport-screening-coronavirus-covid-19
What do these two facts have in common? Obviously, it's that the official narrative for things that impose enormous financial costs on Americans, and dramatically lower their quality of lives, were based on lies. These lies have been obvious from the start. The liquid ban, for example, is based on a plot that never worked (making binary explosives in airport bathroom sinks from liquids) and seems unlikely to ever have worked, according to organic chemists.
Keeping your "piranha bath" near 0' C for a protracted period in the bathroom toilet is some varsity-level terrorism, and the penalty for failure is that you maim or blind yourself with acid spatter.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/on_the_implausi.html
And even if you stipulate that the risk is real, it's been obvious for 14 years that multiple 3oz bottles of Bad Liquid could be recombined beyond the checkpoint to do whatever it is liquids do at 3.0001oz.The liquid ban isn't just an inconvenience. It's not even just a burden on travelers who've collectively spent billions to re-purchase drinks and toiletries. It's a huge health burden to people with disabilities who rely on constant access to liquids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m12mLXgO1A
And as we knew all along, the liquid ban was a nonsense, an authoritarian response to a cack-handed, improbable terror plot. It embodies the "security syllogism":
Something must be done. There, I've done something.
Think of all those checkpoints where all confiscated liquids were dumped into a giant barrel and mingled together: if liquids posed an existential threat to planes, they'd dispose of them like they were C4, not filtered water. No one believed in the liquid threat, ever. TSA can relax the restrictions and allow 12oz of anything labeled as hand-san through the checkpoints. There was no reason to confiscate liquids in the first place. But don't expect them to admit this. The implicit message of the change is "Pandemics make liquids safe."
Now onto data-caps. Like the liquid ban, data-caps have imposed a tremendous cost on Americans. In addition to the hundreds of millions in monopoly rents extracted from the nation by telcos through overage charges, these caps also shut many out of the digital world. They represent a regressive tax on information, one that falls worst upon the most underserved in the nation: people in poor and rural places, for whom online access is a gateway to civic and political life, family connection, employment and education.
We were told that we had to tolerate these caps because of the "tragedy of the commons," a fraudulent idea from economics that says that shared resources are destroyed through selfish overuse, based on no data or evidence.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend
(By contrast, actual commons are a super-efficient way of managing resources)
https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons
Telcos insisted that if they didn't throttle and gouge us, their networks would become unusable – but really, what they meant is that if they didn't throttle and gouge us, the windfall to their shareholders would decline.
What's more likely: that pandemics make network management tools so efficient that data-caps become obsolete, or that they were a shuck and a ripoff from day one, enabled by a hyper-concentrated industry of monopolists with cozy relationships with corrupt regulators?
So yeah, maybe this is the moment that kills Security Theater and data-caps.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-could-force-isps-to-abandon-data-caps-forever/
(Image: Rhys Gibson)
CBC postpones Canada Reads debates (permalink)
The folks at the @CBC have postponed next week's televised Canada Reads debates, so we're going to have to wait a while to find out who wins the national book prize.
https://www.cbc.ca/books/canada-reads-2020-postponed-1.5497678
Obviously, this is a bummer, though equally obviously, it's a relatively small consequence of this ghastly circumstance.
And on the bright side, the CBC have just released a ton of excerpts from the nominees:
https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/read-excerpts-from-the-canada-reads-2020-books-1.5496637
If you're looking for some Canada Reads lit for this moment, my novella "Masque of the Red Death" appears in my collection Radicalized, one of the finalists. I put up the story as a free podast last night (thanks to Macmillan Audio for permission).
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/the-masque-of-the-red-death/
Star Wars firepits (permalink)
West Coast Firepits went viral when they produced a Death Star firepit, though of course, I lusted after their Tiki Firepit.
https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/tiki-firepit-69825
But now they're really leaning into the Star Wars themed pits, with an Interceptor pit ($2500):
https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/interceptor
Or, if you prefer a post-apocalyptic version, there's a Crashed Interceptor pit, also $2500.
https://www.westcoastfirepits.com/shop/crashed-interceptor
If those prices seem high, consider that they're hand-made onshore, and contain 750lbs of 1/4" and 1/8" steel.
