But something wasn’t adding up—what they brought back to the lab wasn’t matched to what the government thought the problem was. There were no deepfakes and very few instances of scenes that were altered in a realistic way so as to deceive the viewer. Nearly all of the manipulated political content was in meme form, and it was a lot more creative than we expected. (Location 161)
Top-down control of information by those in power is an understandable phenomenon—this has always been a problem. But why is there near universal interest in faking everything and anything on the Internet today? (Location 193)
But this line of inquiry betrays a certain naïveté about the online experience. Do all falsehoods necessarily mislead us? Are those who produce false content always malicious? What would happen if media that facilitate the widespread dissemination of fictions were strictly regulated or even banned? Who even has a good grasp of what those media are and how they work? (Location 246)
Long considered a locus of rationalism, today’s Internet is more often than not pushing against facts and reason as it serves as a conduit through which popular stories move. (Location 252)
The myth cycles now exist digitally on the Internet, where they are increasingly supported by AI and are more influential than ever. (Location 430)
Note: Terrible section
Contemporaneous trends in technology development were supported by the flight from complexity and related popular demand to return to the livable fictions of earlier centuries. The primary developments coming out of this were new communication mediums. (Location 458)
Note: Cognitive overload?
“Where increasing productivity is concerned, no break exists between Should and Can; continuity prevails.” (Location 492)
Like the size of the corporate clouds, this is currently unknown. However, the best estimates indicate that less than 60 percent of web traffic is human generated, the bulk of users on various social-media platforms are bots, and the veracity of most of the content people are consuming is in question (Read 2018). (Location 553)
Note: Isnt that system to system?
A generative model is an AI system that is able to synthesize new content based on what it knows about the world (Location 575)
A thought here is that within the news-media ecosystem, one finds a mass audience consuming messages directly from a media technology—predominantly print in the nineteenth century, radio and television in the twentieth century, and the Internet today. Co-opting any one of those technologies would provide a direct channel to millions. But the human element of news production is a weaker link. It has always been particularly vulnerable to attack by virtue of the way news stories are collected—reporters look for scoops that have mass appeal, above all. The news is, in practice, a system that can be hacked. (Location 730)
And the exposure of weaknesses within the news-media ecosystem in the nineties would have grave consequences later, when trolls, political operatives, and intelligence services picked up where the original hackers left off. (Location 734)
a hacker collective interested in executing culture jamming campaigns through computer networks. (Location 759)
But the technical information that follows, in the form of screen captures of command line terminal activity, looks plausible. It was not uncommon to see such juxtapositions in hacker writing, where bravado and hyperbole were intermixed with dumps of real data. (Location 785)
Note: Not evolved
Much of the writing produced by hackers has this flavor: a blend of technical elements that are real and fantastic elements that push the imagination into the new realm of cyberspace. (Location 812)
Communities that latch onto new forms of media seek a better understanding of the world around them, the ability to meaningfully and effectively act within that world, and a mechanism to escape from that world when it becomes overwhelming. (Location 834)
Goggans had learned an interesting lesson: if fake content could be crafted to look plausible enough to people who were not expert technologists, then groups outside of the hacker underground would pay attention if the message was sensational enough. (Location 856)
“The three of us who wrote that textfile grew up in the 1970s. There were a lot of strange stories being told back then: cattle mutilations, UFOs, Bigfoot. The textfiles that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s were a stone soup made out of all of this stuff.” (Location 884)
Note: Nine unknown men issue
The rise of a paranoid media culture (Location 889)
Note: The paranoid style etc
Due in large part to continuity in its authoritarian government from 1949 to the present day, China remains the lone country where this is still unfolding. (Location 1148)
Note: Lol
What was not initially appreciated by creators and observers of visual disinformation was that a fake image could be more effective in a democracy if it were obviously fake. (Location 1209)
But photographs are neither true nor false in and of themselves. They are only true or false with respect to statements that we make about them or the questions that we might ask of them. (Location 1264)
Note: Epistemic framework
Historical treatments of memes often begin with a discussion of Richard Dawkins and his book The Selfish Gene, but that may no longer be the best frame of reference for this analysis. (Location 1499)
it is how we absorb the content into our decision-making and culture-generation practices. (Location 1541)
Note: Epistemic health
The mysteries associated with fake exploits like this one remain mostly unsolved. Martin hopes to one day investigate these cases in his archived copy of OSVDB: “Myth/Fake is fucking fascinating to me. There is probably a ton of good stuff in there to study and make sense of.” (Location 1784)
You will find people talking about this phenomenon. Textfiles with titles like ‘shitlist,’ ‘BBS losers’ and so forth contained lists of people who were getting called out for spreading bogus stuff.” On the other hand, there were elite hackers making use of fake material to discredit others in the scene who they believed were violating the unwritten code of computer hacking. (Location 1794)
