#potemkin ai

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

#pluralistic #elon musk #neuralink #potemkin ai #neural interface beta-tester #full self driving #mechanical turks #ai #amazon #amazon go #clm #joan westenberg

[painting-with-much-passion]

POTEMKIN BUSTAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

My own painting depicting one of the coolest grab moves ever in motion!

#artwork #illustration #digitalart #art #drawing #fanart #painting #artist #artistsontumblr #tradigital #no ai #guilty gear #guilty gear strive #guilty gear accent core #guilty gear xx #bridget guilty gear #testament guilty gear #potemkin #potemkin gg #potemkin guilty gear #potemkin buster

[abr]

2023: momenti Korazzata Potemkin

Un sacco di cazzate cui credere ciecamente si stan smontando da sole tipo panna mal montata - essendo sòle; una volta denunciate svaniscono come neve la sole, tutti riconoscono che non esistono; al che i fan più sfegatati van via fischiettando e i protagonisti si riciclano come se nulla fosse, da scappati di casa alla Crisanti.

Citiamo tra le altre apparentemente insuperabili coracazzate Potemkin la pandemia e gli anceli, la transizione energetica, la guerra patriottica ucraina. il PD !!! I gretini di (magari) Ultima Generazione. I fake assalti ai Palazzi d'Inverno a Washington e a Brasilia. Soumahoro e il bizness dell'accoglionismo.

[azspot]

We can call this way of building and presenting such systems — whether analog automatons or digital software — Potemkin AI. There is a long list of services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans acting like robots. Autonomous vehicles use remote-driving and human drivers disguised as seats to hide their Potemkin AI. App developers for email-based services like personalized ads, price comparisons, and automated travel-itinerary planners use humans to read private emails. A service that converted voicemails into text, SpinVox, was accused of using humans and not machines to transcribe audio. Facebook’s much vaunted personal assistant, M, relied on humans — until, that is, it shut down the service this year to focus on other AI projects. The list of Potemkin AI continues to grow with every cycle of VC investment.

Potemkin AI

#ai #potemkinai

[continuations]

Thinking About AI: Part 3 - Existential Risk (Loss of Reality)

In my prior post I wrote about structural risk from AI. Today I want to start delving into existential risk. This broadly comes in two not entirely distinct subtypes: first, that we lose any grip on reality which could result in a Matrix style scenario or global war of all against all and second, a superintelligence getting rid of humans directly in the pursuit of its own goals.

The loss of reality scenario was the subject of an op-ed in the New York Time the other day. And right around the same time there was an amazing viral picture of the pope that had been AI generated.

I have long said that the key mistake of the Matrix movies was to posit a war between humans and machines. That instead we will be giving ourselves willingly to the machines, more akin to the "Free wifi" scenario of Mitchells vs. the Machines.

The loss of reality is a very real threat. It builds on a long tradition, such as Stalin having people edited out of historic photographs or Potemkin building fake villages to fool the invading Germans (why did I think of two Russian examples here?). And now that kind of capability is available to anyone at the push of a button. Anyone see those pictures of Trump getting arrested?

Still I am not particularly concerned about this type of existential threat from AI (outside of the superintelligence scenario). That's for a number of different reasons. First, distribution has been the bottleneck for manipulation for some time, rather than content creation (it doesn't take advanced AI tools to come up with a meme). Second, I believe that the approach of more AI that can help with structural risk can also help with this type of existential risk. For example, having an AI copilot when consuming the web that points out content that appears to be manipulated. Third, we have an important tool availalbe to us as individuals that can dramatically reduce the likelihood of being manipulated and that is mindfulness.

In my book "The World After Capital" I argue for the importance of developing a mindfulness practice in a world that's already overflowing with information in a chapter titled "Psychological Freedom." Our brains evolved in an environment that was mostly real. When you saw a cat there was a cat. Even before AI generated cats the Internet was able to serve up an endless stream of cat pictures. So we have already been facing this problem for some time. It is encouraging that studies show that younger people are already more skeptical of the digital information they encounter.

Bottom line then for me is that "loss of reality" is an existential threat, but one that we have already been facing and where further AI advancement will both help and hurt. So I am not losing any sleep over it. There is, however, an overlap with a second type of existential risk, which is a super intelligence simply wiping out humanity. The overlap is that the AI could be using the loss of reality to accomplish its goals. I will address the superintelligence scenario in the next post (preview: much more worrisome).

#artificial intelligence #ai

[wowychara]

Uuughhhhh, people are doing it so I'll hop on the bandwagon I guess.

✨Intro thingy✨

Name: Chara (Nicknames include but are not limited to: Melindez, Shawnie, Gary, Sugar Sweet, Potemkin Buster Queen, Defenestration Master, Fire Alarm, Really Annoying Girl, Melody, Doopy)

Age: 19

Fandoms: Murder Drones, TADC, Omori, Undertale, Undertale Yellow, Deltarune, Guilty Gear.

Things I do: Art, RP (Askblogs below), Storywriting, DnD, Causing major structural damage to historical buildings, Selling kidneys, Being tired, The Roughhouse.

Things I like: Cool art, Idie animation, Causing major structural damage to historical buildings, Dommy mommys, Chucking molotovs into crowded areas.

Things I DISLIKE: AI art, Big corporations, THE GOVERNMENT GRRAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!, Politics, Being tired, People stopping me from causing major structural damage to historical buildings.

DNI if you: Like lolis, Are just a pedo, Eat cottage cheese, Are here for politics, Are ableist, Are transphobic or homophobic, Are a troll, Don't have common sense, Try to stop me from causing major structural damage to historical buildings.

The Roughhouse Masterpost Link

Askblogs I run: @ask-bebel @askcomedymaskgangle

Uuuuggghhhhhh, thatsitbye.

#wowychara #introduction #blog info

[beesandwasps]

Idea for a short story:

Putin, having established that he will punish people who bring him bad news and that he believes he is going to go down in history as The Founder/Savior Of The New Russian Empire, has secretly funded a project to keep his brain alive forever to continue ruling the country. (After all, he can’t retire safely because there is no leverage he can possibly hold over his replacement that will keep the replacement from having him killed as a scapegoat using the dictatorial powers he himself has built up for the office.)

The plan is implemented. His subordinates have hackers create a VR environment indistinguishable (to a brain in a jar which gets its sensory input through machines anyway) from the real world and eventually switch Putin’s inputs over. The new Russian government uses him as a scapegoat for all existing failed policies, and then gradually make the VR world more and more ridiculous, and broadcast an edited-together version of Putin coping with invasions of cloned armies of Margaret Thatcher, economic crises caused by shortages of used pickle brine, and rebellions led by mutant clowns.

The show is immensely popular at first, but after a few seasons people become bored. Hackers build an AI to keep Putin’s weird potemkin world going, and leave the system running unattended with the intent of eventually bringing back the TV show. It is eventually just forgotten. Three hundred years later, the system is rediscovered, still running in a back room in a minor government building, and the simulation has become so completely out of sync with reality that it is no longer possible for normal people to even parse the visuals, but the signals from the brain show that Putin is enjoying it more than ever.

[salfadog]

I MEZZI GIUSTIFICANO IL FINE

“Il fine giustifica i mezzi” per me è come la corazzata Potemkin per il ragionier Fantozzi.

Continuate pure a credere ai leccapiedi dei potenti che disquisivano su come i nostri padroni possono prendere il potere a scapito di innocenti con ogni mezzo e poi chiedetevi perché nessuno è riuscito mai a fermare una guerra.

Sull’argomento la penso come due dei miei idoli di sempre:

Non me ne frega niente se anch'io sono sbagliato Spiacere è il mio piacere, io amo essere odiato Coi furbi e i prepotenti da sempre mi balocco     E al fin della licenza io non perdono e tocco

(Cyrano, Guccini)

Poi mi hanno spiegato che anche i geni sbagliano (l’ho scritto altrove tra i miei deliri). Il corollalrio è che in qualsiasi libro di un genio ci sarà una percentuale di verità quanto una di menzogne. È statistica.

(tranne Doug Fawcett, ma questa è un’altra storia) 

Siccome sono impazzito, nei giorni scorsi, per provocazione, ho iniziato a dire che i mezzi giustificano il fine. E poi ho capito di essere alndato ben oltre la pazzia. Perché un senso glielo si può trovare e anche migliore dell’originale.