This day in history (permalink)
#15yrsago How DRM will harm the developing world https://web.archive.org/web/20050317005030/https://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/itu_drm.php
#5yrsago Anti-vaxxer ordered to pay EUR100K to winner of "measles aren't real" bet https://calvinayre.com/2015/03/13/business/biologist-ordered-to-pay-e100k-after-losing-wager-that-a-virus-causes-measles/
#1yrago A massive victory for fair use in the longrunning Dr Seuss vs Star Trek parody lawsuit https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190313/09554041791/big-fair-use-win-mashups-places-youll-boldly-go-deemed-to-be-fair-use.shtml
#1yrago A detailed analysis of American ER bills reveals rampant, impossible-to-avoid price-gouging https://www.vox.com/health-care/2018/12/18/18134825/emergency-room-bills-health-care-costs-america
#1yrago Ketamine works great for depression and other conditions, and costs $10/dose; the new FDA-approved "ketamine" performs badly in trials and costs a fortune https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/
#1yrago Facebook and Big Tech are monopsonies, even when they're not monopolies https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-not-monopoly-but-should-broken-up/
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources: EFF Deeplinks (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/), Waxy (https://waxy.org/), Slashdot https://slashdot.org).
Currently writing: I've just finished rewrites on a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I've also just completed "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel next.
Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.
Latest podcast: When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/13/when-sysadmins-ruled-the-earth-2/
Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627
(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583
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Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case
A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about Reddit for this very site. Before it published, I was sure it was going to be my Best Post Ever. I cleared my morning to handle the massive influx of comments.
Crickets.
Netting just over 400 shares, it was – by CMI’s standards – a dud.
I’ve since learned that confessing my undying love of Reddit to non-redditors creeps people out. Reddit has a strange and even repellant interface, though its engineers are working on a friendlier site redesign now. And when Reddit makes the news, it’s usually a story about the site’s trolls or less attractive underbelly (such as when redditors harassed innocent bystanders after the Boston Marathon bombing, implying they might be the bomber based on appearance alone).
If you’re not currently using Reddit, I’m going to try to convince you to change your ways. But before I do, here’s a Reddit 101 for those of you not familiar with the site.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is a collection of thousands of subreddits, communities built around a particular topic or idea. Some subreddits (called “subs”) are massive in size and scope (r/technology), while others can be pretty arcane (r/overlanding).
If you have a hobby, there’s a subreddit for that. If you have a problem, there’s a subreddit to help you cope. And there are thousands of subreddits devoted to things you didn’t know you wanted to know about (but do!), such as r/accidentalrenaissance or r/AnimalsBeingJerks. Each subreddit has its own rules, moderators, and vibe based on the people who subscribe to it.
Each subreddit has its own rules, moderators, and vibe based on the people who subscribe. @clare_mcd #Reddit
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If you visit the site when you’re not signed in to a Reddit account, your “front page” will be a collection of popular posts from across the site – and that’s what usually turns new visitors off. As a little experiment, I took a peek at the top few posts on “popular” to see what a non-user would encounter when visiting Reddit for the first time (timestamp: 3:20 pm on 4/24/18). Let’s just say the editors of this blog would not allow me to post what I saw.
To understand why Reddit is awesome, you need to open an account. Without one, your view will default to what is interesting to the average user (my guess: a 20-year-old guy, living at home, eating Hot Pockets). Once you have an account, you can choose subs to join and customize what you see on your front page. That means fewer pictures from r/aww and r/BikiniBottomTwitter, and more posts from the communities you enjoy. Whenever I hear people say, “I don’t get it,” it’s because they haven’t joined subs that interest them.
To understand why @reddit is awesome, you need to open an account. @clare_mcd Read more>>
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Reddit for Marketing? Tempting …
We’ve gathered here, however, not to talk about Reddit in general but to explain Reddit for marketing. I find it fascinating that most content marketers don’t understand just how popular Reddit really is.
The numbers speak for themselves. A list of the top websites in the world, compiled by Alexa, shows Reddit comes in sixth, just behind Wikipedia. (Alexa’s rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the trailing 3 months.) Even more amazing? Reddit’s average for daily time on site is more than 15 minutes, crushing the sites above it in the rankings, including Facebook and YouTube.
Of the top websites in the world, @reddit comes in 6th behind @Wikipedia via @AlexaInternet. Read more>>
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In the last 30 days, Reddit had nearly 60 million unique visitors from the U.S. alone, more than 1 billion visits, and over 8 billion pageviews. Holy cr@p; that’s a lot.
