Network Culture Course 2013

David Simon (creator of The Wire) talking uneven growth (!!) in this edited extract of a talk he delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.

I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.

And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.

John Matrix is the Spotify hit artist created by internet security consultant Peter Fillmore. Not being a musician Fillmore generated short midi clips usingWolframTones: “WolframTones works by taking ‘simple programs’ from Wolfram’s computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematicaalgorithms to render them as music." Fillmore’s scripts would then splice these with public domain samples, creatinga generative sound unlike anything else.

Then to get these songs to the top of the charts, the engineer created some bot fans that would listen to John Matrix’s music 24/7. Running on Amazon servers, a bash script would automate the act of playing the tunes on Spotify. John Matrix soon had amassed millions of plays and made $1000 in royalties. The high chart positions of these songs prompted human listeners to complain, resulting in the account being shut down after a month.

How the newest trends in clickbait help reveal Facebook and Twitter's fight over optimizing for the news media, and its implications for journalism.

Two social networks, trying to become more like the other. It is, as Buzzfeed’s John Herrman has written, “the fight for the ultimate feed.”

And this, this phenomenon, which starts with strategic interface changes and works its way up to how editors think about headlines at the most important newspaper in the world’s most powerful capital city—this is what that fight looks like.