Faccio un esempio:

Caso A: Possiamo comprare un mazzo di fiori e una scatola di cioccolatini per al partner una stupensa notte di sesso? 

Mezzo: fiori e cioccolatini. Fine: Sesso.

Caso B: Posso stuprare la vicina di casa perché è tanto che non faccio sesso e lei mi piace molto?

Mezzo: stupro. Fine: Sesso. 

Spero sia abbastanza chiaro: 

Faccio un secondo esempio:

Caso A: Posso aiutare le popolazioni oppresse di un altro paese offrendo loro rifugio e protezione e aiutandoli a risolvere i loro disaccordi con il governo coercitivista (tranquilli non vi inalberate, vale per tutti)  e usare la mia immensa macchina di propaganda per sollevare il mondo contro l’oppressore?

Mezzo: aiuti. Fine: Proteggere gli innocenti.

Caso B: Posso invadere una nazione confinante perché è in guerra civile o rivoluzione per proteggere una parte della sua popolazione, conquistandola e decidendone la sorte politica?

Mezzo: Invasione. Fine: Proteggere gli innocenti.  

Spero abbia senso per voi quanto lo ha per me. Ma questo significherebbe che state impazzendo pure voi.

Il raggiungimento del fine deve essere subordinato al mezzo e non viceversa.

Come dire: Se le vie per l’infermo sono lastricate di buone intenzioni, le strade per il paradiso sono  pavimentate con tentativi ed eorri. 

A   

[ninocom5786]

Il top del peggio dei social, della politica, della società, delle tv e dei quotidiani sulla guerra Russia Ucraina:

1. La Nato è solo un’organizzazione difensiva e mai ha invaso uno Stato sovrano (Bosnia 1994-95, Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Libia 2011); 

2. Il Battaglione Avoz non è un gruppo neonazista (basta vedere il simbolo e l’idolatrazione di Stepan Bandera per capire che non è neonazista); 

3. il presidente Zelensky ha sempre condannato gli ultranazionalisti ucraini (Anrdy Paruby, presidente della Rada ucraina, ritratto con la Boldrini allora presidente della camera dei deputati, ha ritenuto Hitler un maestro e il presidente Zelensky aveva conferito alla Rada un’onorificenza a un soldato di Pravy Sektor, altro gruppo paramilitare neonazista);

4. Servizio del Tg1: nel 1905, i bolscevichi al potere repressero la rivolta di Odessa (in realtà era una scena del film La Corazzata Potemkin dove Fantozzi riteneva il film “una cagata pazzesca”, così come il servizio del tg della RAI e tutto il resto del giornalismo italiano); 

5. Marc Innaro, il prof. Orsini, gli articoli de La Stampa sui gruppi paramilitari neonazisti del 2014 e l’articolo de Il Manifesto “L’arte della guerra” tutti silurati solo per aver documentato le origini della guerra in Ucraina, di come la Russia è intervenuta militarmente e perché la NATO si è estesa a Est e non Mosca; 

6. la violenta russofobia dei liberal socialdemocratici e progressisti superando sempre più a destra i Salvini, i Meloni, Casa Pound e ratti fascisti vari e permessa sui social network; 

7. Israele che afferma che “la guerra non è la soluzione” quando giornalmente bombarda illegalmente la Siria e uccide i palestinesi come i peggiori nazisti;

8. l’apertura e l’accoglienza dei profughi ucraini scappati dalla guerra, a parte yemeniti, siriani, libici, afghani, iracheni e africani (non sono profughi ma “invasori”); 

9. la “sensibilizzazione” dei media e della politica riguardo la quesitone ucraina tralasciando lo Yemen bombardato dagli amici di Renzi, la Siria, l’Iraq, l’Afghanistan, la RF di Jugoslavia e la Libia; 

10. l’eroica “resistenza” degli ucraini contro gli invasori e “cattivi” russi attraverso l’elogio dei neonazisti e l’umiliazione di Bella Ciato da parte di una cantante filo banderista; 

11. la censura di ogni forma di critica, dissenso, obiezione e ragionamento sulla questione ucraina e ogni opposizione alla NATO in difesa del libero e democratico Occidente (come ai tempi del regime fascista) per creare più consenso favorevole possibile; 

12. la censura dei media, delle agenzie di stampa e di informazione russa, di canali di informazione seriamente liberi e indipendenti bollati come “disinformazione” filorussa; 

13. affermare ancora Putin che sia comunista e vuole ricostruire l’Unione Sovietica, che in realtà è anticomunista e rivuole la Grande Russia imperiale; 

14. la censura nei social a ogni riferimento alla Russia e all’Unione Sovietica, specie la bandiera sovietica nel Reichstag; 

15. manifestazioni per la pace con bandiere di Pravy Sektor e l’appoggio al presidente ucraino Zelensky che sta facendo marcire civili ucraini per poterli usare come scudo umano per incolpare i russi; 

16. lo striscione della Cuvra Sud dell’Hellas Verona che incita i russi e gli ucraini a bombardare Napoli sbagliando però la coordinate (che peraltro bombarderebbero Verona che Napoli); 

17. l’accoglienza di Salvini in Polonia messo alla gogna dal sindaco per la sua maglietta con Putin e che il Capitano (senza palle) voleva solidarizzare con l’Ucraina; 

18. il peggio del governo e della politica italiana sulla questione ucraina facendo aumentare di due euro un litro di benzina, le bollette di luce, gas e i prezzi degli alimenti; 

19. Vladimir Putin paragonato a Josif Stalin o ad Adolf Hitler, paragone veramente ripugnante e squallido; 

20. le sanzioni contro la Russia, l’esclusione degli atleti dalle olimpiadi e da tutte le competizioni sportive, la censura dei media russi, l’estromissione di artisti, cantanti e musicisti russi da ogni evento musicale e artistico. 

#guerra #ukrainian russian war #russia #ukraine #ucraina #informazione #giornalismo #politica #musica #arte #sport #social network #social media #il peggio del peggio #schifo #vergogna #tv #media #merda

[inky-duchess]

History Bites: Best Royal Romances

In History Bites, I pick the best moments of history and the antics historical figures in order to give you inspiration for your WIP. Think of History Bites like prompts, only juicer and 90% accurate (results may vary).

Love is one of the greatest reasons to do anything. Love will make people act strangely, become better people and level empires. In a world of arranged marriages and terrible spouses, some royals found happiness.

Antony and Cleopatra were the Ancient World's power couple. After Caesar's death, who had been Antony's mentor and the father to Cleopatra's son, Antony was sent to govern the Eastern Provinces. At Tarsus in Turkey, Cleopatra paid a visit to Antony. During the visit, Antony and Cleopatra got to know each other better and quickly things got romantic. It was not exactly the best thing for a Roman senator to have an Egyptian mistress and an odd thing for a famously intellectual Queen to take a notorious foolish hothead as her lover but the two were incredibly fond of one another. The two of them had three children, who Antony left the Roman Empire to in his will. The will was the final straw for Rome so it went to war with the couple, which ended in defeat. Antony committed suicide and Cleopatra sometime afterward.

Queen Victoria's marriage was an issue from the get go, because she needed a husband who was not her subject (because women were meant to obey their menfolk and a Queen shouldn't obey a subject) and one who was suitable. Victoria didn't like her cousin Albert when they met as teens but feel head over heels in love with him after they met again after Victoria became Queen. The two were rather smitten with each other and managed to pop out 9 kids. Victoria was distraught when Albert died and rarely wore anything but black for most of her life and rarely went out in public.

Josephine de Beauharnais was a wealthy French woman during the French Revolution which claimed the life of her first husband. Josephine caught the eye of the young Corsican soldier, Napoleon and the two quickly wed despite him being 6 years younger. Josephine was the perfect consort for Napoleon, she was an able diplomat and learned. When Napoleon was away, he often sent her raunchy letters which Josephine hilariously replied with nonchalance. Napoleon divorced Josephine because she was barren and he needed a heir. I doubt he stopped loving Josephine.