And Alexa confirms what I knew already from hanging around on Reddit: The audience skews young, male, and more educated than the average Internet user. (Individual subreddits differ significantly, of course.)
If Reddit’s audience is so massive and engaged, why don’t we hear marketers talking about it?
The #Reddit audience is massive, but it's hard for marketers to make inroads, says @clare_mcd. @AlexaInternet
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But it’s fraught with peril
So far, it’s been exceedingly hard for marketers to make any inroads on Reddit – and that’s good.
Reddit (warning: massive generalization incoming) thinks of itself as different and better than more brazenly commercial sites like Facebook. There’s a knee-jerk suspicion of anything promotional or covertly self-interested in large part because the culture values the community over the commodity. That means marketers who go on Reddit to plug a product or idea are verbally disemboweled. There are legendary cases of famous people doing Reddit for AMAs (“Ask Me Anything” interviews) and bombing terrifically because they just didn’t understand the community’s unwritten rules. (You can read about some of these bombs in my earlier post.)
Marketers who go on @reddit to plug a product or idea are verbally disemboweled. @clare_mcd #socialmedia
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Reddit has tried recently to push marketers into sponsored content, though I’m not convinced that’s working out well either.
A few weeks ago, QuickBooks organized a sponsored AMA with Julie Gordon White, an author and speaker who specializes in women entrepreneurs. There wasn’t anything wrong with the attempt; Julie seems like a likeable and interesting woman, and the microsite created by QuickBooks was decent. But with a measly three upvotes after three days, it’s clear something wasn’t clicking. (The conversation thread on the AMA was also fairly anemic, through no fault of Julie’s.)
The right way to use Reddit for marketing
Therein lies the big problem: On a site where all users are anonymized (which tends to embolden snarky behavior) and where there’s a general disdain for marketing, what’s the role for marketers?
What’s our role on a site like #reddit, where there’s general disdain for #marketing, asks @clare_mcd.
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The answer: Research, young grasshopper.
Reddit is a veritable gold mine of information relevant to your area of expertise, your audience, and your business. The number of subreddits on Reddit is so vast, it’s impossible NOT to find a community that matches your audience and its interests. Are your buyers statisticians? Hang out on r/AskStatistics, r/badstats, r/dataisbeautiful, and r/samplesize. Do you need to attract young programmers to your company? Why not join r/learnprogramming, r/programming and r/machinelearning? Interested in launching a new recipe microsite (poor timing .. but OK!)? Check out the most popular content on r/GifRecipes.
No matter what community you join, you can sort posts in a dozen ways to find the information you need. The best way to check and see if a sub is right for you is to sort by “Top – All Time.” You’ll quickly see what the community is all about.
And outside of the subs that match up with your business audience, you’ll find other cool subs to satisfy your learning needs:
To find new ideas about visualizing information and creating infographics, try r/Infographics, r/visualization, and r/dataisbeautiful
To find out how to untether yourself from your desk and work remotely from beautiful locales around the world, try r/digitalnomad
To brainstorm social and search ideas with others on the frontline, try r/socialmedia and r/seo
To keep tabs on emerging ideas and novel tech applications, try r/technology, r/Futurology, and r/tech
To brighten your life (there’s absolutely no professional reason to visit this sub), try r/reallifedoodles
The most important rule to observe
If you’re visiting a sub because it’s interesting from a marketing perspective rather than from a personal perspective, it’s best to keep your mouth shut. Listen without speaking (or typing).
If you really can’t help yourself and need to share something (whether a post or a comment), I advise you to:
Hang out as a subscriber for a while before you share
Read the sub’s guidelines in the righthand sidebar to ensure that you’re not running afoul of the rules
Keep your mouth shut in #reddit subs until you read the guidelines, says @clare_mcd.
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Surprising rewards
If I still haven’t convinced you to road-test Reddit, consider this: When you join a community, there’s often a subtext or inside joke that you only understand after logging some time there. And much of my insider knowledge bleeds out into the real world – whether it’s understanding the subtext of my kids’ conversations or getting the joke in Twitter conversations. It’s as if Reddit is a middle-aged mom code-breaking tool to help me understand my older kids.
Just the other day I told my 18-year-old son to be careful driving that night because … you know… 420. His eyes widened into white orbs of surprise. My response?
“Reddit, honey.”
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case syndicated from https://hotspread.wordpress.com
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