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Tag: San Francisco

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Thumbs Up for Pandering

What fresh hell is this, San Francisco?

Facebook skin at Montgomery BART

You are entering… Emoji Reaction Land. Tread carefully lest ye be streamed!

Facebook reaction emoji at Montgomery BART

glitched-out Facebook reaction emoji

I don’t actually object to Facebook Live, but the Luddite in me finds this corporate skin of a local train station somewhat unsettling. It’s not a new form factor in terms of advertising, but Facebook as a company is a little different from a department store, no? Stepping into Macy’s involves subjecting myself to surveillance, yes, but they don’t try to subsume every moment of my day.

The Facebook-ified corridor felt like a satirical theme park. But all those “omg!” and “lol!” faces were completely earnest. Facebook is papering San Francisco with this campaign outside the train stations as well, and it’s borderline /r/FellowKids-worthy.

Facebook, you’re old. Stop trying to copy Snapchat. It’s giving me secondhand embarrassment. Make do with being the identity system for a large chunk of the world and indexing copious information about our relationships. Yeesh.

Reflecting on Dystopian San Francisco Again

One of the reasons I started Exolymph is that I live in the Bay Area. San Francisco is the hottest local metropolis, so I visit occasionally, both for work and pleasure. The city is a parallel mixture of luxe yuppie haven and downtrodden slum:

“He pointed out the animated software ads wrapped around bus shelters and glowing on the sides of buildings. He reminded me that the streets smelled of urine and we were passing homeless people wrapped in rags. Sleeping on the damp sidewalk. Meanwhile, money churned in and out of Silicon Valley’s sister city.”

I’ve written about this before, as have others, so please forgive me for flogging a dead horse. But it never ceases to astound me: in this place of economic and technological abundance, you walk by people subsisting on garbage. Maybe if I’d worked in the city full-time for more than three months, I would be desensitized.

San Francisco as a floating prison colony. Artwork by Silvio Bertonati.

Artwork by Silvio Bertonati.

It’s bizarre how normal it feels to live in a dystopia. That is one of my central premises — a lot of the frightening themes of classic cyberpunk fiction have come true in one way or another, but daily life is still mundane. You and I are side characters or NPCs, not the protagonists, so all the depraved systems aren’t exciting. They’re just exhausting.

And I do feel exhausted. I feel exhausted by the constant deluge of bad news — certainly not the first to say so — and I feel exhausted by the pressure to react to each new development, to perform outrage or heartsickness for a drive-by audience.

I feel exhausted by pointing out, again and again, that while technology does “change the world” just by virtue of existing, sometimes it allocates power in scary ways. The ever-accelerating ~innovation~ will knock some of us down.

There’s no solution here. This is just how the world works. Bad things happen. New media happens. Tech businesses happen. Maybe I’d feel better about it if I were more personally laissez-faire.

Statuses To Update

Tonight I’m reading up on how machine learning actually works. To be honest, I don’t understand the concrete mechanisms by which computers do intelligence-y things. I know some of the keywords — “big data” pops into my head — and I have a general idea of how they interact, but it doesn’t go deeper than “general idea”. So I’m seeking more information! This is very mundane, but it constantly amazes me that I have access to just about everything people know about any technical topic.

Cyberpunk rabbit by Vojtěch Lacina.

Artwork by Vojtěch Lacina.

That reminds me of a line I read in an article criticizing San Francisco as a putrid dystopia: “After all, technology is social before it is technical.” When software developers make comments like that, it gives me a little hope for myself in the tech world. I love this industry — it fascinates and infuriates me — but I don’t have any of the requisite skills to participate in the normatively valued ways. I can’t write code. I can’t build databases or even make websites from scratch. But I’m okay when it comes to wrangling humans. I’m a decent communicator.

In this capitalist hellscape we inhabit, do you make time to appreciate yourself? Do you allow yourself a little vanity? I do, but mostly because I can’t help it.

Tonight I made a Slack discussion group called Cyberpunk Futurism. For those who are unfamiliar with Slack, it’s basically a group chat forum. If you want to participate, click here and sign up. I’m not sure how many people will be interested, but I figured it was worth a try 🙂

Garbage & Gold

Alien-girl graffiti in San Francisco.

I saw this graffiti in San Francisco a couple of months ago. The woman got a little alien implanted in her forehead — Google Glass of the future? Or perhaps body mod as witch’s familiar. I’m not sure why her mouth is dripping blood. Maybe it’s… dystopian pudding. Yes, pudding. Not blood at all! Not even slightly sinister!

I grew up in the Bay Area. It seems normal to me. Even though I’d read that San Francisco’s levels of inequality were comparable to Third World countries, the reality didn’t hit home until I was on a date in the city with my boyfriend. We were walking through the financial district and he said, “San Francisco is so cyberpunk.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed out the animated software ads wrapped around bus shelters and glowing on the sides of buildings. He reminded me that the streets smelled of urine and we were passing homeless people wrapped in rags. Sleeping on the damp sidewalk. Meanwhile, money churned in and out of Silicon Valley’s sister city.

Extreme elements, juxtaposed. A wealth of desperation next to desperation for wealth. Welcome to twenty-first-century capitalism!

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