Charles II was not exactly the most monogamous of monarchs. The Merry Monarch and one of the few English Kings I think fondly of, had one declared mistress about five others. A friend of Charles saw Nell Gwyn playing on the London stage and decided to introduce her to his royal master, a wingman if you will. Nell and the King hit it off well because Nell wasn't as grasping as the other mistresses and knew how to make him laugh. She once took him fishing and when the monarch caught nothing, she tied a fried piece of fish to his line. She bore him too sons but felt as if Charles was not awarding them the right honours. When he came to visit them, she called one son over by saying "Come hither, you little bastard." Charles was angry at that but Nell reminded him that she had little else to refer to him by so Charles created a Dukedom for his sons. When Charles died, Nell remained monogamous to him telling one admirer than she would not "lay a dog where a deer that once lain."

Louis XIV was Charles's cousin and they shared a similar taste for mistresses. Madame de Montespan was married as Louis was but the two started a relationship together. Montespan was rather spoilt by Louis, earning the nickname "How much" by courtiers. Montespan and the King were together for a long period of time, having many children. A scandal came to light which involved a supposed witch and black masses where Montespan bought love potions and cursed the Queen. Montespan was lucky to avoid execution but she was dealt a personal blow: the King fell out of love with her. Montespan haunted the court as Louis moved on, keeping a bedroom for him at all times just in case he wished to visit. He never did. Louis moved on to the nanny of his bastard children by Montespan, the religious Madame de Maintenon. The two were kindred spirits and when the Queen died, Louis married Madame de Maintenon and the two lived the rest of their lives together.

Henry IV of France was married when he began a relationship with Gabrielle d'Estrees, a Catholic noblewoman during the Wars of Religion in France. Henry was increasingly fond of her despite their religious differences, even more than his wife at the time Marguerite of Valois. Gabrielle was a successful diplomat, going between the Protestant King and his Catholic nobility, smoothing relations by convincing Henry to become a Catholic. Gabrielle went to war with Henry, caring for his clothes and cooking his meals while on campaign. Henry was worried about her safety, especially when he saw bullet holes in her tent but Gabrielle refused to leave his side. Gabrielle sold her jewels to fund Henry's wars and once left the middle of a ball to rush to Henry's side. Her devotion led to Henry deciding to marry and crown her as his Queen. Gabrielle died suddenly before her wedding/coronation leaving Henry heartbroken.

Catherine the Great is on my list for worst marriages bur she found love after her husband was murdered. During her coup when she was making an important speech to rally the troops to her, a young cavalry officer named Grigory Potemkin offered her his own sword knot, a missing detail on her uniform. The two met years later and quickly fell in love. Catherine and Potemkin kept up their touching relationship throughout the wars with Turkey and Catherine's other lovers. They were incredibly close, Catherine giving him every honour and Potemkin helping her realise her dream of a navy. Potemkin died on the roadside, collapsing in front of his soldiers leaving Catherine heartbroken. It is rumoured by historians that the pair had been secretly married.

Have you ever seen bibles with King James written on the cover? Though King James was married and had sired numerous children with his wife, James had a string of noble young men as favourites, his favourite being George Villiers. James was incredibly fond of George, calling him "Steenie" after St. Stephen who canonically (no pun intended) had the face of an angel. When asked by Parliament about the close relationship, James replied that George was as close to him as Jesus was to his disciples. Though historians dispute whether they were actually gay (citing the fact that James had a wife and a loving relationship with her), it is entirely possible that James was bisexual. The two sent numerous letters to one another over the years, each rather touching

Inez de Castro is probably Portugal's most interesting Queen Consort. She was exhumed for her own coronation. Inez was the mistress of Prince Pedro and mother to his children. The King, Pedro's father, really did not want his son marrying his mistress so he had Inez murdered. Pedro was distraught at her death and hunted down the men who had done it, having their hearts torn out in revenge. He would never marry again so to make his children legitimate he had Inez exhumed and crowned Queen, forcing the nobility to kiss her hand and hail her as Queen. Nobody bothered Pedro about his kids again.

Though the film The Favourite (2017) is a skewed version of the relationship between Anne of England and Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, there is some proof to attest to the romantic relationship between the two. They knew each other from a young age and once escaped a house together to avoid the influence of Anne's father who at the time was embroiled in a battle to keep the throne against Anne's sister Mary. The two were incredibly close despite their rather differing personalities. Sarah did care for the Queen but had a habit of being quite abrasive and quick with cruel words which eventually ended the long lasting relationship between the two.

Peter I of Russia was an imposing man both in stature and in political policy. Peter dragged Russia toward Westernization and imposed radical reforms upon his country. Perhaps the greatest wave he made, was his marriage to Catherine, a laundress. Peter and Catherine were incredibly fond of each other, sharing an appetite of good living and each other. Peter did sleep about but Catherine joked about it in letters asking him whether he found any laundresses he liked. Peter fathered two daughters on Catherine but instead of handing control to them after he died he made his wife Empress Catherine I.

Perhaps my favourite royal romance story, is between Emperor Ai and his favourite Dong Xian. Emperor Ai and Dong Xian were chilling in bed together one day. Ai had to get up but Dong Xian was still asleep, laying on his sleeve. Rather than waking his lover, the Emperor cut off his own sleeve so he could get out of bed.

Emperor Hadrian is famous for his bitchin wall between Britannia and Caledonia. But Emperor Hadrian's greatest love would be the Greek Antinous. The emperor had Antonius come with him wherever he went and the two were fond of hunting and writing poetry. Antinous tragically drowned in the Nile, probably by accident but foul play cannot be ruled out.

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson or as you might know her Madame de Pompadour was told at nine years old that she would love a king. In her twenties it came true when she caught the eye of King Louis XV of France, earning her the title maîtresse-en-titre. Madame de Pompadour understood Louis in a way nobody else would. She knew how to read his emotions and knew how to keep him entertained. Though the two stopped sleeping together thanks to a medical condition Jeanne had, Louis kept her as his official mistress. Kings were not permitted to attend funerals so when Jeanne died, Louis couldn't go. He stood on his balcony in a downpour as her funeral carriage left Versailles, the only tribute he could pay the love of his life

Elizabeth Woodville's first husband was an early casualty in the Wars of the Roses, leaving her to care for two sons. Destitute, Elizabeth stood by the road to speak with the new York King of England. Edward IV was younger than her and was her enemy, yet the two fell in love and wed in secret. The court was furious at the marriage as Elizabeth was only the daughter of a baron. The marriage was extremely happy despite Edward's many mistresses and the unsettled times they lived in.

Elizabeth of York, Elizabeth Woodville's daughter, was a highly sought after bride in Europe. Henry Tudor, her uncle Richard's enemy, proposed to her from abroad declaring her would wed her in the Cathedral of Reims. Henry invaded England and won the crown at the Battle of Bosworth. He married Elizabeth and the two, despite being born enemies, lived a happy marriage together. Henry was distraught when Elizabeth died and never remarried.

Mary Tudor, the daughter of Elizabeth of York, was at one point Europe's most eligible and beautiful Princess. She was offered as a bride to the Prince of Spain and then the King of France, who she was married to. Mary was briefly Queen of France but her aged husband died soon after the wedding. Mary returned to England but she had a secret, she had hastily wed her brother's childhood friend, Charles Brandon. Henry VIII, her brother, got so cross that he fined and banished the two of them from court. But he quickly forgave them and the couple returned to court where they spent their short but happy marriage.

Elizabeth II & Prince Philip have been married for decades. The Queen was only eight when she met Philip and the two became friends, writing to each other during WWII. After WWII, Philip renounced his his Danish and Greek titles to marry Elizabeth, becoming Prince Consort and Duke of Edinburgh. Despite Philip's infamous faux pas and wild behavior, the two have a stable and loving relationship.

Edward III & Philippa of Hainault were only children when Edward's mother planned their marriage to gain the military might of Philippa's father. Their marriage was a happy one that produced 12 children. Philippa accompanied Edward to the battlefield many times.

Edward II is on my list for worst marriages but he was a romantic at heart. Edward was very close to a knight named Piers Gaveston. Edward's father didn't like this bond and sent Gaveston away. Edward's first act as king was to recall Piers and bestowed titles and land upon him like there was no tomorrow. Piers was seen as a bad influence and because of this he was killed by a group of rebelling nobles. Edward grieved for years and eventually went on a revenge war against the nobles who had killed his lover.

