Alexandra Peers
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Alexandra Peers
@peersalexandra.bsky.social
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Environmental science, history, art, fiction, technology, writing. Buddhist. She/her. Tweets/views are my own.
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Reposted by Alexandra Peers
jonathanbogart.net
"82 year old dies" is in a sense hardly news at all. "singular genius who transformed popular culture dies" is news, but also not uncommon. but "one-time symbol of bravura youth culture, trapped for decades by the fallout of the sixties, who fought free and became a widely beloved elder, dies," phew
June 11, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Reposted by Alexandra Peers
ztul.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/ztul...
ztul.bsky.social michael lutz @ztul.bsky.social · Jan 28
Thinking of this passage from Julian Dibbell's MY TINY LIFE (covered in the upcoming episode of Game Studies Study Buddies) wherein a guy who feels he was wronged by a chatroom's moderation system explains his plan to use a semi-automated sockpuppet army to troll the community into ruins.
Not that the vestigial Power Elite wouldn’t do their damnedest to rub them out, of course. But this was evidently also part of Anthony’s master plan. As he gleefully observed, the moment anyone tried to bring a dispute against one of his net-puppets, he would straightaway “crank up HortonWho.vs.aCleanWellLighted-MOO again, via proxy,” and watch with pleasure as the CWL crowd went into a frenzy of hairsplitting attempts to draw the line between their own communications link and his. He readily conceded that their efforts might in time sueced, and that a judgment banning some or even all of the little monsters might at last be won, but in that case his adversaries would then face the even tougher challenge of enforcing such a ban. “If you look at the problem of detecting such players, it’s very difficult,” said Anthony, explaining that the only way to go about it would involve a lot of laborintensive close examination of object code. Not an impossible job, to be sure, but then the purpose of his monsters, ultimately, was not to make themselves indestructible—it was to make the existing social system so chaotic and exhausting that eventually nobody in her right mind would even try to make it work. “The point is this, DrB,” said Anthony. “Wars are not won by killing people, they are won by economic collapse of the enemy.”
February 3, 2025 at 6:59 PM