Marshall McLuhan once said, “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” The handwaving rhetoric that I’ve called a Borg Complex is resolutely opposed to just such contemplation when it comes to technology and its consequences. We need more thinking, not less, and Borg Complex rhetoric is typically deployed to stop rather than advance discussion. What’s more, Borg Comlex rhetoric also amounts to a refusal of responsibility. We cannot, after all, be held responsible for what is inevitable. Naming and identifying Borg Complex rhetoric matters only insofar as it promotes careful thinking and responsible action.

Well it probably starts as some kind of not very funny edgelordy joke that most kids don’t know about, but where gains traction, where this list actually becomes really popular is with adults like Lori who, when she got ahold of it, passed it around to school administrators and other adults and she thinks maybe it got out from there. But she also says she wasn’t the only one, she’d heard of other admins at other schools who had gotten a version of this list.

And then what happens next, this thing springs onto a new level: from principal offices to Facebook. Starting on the morning of September 22nd, you can watch this list ping pong wildly across Facebook in just a 24 hour period.

In the morning, a principal in California posted it to a private principal leadership Facebook group. Then, at 5P.M., it’s on this Facebook page full of cops talking about drugs and alcohol. And then, at 10P.M.,Officer Gomez takes a screenshot of a couple of other Facebook posts as evidence, types out the list and posts it himself. And by that point, it’s just everywhere. It’s on Facebook and Instagram, it spills onto the local news.

Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags
Reliable tools for the modern paranoid.

It’s the apotheosis of capitalism where the market now provides a financial token game for every meme, every celebrity, every political movement, and every bit of art and culture—with each tribe competing against each other in a war of all against all for the hyperfinancialization of all human existence. Is that the world we want to live in?

Web3 is a deeply polarizing topic for technologists because it’s designed to be that way. It’s a rhetorical trick to set up a false dichotomy between the legacy internet world of popup ads and Zuckerbergs—which legitimately does suck—and a fantasy world built on technologically incoherent pipe dreams and phoney crypto-populism.

Solve a murder in a near future world by diving into the Wikipedia of that world

mapscii.me

00WARTHERAPY00
7 years ago
Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first, ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together - until he died, when i was just 6.

i couldnt touch that console for 10 years.

but once i did, i noticed something.

we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome for the time it came.

and once i started meddling around... i found a GHOST.

literaly.

you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it - his ghost still rolls around the track today.

and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and...~

i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it.
Bliss.