Despite being Nazi-Sympathizing assholes, no one could doubt that Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII did truly love one another. Edward was King and Wallis was an American divorcee (sound familiar?), and there were laws starting that he could not marry a divorcee. But Edward couldn't give her up do he gave up his throne for her and the two went off to live in France together.

Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra (then Princess Alix of Hesse) were never meant to be married. Alexandra's grandmother Queen Victoria did not approve of the autocracy of Russia and would have preferred that she marry into England. Alexandra herself dithered on whether to marry Nicholas as it meant a change in religion for her. In the end, the two decided to wed and they had a relatively close marriage. Some of their letters still survive.

#History Bites #best royal romances #writing #writing resources #writing reference #writing advice #writeblr #writer #writer's problems #spilled words #writer's life #characters #louis xiv #Charles ii #mary rose tudor #Elizabeth II #anne I of England #Catherine ii #Catherine I #Emperor ai #wallis Simpson #Emperor Hadrian #lgbt+ History #love #Madame de montespan #nell gwyn #george villiers

[lhommequibavardeenecrivant]

On fait bien d’éteindre les lumières à la fin du spectacle!

Quand on parle théâtre, on a différentes places à choisir. Il y a la plus connue, la plus nombreuse, la plus discrète… Et il faut que toutes ces équipes conviennent d’un rendez- vous. Moquez-vous, jeune Béotiens! Le théâtre est le moyen le plus ancien et le plus extraordinaire de faire que des gens se réunissent pour réfléchir pour et par eux-mêmes. On a souvent comparé le théâtre à une liturgie. La bonne blague! En matière de célébration religieuse on a soit la confrontation, type catholique, protestant ou tout ce qui va vous refiler un prêcheur soit la grande communion circulaire, type tous devant un point cardinal pour psalmodier. Tiens le plus drôle c’est qu’un des religion les moins revendicatives d’un pouvoir en triangle perd sa nature profonde dès qu’apparaît un prêcheur. Tu sais c’est le type qui t’explique les écritures sanctifiées par le groupe, au cas où tu serais trop idiot pour ne pas comprendre par toi- même… Quoi? Ah, d’accord. Nous sommes tous des idiots pour les prêcheurs! Dès lors, des pécheurs potentiels pour les prêcheurs. Ben, tiens! Et c’est comme ça que de vrais idiots iront jusqu’aux armes et aux meurtres pour te faire admettre qu’ils ont raison. Ce qui est encore plus stupide parce que quand tu es mort, c’est assez compliqué de dire que l’autre a raison…

Ben, le théâtre, il ira pas te tuer parce que t’as pas aimé ce que t’as vu ou pas compris. Au pire, tu en seras pour avoir perdu quelques deniers, mais bon, ce n’est pas ça qui va changer la face du monde, hein… Pour l’instant, je n’ai pas connu de spectateurs qui se soit mis une ceinture d’explosifs parce que des gens allaient regarder Hanouna sur le plateau de…(1) je ne veux pas faire de pub; 2) je ne sais même pas sur quelle chaîne il officie; 3) ça s »écrit comme ça Hanouna?) Bon, toujours est-il qu’après on pense comédiens. alors là, le baratin qu’on peut se faire sur ce genre de métier…

Parce que oui, les cocos, c’est un MÉTIER, c’est à dire qu’il faut avoir de l’expérience, étudier pour s’améliorer et recommencer encore. Alors certes les gros muscles de Dwayne nous laisse croire que, bon, no pain no gain, mais pas seulement la fonte, l’ami, la capacité d’être empathique avec un texte… Et là, tu m’excuseras mais je n’en ai pas vu beaucoup qui soit bien capable de le faire…

Du coup, pardon, je veux revenir sur la polémique hypocrite de Scorcese à propos des films de super héros qui ne sont pas des films et les siens qui sont des films. Mort de rire! On a arrêté de faire du cinéma à partir du moment où on a créé les producteurs et c’était bien avant Scorcese. J’aime bien les films de Scorcese, les films de Lynch, de Cronenberg, de Lucas ou de Spielberg, mais je préfère Gilliam… Le problème c’est que l’artiste est trop souvent plus un manager qu’un cinéaste. Alors quand les gros blockbusters sont arrivés, et ça a commencé bien avant Marvel ou DC comics, qui, à l’époque, était des vraies BD US, ben le cinéma est devenu concurrentiel et ce n’était déjà plus du cinéma. Alors ok, Scorcese, il continue à préparer ses potages cinématographiques avec les bonnes vieilles recettes d’antan, mais voilà, il fait du bon vieux potage et les super héros c’est de la soupe lyophilisée, mais, dans tous les cas, c’est de la soupe. Tu veux un vrai film? Le Cuirassé Potemkine d’Esenstein, ou le Nosferatu de Murnau, je ne te parle pas de Melies, sinon Scorcese va faire une apoplexie!

Bon, je bavarde, je bavarde… Tu vois comment c’est bien d’éteindre ala lumière. Boum tu éteins, bam je m’arête…

Hein, pourquoi il fait noir, tout à coup….

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:)

#théâtre #Scorcese #acteur #cinéma

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

[tsarinahq]

A chegada da primavera em Nantis não havia sido marcada apenas pelo clima mais quente, ainda que o gelo do inverno não tenha se dissipado em sua totalidade, mas também, pela chegada das inúmeras e suntuosas carruagens nos portões do Palácio de Inverno, transportando as tão aguardadas participantes do que seria o maior evento de toda Moscovia. Apesar de todas as favoritas possuírem títulos da nobreza, havia quem já estivesse acostumada com todos os luxos proporcionadas por uma corte abastada, e também, as que enchiam os olhos em deslumbramento e encanto ao se deparar com um cenário tão belo e tão inusual, mesmo para parte da nobreza que, apesar de carregar o título nobiliárquico, não fora agraciada com uma grande fortuna. 

A entrada do palácio era adornada por um jardim esmeraldina desenhado em espirais, e pincelado por delicadas flores primaveris que começavam a brotar nos arbustos. Estátuas de ouro maciço faziam-se presentes na base das robustas e majestosas escadarias de mármore, tão vívidas que, segundo alguns falastrões, se prestasse atenção, era possível visualizar seus olhos acompanhando o movimento de cada habitante ou convidado da antiga residência do ex-czar Maxim. A fachada, inspirada no antigo Palácio de Catarina, seguia uma paleta de cores harmoniosas de azuis e dourados, finalizados com o branco perolados do mármore que compunha as inúmeras pilastras da fachada quase quilométrica do Palácio de Inverno.

Era início da tarde quando todas as favoritas de Moscova foram recepcionadas no suntuoso Salão dos Espelhos, revestido por pilastras reluzentes, estatuetas douradas, e claro, inúmeros espelhos, que tornavam o ambiente bem mais vasto do que já era. Primeiramente, as clássicas boas vindas, acompanhadas das lista quilométrica de regras, alegando o que fazer e não fazer enquanto estivessem hospedadas no Palácio, na presença do czar, e principalmente, na presença do príncipe. E depois de um breve tour pelas áreas mais importantes da residência real, as favoritas foram levadas para um grande salão, onde foram apresentadas aos estilistas, cabeleireiros, maquiadores e manicures, e informadas de que teriam a tarde inteira para se prepararem para o grande evento da noite ––– que incluiria a apresentação das garotas não apenas para a família real, mas para toda Moscovia. A primeira parte do evento consistiria no tapete vermelho, fotos, filmagens e entrevistas. Logo após se apresentarem em rede nacional, exibindo sua beleza e seus trajes de gala que beiravam o exagero, as favoritas chegavam ao púlpito folheado em ouro, onde o arcebispo Vasili Potemkin-Tavricheski, juntamente da czarina Olga, do czar Dimitri e do príncipe Grigori, as aguardavam pacientemente. Após repousarem a destra sobre o Livro Sagrado, as garotas teriam que jurar em nome de Deus, e de Sankta Sofya, Sankt Yuri e Sankt Maskim que todos os seus sentimentos e juras de amor haverão de ter direcionadas ao príncipe e a ninguém mais enquanto estiverem na competição.

E logo depois, todas iriam diretamente para o Salão Principal, onde aconteceria um grande baile. Antes de chegarem ao vasto ambiente, as favoritas passavam por um longo corredor, que ostentavam em suas paredes quadros com molduras barrocas, do tamanho de um homem adulto, e em cada um deles, havia a pintura de cada czar que um dia governou tanto Moscóvia, quanto a antiga Rússia. Pedro, Catarina, Nicolau, Maxim, Dimitri… Mas o último quadro, ao lado da porta que dava para o salão de baile, estava vazio, à espera do próximo czar. O ambiente era propositalmente majestoso e imponente, como se fosse sua intenção mostrar todo o poder e a força que o czarismo carregava; as pinturas olhavam seus telespectadores de cima com alguma prepotência, como se dissessem que não sucumbiriam nas mãos de rebeldes, tampouco seriam piedosos com quem tentasse derrubá-los. A iluminação suntuosa, comes e bebes de todos os tipos, e em quantidade o suficiente para alimentar um exército, a decoração ostensiva em mármore e dourado, assim como as estatuetas cuidadosamente polidas em cristal decorando as mesas, formavam um cenário espetaculoso o suficiente para chamar atenção de todos os jornais de Nantis; fotógrafos e jornalistas insistiam em noticiar o evento, mesmo que já houvessem tido sua vez no tapete vermelho; e as favoritas, é claro, compunham uma parte importante do ostensivo quadro. Os vestidos de gala, festivos e representando claramente a província de onde veio cada garota, também eram motivos de notícias, assim como a curiosidade de toda a nação, envolvida pela política do pão e circo, para conhecer as concorrentes à Coroa. Afinal, seus czares eram venerados como verdadeiros santos, e em pouco tempo, seria decidido quem seria a felizarda a ocupar o título de czarina. 

INFORMAÇÕES OOC:

Pa pa pa pa pa pa… McDonald’s? … não, mas temos um baile gostosinho esperando, então vamos!

A família real já chega como? Mostrando a que veio. Com muita pompa, circunstância e uma pitadinha de arrogância, o baile de apresentação das Favoritas estará sendo televisionado para todos os territórios moscovitas. Melhor ficar atento para causar uma boa impressão!

A festa conta com uma infinidade de comes e bebes, num banquete diversificado que busca agradar os paladares mais exigentes. A decoração também é soberba, pensada com cuidado pra ostentar toda riqueza da Coroa de Moscóvia. Porém, não se engane. O mais importante do evento, a despeito das distrações, é a construção de um bom network. Nossas Favoritas vão precisar de toda ajuda possível, acreditem!  

Nosso primeiríssimo evento poderá ser aproveitado a partir das 18:00hs de hoje, segunda-feira (12/10) até as 23:59hs de quinta-feira (15/10) em OOC. Em IC, a passagem de tempo é de uma noite, com o salão de baile sendo ocupado no máximo até as 03:00hs formalmente. Qualquer alteração na duração do baile será avisada com antecedência por nós, não esquentem!

Como dito no texto acima, nossas queridinhas estão homenageando seus setores através de looks chiquérrimos! Se quiserem postar as roupinhas temáticas é só usar a tag #favlooks. Lembrando que os funcionários também devem aparecer bem vestidos para a comemoração — e não vamos nem falar da realeza convidada! É haute couture na veia, meus amigos.

Todo mundo pode, e deve, interagir nesse evento, de preferência deixando um starter aberto na tag #favstarter. Apenas pedimos mais atenção na hora de interações com funcionários, já que ao contrário de outros personagens, eles estão no baile para servir. (ai, gente, tem que dar aquele jeitinho brasileiro e ir pra trás dos arbustos conversar kkkkkkkk)

No mais, divirtam-se!!! Esperamos que aproveitem bastante o evento, fizemos com muito carinho para vocês. E, aproveitando a deixa, queremos agradecer a todos por terem aplicado para o RP e estar tornando esse jogo possível! Vocês são maravilhosoooos! Agora vamos colocar a raba pra dançar muito elegantemente, plmdds. Vamos lá, piui tic tac!

#faveventos #eventos. #ei galera #vamos focar em interagir #os looks não são obrigatorios #se for postar #deixe pra postar depois deixar um starterzinho aberto na tag #♡

[archinform]

Cinema moderne: The Punch and Judy Theatre, Chicago, 1930

“The graceful functionalism of the Punch and Judy;” drawing by Nicolas Remisoff. The Western Architect, November 1930, p. 175.

The cinema unique

The Punch and Judy Theatre was a cinematic remodeling in the modern style of an older theater space. Originally the second-third floor Recital Hall of the 1896 Steinway Hall [see Steinway Hall article here], the new cinema space was a complete reimagining, on an intimate scale, of the experience of moviegoing. The Punch and Judy’s design was the work of Eugene Fuhrer, architect, Nicolas Remisoff, theatre designer and consultant, and Edgar Miller, designer of the lobby's relief decorations.

Edgar Miller “Punch” relief

The Punch and Judy was “an extension of the ventures of Louis Machat,”[1]  who had built on the “little theatre” movement in America with his version of “little cinema,” first in the eastern U.S. and then in Chicago’s Towertown [the area off N. Michigan Ave. near the Water Tower].

The “little theatre” movement has courageously invaded the Loop and the result, architecturally, is a most interesting transformation of the one Chicago’s oldest “legitimate” theatres into a motion picture house not only modern but vigorously modernistic, and as such, it is probably one of the most successful examples of this manner that we have in America.[2]

The Western Architect, November 1930, p. 182. 

The existing theater was square-shaped, of late-Victorian design, and with “objectionable features throughout” including two balconies, view-obstructing columns, bad acoustics, improper ventilation, and badly-arranged seats. It was judged “utterly impossible for the present-day theatre, while the general design was of such poor taste that a complete remodelling had to be considered.”[3]

Interior views from “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, pp. 35-40:

The designers’ task was to turn an “antiquated playhouse,” by then “the product of another architectural period,” [4] into the cinema unique, with every modern design feature and convenience. Modern and modernistic were how the designers’ work was described, in terms both of technology and of style. Eschewing the historical trappings of grand movie palaces, the new style was stripped down, almost devoid of ornament, and based on smooth, curving surfaces. Streamline moderne[5] or Depression Modern[6] would later define this style; in France, it would be called at the time Style paquebot, or "Ocean liner style," referring to the classic ocean liner Normandie.[7] Indeed, one description noted “The columns rising like pylons or the stacks of a great ship” (which actually covered the four columns of the earlier theater), as well as “the plain surfaces and strong lines that mark the entire design.[8]

This is modernism in the mood commonly referred to when this style of design is mentioned. For those who like the severer note…it is probably one of the most honest creations in the motif that we have in this country… [one would] be reminded of several of the finest examples of the manner erected in Germany.[9]

  Interior views from Remisoff, Nicolas, “The Punch and Judy Theatre,” The Western Architect, November 1930, pp. 182-191:

The cinema’s broadly-curved walls and domical ceiling, as well as the color scheme – touches of red and blue in reference to Punch and Judy, “faun” or “honey-brown” walls, and bold accents of black – characterized its modern style. A hallmark of this new mode, in addition, was its use of lighting. In the Punch and Judy, illumination was almost all from reflected light. Its principal source was from a light cove set into an elongated proscenium arch, from which the indirect lighting would be reflected off the curtain, softly illuminating the whole room. The lighting allegedly had the same faun tint as the walls.[10]

The new theater was illustrated in The Western Architect of November 1930, one article penned by Nicolas Remisoff, design consultant. The theater had been transformed from a squarish space into one “circular in feeling.”  Its design, the specialized sound-absorbing seats made by the American Seating Company, the color scheme, the acoustics, and even the free demitasse coffee and cigarettes offered in the lobby, reflected the idea that “the whole theme of the theatre is comfort - comfort to all the senses.”[11] A sense intimacy was achieved by reducing the previous space’s 890 seats to just 354.[12]

Main floor and loge plans

The new Punch and Judy offered seating on the main floor and in a second-level loge; the loge featured metal trays where patrons could comfortably rest their demitasses or ashtrays. Its small lobby, with plaques of Punch and Judy by Edgar Miller, was reached by a stairway from the ground floor; the entry was through the space originally occupied by the Lyon & Potter Steinway showroom, to the right of the building’s central entrance.

“Thus by a harmony of forms, colors, sounds, service, that restful result which we have long sought in theatre design has at last been achieved.”[13]

1934 handbill

The “Little Cinema” Movement:

The Little Cinema or art house movement sought an alternative to commercial films, the huge public that supported them, and the huge movie palaces in which they were displayed. Discernment, or the need for something different, was the key. It had similar aims to the Little Theatre movement, which had started in the late 19th century, whose goal was to create experimental centers for the dramatic arts.

Starting in 1925, a chain of small theaters was proposed, designed to provide an "intimate" alternative to the large commercial movie houses of the day, and dedicated to showing "art films that appeal to the intelligent and sophisticated.”[14]

Design features encouraged patrons, in the words of one early promotional brochure, to “Sip delightful Java and smoke cigarettes of your own choosing." Created for comfort and quiet, interiors offered sumptuous lounges appointed with deep carpets, velvet, drapes and soft lighting to encourage rest, relaxation, and "intimate chat."[15]

“Sure seaters” was a nickname given to these art house cinemas, since patrons were always assured of finding a seat, due to the films’ lack of broad appeal.

The sure-seater has a subtle snob appeal that helps at the box office. You go into a theater that has a few tasteful paintings in the lobby and a maid serves you a demitasse of coffee. You’ve just paid top admission prices, but the coffee creates a pleasant aura. Then you’re shown to a comfortable seat in a well mannered audience…. You see a picture that assumes you have average intelligence and it’s such a refreshing switch that you are flattered to be among such perceptive folks who are sharing the experience.[16]

Chicago’s first “art house,” the Playhouse, formerly a legitimate theater, opened on September 11, 1927. Managed by Michael Mindlin, the 602-seat theater had a top ticket price of $1.10, and successfully premiered with Battleship Potemkin.[17]

 The Cinema Art Theatre, 151 East Chicago Avenue, Armstrong, Furst and Tilton, architects, opened on December 26, 1929 with the film Shiraz.[18] This cinema, with 299 seats, was presumably one of “the ventures of Louis Machat” in Chicago’s “Tower town” referred to earlier. Like the Punch and Judy, the cinema was decorated in soft and contrasting color schemes that downplayed its small size, and both featured works of art in the lobby or lounge, “objects embodying distinctive cultural values,”[19]  sometimes exhibited on a rotating basis.

 Foyer and auditorium, Cinema Art Theatre, 151 E. Chicago Ave., from The Western Architect, April 1930.

The Punch and Judy opened September 18, 1930, with D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, with a policy of presenting American-made pictures “of the type regarded as appealing to the socalled ‘discriminating’ portion of the citizenry.” The opening-night ticket price was $11 a seat [about $170 at today’s prices]. The Griffith film was then shown three times a day at a top evening price 0f $2.[20]

 Punch and Judy marquee, announcing D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, 1930. Photo: Cinema Treasures

An item in the December 20, 1930 Exhibitors World-Herald announced that “We understand that Max Ascher has taken over the defunct, as it were, Punch and Judy theatre on Van Buren street.”[21] Whether the cinema had fallen on hard times in its first three months or simply changed management is not known; the Playhouse had felt the effects of dwindling ticket sales soon after its opening, and perhaps this was also the case with the Punch and Judy. The stock market crash of 1929, as well as a scarcity of quality foreign silent films and the advent of talking pictures, played their role as well.[22]

 The Punch and Judy would change its name to the Sonotone in 1935; it would be known as the Studio 1940-1952, the Ziegfeld 1952-1958, and finally the Capri 1958-1968. The Capri would exhibit adult films until it closed in 1968;[23] the Steinway Hall building, which housed this succession of cinemas, was demolished in 1970.

Movie ads for (top) the Ziegfeld 1950 and (bottom) the Capri March 15 1963. Source: Cinema Treasures

 In retrospect, The Little Cinema Movement seems to have been destined to engage in a rearguard action against the incursion of what must have seemed the vulgar aesthetic tastes represented by the mass-appeal talkies. Early literature…alludes to the physical layout, atmosphere, and programs as exuding elegance, refinement, intelligence, and repose as an antidote to the helter-skelter pace of the Roaring Twenties.[24]

  The Designers

Information about Eugene Fuhrer, architect, is scarce. From a 1956 American Architects Directory (American Institute of Architects) he was born February 2, 1902, in Wallendorf, Austria-Hungary. He earned a B.S. in Architecture in 1923 from the Armour Institute of Technology, where he earned a Huntchinson Medal and AIA Student Medal. He received a Traveling Scholarship from the Chicago School of Architecture in 1923, and traveled to Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Holland, German, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy.

Fuhrer was employed as a draftsman and designer for A.S. Alschuler, Inc., Chicago, 1923-26; as a designer for Walter Ahlslager 1926-27, and by Rissman & Hirschfield in 1927. He and his brother Max (b. January 31, 1901, studied at Cane College and Armour Institute) organized the firm Eugene & Max Fuhrer in 1927. The firm received commissions in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Among these were the Women’s Dormitory and additions to a power plant at Northern Illinois State Teachers College, DeKalb, as well as large construction projects in the Chicago area. Eugene co-authored the book Chicago Building Costs in 1936. The firm’s address was 120 S. LaSalle St. [now the CIBC Building], No. 3, and Eugene’s home was at 5228 S. University Ave., Chicago.[25]

Women’s Dormitory, Northern Illinois State Teachers’ College, DeKalb IL; postcard

Helsing’s Restaurant and Bar, 166 N. State St., matchbook cover

More details are gleaned from a 1946 Architects’ Questionnaire to gain qualification for federal public works. To his prior practice, Eugene added H. Clyde Miller 1920-21, draftsman and tracer, and Root and Hollister 1922-23, draftsman and designer, as well as brother Max’s prior qualifications. A third brother, Martin (b. December 12, 1912) is listed, who commenced practice in 1933. The firm’s large commissions included the Teachers College dormitory referred to ($1,200,000) and Stickney Hospital, Stickney, Illinois ($1,000,000). Smaller commissions included Helsing’s Washington Street Restaurant, Chicago; the Goodman Company, Cleveland; and the McNeill Building, Chicago. Further representative works from 1936 to 1947 are also listed in the questionnaire.[26]

A couple of drawings by Eugene Fuhrer in the Ryerson and Burnham Archive, Art Institute of Chicago, represent his sketching and presentation drawing skills.

  Nicolai (or Nicolas) Remisoff (1887-1975) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia; in 1910 he began studying at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1918. He and his family fled Russia, and eventually arrived in Paris in 1921. In Paris, he became the artist director of the famed theatre company Chauve-Souris (the Bat), which traveled the world and brought Remisoff to the United States. In New York, Remisoff began designing covers and doing illustrations for Conde Nast publications; he was then asked by Elizabeth Arden to design her famed “Red Door” salon and spa. In 1924, Remisoff opened a Russian-themed night club in New York called Club Petrushka, but the club burned in 1925.

Remisoff headed to Chicago, where he taught stage design at the Art Institute 1925-1926. While in Chicago, where he stayed until 1935, he designed sets and costumes for the Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page ballet companies. He created murals for the Casino Club, the Chicago Club, the Graceland Cemetery Chapel, and the Lake Forest Public Library, among other buildings. He had one-man shows at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1925 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938. He also exhibited at the Century of Progress Exhibition in 1933.

Remisoff left Chicago in 1938 for Hollywood, where he would serve as art or production designer for 31 movies.[27]

 Portrait of Nicolas Remisoff painted by Ilia Repine in 1917

Nicolas Remisoff, Winter Scene Design for a Ballet; Art Institute of Chicago

Edgar Miller (1899-1993) was an American self-taught artist and master craftsman, “a creative virtuoso of the modern era—who applied his skills to a multitude of projects in art, design and architecture.”[28] He was a designer, painter, craftsman, master woodcarver, and stained-glass designer.

Edgar Miller’s genius reached its apex in four fully realized artistic studios that he built on Chicago’s North Side in the 1920s and ‘30s. Miller marked almost every inch of the studios with daring and surprise. He took rustic brick, crude stone, salvaged tile, found glass and recycled steel and wood and “Edgarized” the homes, packing them with stained-glass windows, frescoes, murals, mosaics and woodcarvings.[29]

 These studios include the Carl Street Studio (1927) and the Rudolph Glasner Studio (1928), both in Chicago’s Old Town area.

Edgar Miller painting a mural, 1957

(Left) Edgar Miller interior and stained glass, Architecture, August 1932, p. 66; (right) Carl Street Studio, www.edgarmiller.org

 In his younger years Miller was called everything from “the blond boy Michelangelo” to “a new luminary.” In 1919 he had been was hired as an apprentice in the studio of Alfonso Ianelli, spending five years working on advertising, design, packaging, ink drawings, mural posters, stained glass, and cut stone. Through Ianelli, Miller met important studio clients like Marshall Field & Company and Holabird & Root, developing a network of future employers.[30]

 Of Miller’s plaques for the lobby of the Punch and Judy, Nicolas Remisoff wrote:

In some respects I consider these among the most clever things done by Miller. They are beautifully composed in diagonal compositions, perfectly done. Edgar Miller has, with his usual fine sense of fitness, captured something characteristically theatrical of the old time theatre. This is the one spot where tradition enters boldly, but up the stairway and toward the lounge one sees another plaque that expresses its fitness for its setting and carries out the circular form and motifs of this new theatre.[31]

  The Punch and Judy, which has “…introduced a new form for moving picture theatres, free from any kind of style and scenery,”[32] had offered an innovative and more intimate experience for the discerning movie patron of the 1930s. Its concept was realized by some of the most renowned designers and decorators of their day. Its forms evoked an age of speed, machines, and sleek new “modern” design that in retrospect would come to be called streamline moderne.

  The Punch and Judy would end its existence as the Capri Cinema, which closed in 1968. Photo: Cinema Treasures

Links to PDF documents of works cited:

Edgar Miller Designer-Craftsman, Architecture, August 1932

Finding Aid for the Nicolas Remisoff Papers

Fuhrer & Fuhrer Questionnaire for Federal Public Works

“The Cinema Unique,” The Western Architect Nov. 1930

Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World Oct. 25, 1939

Remisoff, Nicolas, “The Punch and Judy Theater,” The Western Architect Nov. 1930

Notes:

[1] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p. 35

Louis Machat started in 1910 with an early talking apparatus, such as it was…. Louis Machat was then connected with the old Sixth Avenue Playhouse in New York…. It failed and with the failure of the cylinder film followed the importation of foreign productions from Sweden, France and Italy. This importing business let him into the “Little Theatre” movement and resulted in the opening of the Wardman Park hotel theatre in Washington, D.C. in 1926. Similar theatres followed in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rochester and Chicago, with still others projected.

Shortly after the Punch and Judy was opened, Machat said to me, “It is high time for the motion picture industry to take cognizance of the fact that the whole population of the United States does not care for gilded walls…. There is a lot of room in America for some native theatrical architecture….”

Ibid. p. 129

Louis Machat would later be listed as the Producer for the 1943 short film Wasted Lives. IMDB https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7956280/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 

The article’s author, Nick John Matsoukas, was a theater manager, film press agent, and journalist. Limited information about him is available at:https://www.myheritage.com/names/nick_matsoukas#col_a_10220http://cinematreasures.org/photos/229126

 [2] Ibid.

 [3] “The Cinema Unique,” The Western Architect, vol. 29 no. 11, November 1930, p. 175.

[4] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p. 35.

 [5] “Streamline Moderne,” Archetypical.  https://www.archetypical.us/streamline-moderne/

 [6] Greif, Martin, Depression Modern, The Thirties Style in America. New York: Universe Books, 1975.

 [7] “Streamline Moderne,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamline_Moderne

 [8] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, pp. 37 and 39.

 [9] “Notes on Writers and Subjects in this Issue,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p. 19.

 [10] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p. 38.

 [11] “The Cinema Unique,” The Western Architect, vol. 39 n. 11 Nov. 1930, pp. 175-76.

 [12] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p.36.

 [13] “The Cinema Unique,” The Western Architect, vol. 39 n. 11 Nov. 1930, p. 177

[14] “The Little Cinema Movement,” The Little; https://thelittle.org/history

[15] Ibid.

[16] Wilinsky, Barbara, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, p. 1. Accessed at https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uJp_B8lN0iIC&oi=fnd&pg=PP11&dq=little+cinema+movement&ots=a5AX92LnoG&sig=kzefPGtf9xbHDWuhPlMhja8CCyg#v=onepage&q=little%20cinema%20movement&f=false

 [17] Guzman, Tony, “The Little Theatre Movement: The Institutionalization of the European Art Film in America,” Film History. Vol. 17, No. 2/3, 2005, p. 274.

 [18] “Cinema Theater, 151 E. Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611,” Cinema Treasures. http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/980

Once a popular art house located off N. Michigan Avenue on E. Chicago Avenue on Chicago’s Near North Side, the Cinema Theater opened on December 26, 1929 with “Shiraz”.

The Cinema Theater closed September 13, 1981, and was demolished and replaced a few years later by the Olympia Centre tower. A Neiman Marcus store is also situated on the former theater site.

The theater was illustrated in The Western Architect, April 1930, p. 60 ff.

[19] “The Cinema Unique,” The Western Architect, vol. 39 n. 11 Nov. 1930, p. 177.

[20] Matsoukas, Nick John, “The unconventional PUNCH and JUDY,” Exhibitors Herald-World, October 25, 1930, p. 35

[21] Little, Jim, “Chicago Personalities,” Exhibitors World-Herald, December 20, 1930, p. 62.

See also: Schiecke, Konrad, Downtown Chicago's Historic Movie Theatres. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2011, p. 178; “Ascher Brothers, Wikitia. https://wikitia.com/wiki/Ascher_Brothers

[22] “History of the Reel World,” https://thelittle.org/history

[23] Schiecke, Konrad, Downtown Chicago's Historic Movie Theatres. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2011, pp. 75-76.

 “On July 3, 1940, the theatre emerged as the Studio, with new management dedicated to public service and single, first-run features, newsreels and comedy shorts. French without Tears started off Studio’s program. In 1952 the theatre was renamed the Ziegfeld, operated with Tom Down as manager until 1958 when M. Down became owner.

    The newly redecorated “art” theatre, now renamed the Capri, opened on July 3, 1958, with a controversial adult French film, Nana, based on an Emile Zola novel…Adult films were shown until the theatre closed in 1968.”

[24] “History of the Reel World,” https://thelittle.org/history

[25] American Institute of Architects, 1956 American Architects Directory. Accessed at https://aiahistoricaldirectory.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AHDAA/pages/20644319/1956+American+Architects+Directory

[26] “Questionnaire for Architects’ Roster and / or Register of Architects Qualified for Federal Public Works,” May 10,1946. Eugene and Max Fuhrer, 160 N. LaSalle St.

[27] Richard Norton Gallery, Nicolas Remisoff biography, no date. http://richardnortongallery.com/artists/nicolai-remisoff

Remisoff’s decor for the New York home of Elizabeth Arden is illustrated here: https://thepeakofchic.blogspot.com/2016/04/an-early-thirties-set-piece.html

[28] “Edgar Miller, the Artist,” https://www.edgarmiller.org/terra-3

[29] “Edgar Miller Legacy,” https://www.edgarmiller.org/history/

[30] Cahan, Richard and Williams, Michael, Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home. Chicago: City Files Pres, 2009, pp. 18–93.

[31] Remisoff, Nicolas, “The Punch and Judy Theatre,” The Western Architect, November 1930, p. 183.

[32] Schiecke, Konrad, Downtown Chicago's Historic Movie Theatres. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2011, p. 75.

#punch and judy #theatre #cinema #art deco #moderne #streamline moderne #steinway hall #Nicolas Remisofff #edgar miller #Eugene Fuhrer #capri cinema #chicago #van buren st. #1930s #little cinema #little theatre

[azspot]

I coined a term on @machinekillspod that I feel like needs its own essay: Habsburg AI – a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI's that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features. It joins the lineage of Potemkin AI.

Jathan Sadowski

#ai #habsburgai

[isolaradiale]

Lost in Space 17

Hello, Isolans! We have conducted an activity check for the month of January!

If your character isn’t on this list, make sure to check this page to see how many stars that character has earned this month! Stars can be used for purchases at the marketplace.

The blogs that were removed from the Isola Radiale masterlist are under the cut. Note that both blogs with broken links and deactivated accounts will be included both at the top of this list and in their proper categories.

If you were removed in error, please simply send a re-application message. Several different people work on the activity checks, so it’s possible there are mistakes! If this happens to you, you will be able to keep everything you previously had, you just may be placed in a different residence.

Our general activity rules regarding checks are as follows:

Make at least three in-character posts during a calendar month (for instance, if the activity check is for January, have three in-character posts between the 1st and 31st of January).

Only one drabble and/or meme response of 300+ words counts as activity.

One-liners or minis not tagged #isola mini also do not count.

Please Note: If you are removed during two consecutive activity checks, you will not be allowed to re-apply as that character for two calendar months. 

Additionally, anyone removed during the activity check will have a 12-hour window from the time of posting to re-claim their character. Any character not reclaimed during that period will be open to the community at large.

Please send in your reapplications from the account of the character that was removed.

Broken URLs:

Saber (Arthur Pendragon) (FATE)

Sanae Kochiya (TOUHOU)

.HACK SERIES

Haseo/Ryou Misaki (HOUSE 119)

 07-GHOST

Frau (APARTMENT 302)

 4 CUT HERO

Zeed Toven (HOUSE 139)

 AI THE SOMNIUM FILES

Iris Sagan (TOWNHOUSE 252)

 ATELIER RYZA

Ryza (CONDO 450)

 BERSERK

Casca (TOWNHOUSE 206)

 BLACK BULLET

Rentaro Satomi (APARTMENT 321)

 BLAZBLUE

Celica A. Mercury (CONDO 426)

Trinity Glasfille (APARTMENT 327)

 CASTLEVANIA

Trevor Belmont (TOWNHOUSE 247)

 CLOSERS

Harpy (APARTMENT 321)

 COWBOY BEBOP

Vicious (APARTMENT 313)

 CRITICAL ROLE

Jester Lavorre (HOUSE 135)

 DANGANRONPA

Miu Iruma (CONDO 413)

Mukuro Ikusaba (TOWNHOUSE 203)

 DARK SOULS

Creighton (APARTMENT 326)

 DC COMICS

Bruce Wayne (Batman) (TOWNHOUSE 245)

Clark Kent (Superman) (APARTMENT 301)

Timothy Drake-Wayne (HOUSE 162)

 DISNEY

Prince Edward (TOWNHOUSE 233)

 THE DRAGON PRINCE

Soren (TOWNHOUSE 212)

 FATE

Assassin (Shuten Doji) (APARTMENT 340)

Caster (Nitocris) (CONDO 401)

Kiara Sessyoin (CONDO 410)

Lancer (Nagao Kagetora) (HOUSE 109)

Reines (Lord El-Melloi II's House of Misfits [Archimedes])

Saber (Arthur Pendragon) (TOWNHOUSE 203) *BROKEN URL

Saber (Charlemagne) (TOWNHOUSE 218)

Sakura Matou (APARTMENT 324)

 FINAL FANTASY

Cloud Strife (TOWNHOUSE 230)

Tidus (CONDO 461)

Warrior of Light (Black Mage - Shino Shimokobe) (TOWNHOUSE 255)

 FRUITS BASKET

Yuki Sohma (HOUSE 131)

 GIRLS FRONTLINE

AK-12 (TOWNHOUSE 216)

 THE GOOD PLACE

Michael (HOUSE 143)

 GRANBLUE FANTASY

Lucifer (HOUSE 141)

Siegfried (TOWNHOUSE 202)

 GUILTY GEAR

Potemkin (HOUSE 138)

 HOMESTUCK

Davesprite (TOWNHOUSE 271)

Equius Zahhak (CONDO 404)

 HOTLINE MIAMI

Biker (TOWNHOUSE 205)

 INVISIBLE INC

Raymond Malik (Shalem 11) (TOWNHOUSE 254)

 JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE

Caesar Zeppeli (TOWNHOUSE 224)

Holly Kujo (HOUSE 106)

 KAMEN RIDER

Ankh (TOWNHOUSE 257)

Eiji Hino (TOWNHOUSE 238)

 KANCOLLE (KANTAI COLLECTION)

Shigure (CONDO 440)

 KIMETSU NO YAIBA

Inosuke Hashibira (HOUSE 126)

Kokushibou (HOUSE 112)

Nezuko Kamado (APARTMENT 316)

Yushiro (HOUSE 172)

 LEAGUE OF LEGENDS

Neeko (APARTMENT 324)

Zoe (APARTMENT 346)

 LOBOTOMY CORPORATION

Little Red Riding Hooded Mercenary (HOUSE 132)

 LORE OLYMPUS

Eros (CONDO 434)

 MARVEL

Clint Barton (Hawkeye) (Hawkeye's House [Golden])

Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) (CONDO 449)

Peter Benjamin Parker (Spiderman Noir) (Peter's House [Golden])

 MEGAMAN

Rock Volnutt (APARTMENT 306)

 MIRACULOUS LADYBUG

Marinette Dupan-Chang (Ladybug) (TOWNHOUSE 206)

 THE MURDERBOT DIARIES

Murderbot ( SecUnit ) (TOWNHOUSE 211)

 MY HERO ACADEMIA (BOKU NO HERO ACADEMIA)

Eri (TOWNHOUSE 221)

Izuku Midoriya (Deku) (CONDO 463)

 NO MORE HEROES

Margaret Moonlight (CONDO 448)

 ONMYOJI

Susabi (HOUSE 136)

 ORIGINAL CHARACTER

Alydia Skye (TOWNHOUSE 269)

Amalie Cyrille Dubois-Phanuel (TOWNHOUSE 257)

Demyan Reyes (CONDO 430)

Ellis Morgan (APARTMENT 313)

Eris Kihara (APARTMENT 324)

Liu Canglong (APARTMENT 311)

Luno Alexias Watchman (CONDO 410)

Miriam Shushkevich (Miriam's House [Fibonacci])

Nikolai (TOWNHOUSE 256)

Seiji Kazama (TOWNHOUSE 227)

Zack Ledger (Zack's House [Golden])

 OVERWATCH

Elizabeth Caledonia Ashe (TOWNHOUSE 268)

Genji Shimada (HOUSE 159)

 PERSONA

Rise Kujikawa (TOWNHOUSE 201)

 POKEMON

Ash's Pikachu (TOWNHOUSE 207)

Green (APARTMENT 362)

Nessa (CONDO 447)

Piers (HOUSE 101)

Rapidash (CONDO 406)

 PRECURE

Love Momozono (Setsuna's House [Golden])

Shut (APARTMENT 305)

 RAGING LOOP

Haruaki Fusaishi (APARTMENT 343)

 RWBY

James Ironwood (TOWNHOUSE 213)

Oscar Pine (Time's Respite [Fibonacci])

Penny Polendina (CONDO 444)

Salem (TOWNHOUSE 271)

Whitley Schnee (APARTMENT 329)

 SAILOR MOON

Usagi Tsukino (TOWNHOUSE 218)

 SERVAMP

Hyde (Lawless) (HOUSE 110)

 STAR OCEAN

Leon D.S. Gehste (CONDO 450)

 STARDEW VALLEY

Harvey (CONDO 452)

 STARGATE UNIVERSE

Nicolas Rush (TOWNHOUSE 252)

 STEVEN UNIVERSE

Pink Pearl (CONDO 450)

 SWORD ART ONLINE

Asuna Yuuki (CONDO 449)

 TALES OF

Edna (Edna's House [Golden])

 TO THE MOON

Dr. Eva Rosalene (CONDO 415)

 TOUHOU

Sanae Kochiya (CONDO 407) *BROKEN URL

 TRIGUN

Vash the Stampede (CONDO 407)

 UNDERTALE

Asriel Dreemurr (CONDO 412)

Frisk (CONDO 441)

 VOCALOID

Rin Kagamine (The Boss's Penthouse [Cotes])

 YONA OF THE DAWN

Hak (APARTMENT 370)

 YOUR TURN TO DIE

Joe Tazuna (TOWNHOUSE 220)

#activity check #modnote #lost in space 17