News
The Internet’s Obsession With Luigi Mangione Signals a Major Shift
On Monday, police arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old app developer, in connection with the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Online reaction to his apprehension reveals a new form of fandom.
Luigi Mangione, currently the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected. Mangione, who was arrested Monday in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, fits that bill.
LINK: https://www.wired.com/story/internet-culture-luigi-mangione-major-shift-fandom/
The Ballot or the Bullet? Little Known (But Highly Entertaining) Assassination Trivia
Violence among humans seems to be worst when it is institutionalized (as in a standing army). Then it becomes the basis of the society’s economy. It becomes self-perpetuating and self-justifying. In addition to the death and destruction it causes, it re-enforces a masculinist character among the people. This is not the violence I am talking about, but rather the hit-and-run spontaneous violence of autonomous anarchist collectives. Not against the general populace, but against those in control. Anarchist violence still kills, but is quite a different thing from the massive, scientifically planned objective violence of institutions like the Pentagon. It is more like the violence of a cornered animal defending itself. Still, those who kill defile themselves, and they must be prepared to accept the consequences of that defilement. But at this stage in the crisis of international industrialism, I see no effective alternative to revolutionary violence. And revolutionary violence is effective — that’s why the U.S. government is so uptight about it.
Person of interest in fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson ID’d as Luigi Mangione, an ex-Ivy League student
The person of interest identified in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is an anti-capitalist former Ivy League student — who liked online quotes from “Unabomber’’ Ted Kaczynski raging against the country’s medical community.
Tech whiz Luigi Mangione, 26, of Towson, Md., was taken into custody Monday morning at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., after an intense manhunt following the coldblooded execution of Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last week, sources said.
He has not been charged.
The former prep school valedictorian was caught with a manifesto that appeared to list grievances against the health care industry, including its taking of enormous profits and its alleged shady motives, sources said.
He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?
Philip Agre, a computer scientist turned humanities professor, was prescient about many of the ways technology would impact the world.
In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.
That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.
“Genuinely worrisome developments can seem ‘not so bad’ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia,” wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.
Nearly 30 years later, Agre’s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to sway elections or, in at least one case, to out a gay priest. But Agre didn’t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.
Then, no one listened. Now, many of Agre’s former colleagues and friends say they’ve been thinking about him more in recent years, and rereading his work, as pitfalls of the Internet’s explosive and unchecked growth have come into relief, eroding democracy and helping to facilitate a violent uprising on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in January.
In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Menti
“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?”
In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”
“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.
In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.
An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.
25 Years Later, I Finally Understand Fight Club
The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand
We’re nearly halfway through the 2020s, dubbed the most decisive decade for action on climate change. Where exactly do things stand? Climate impact scholar Johan Rockström offers the most up-to-date scientific assessment of the state of the planet and explains what must be done to preserve Earth’s resilience to human pressure.
Ishmael Series
Ishmael Series
Descriptions: https://www.goodreads.com/series/96452-ishmael
Download: https://libgen.rs/fiction/4EE3B6D8E3F84E05A344237F3B8CEB30
Reporting on Doomsday Scenarios | 60 Minutes Full Episodes
From 2022, Jon Wertheim’s report on “preppers” who are gearing up for extreme catastrophes. From 2008, Scott Pelley’s visit to the “doomsday vault” inside a mountain near the North Pole, built to warehouse backup copies of all the world’s crops. From 2023, Pelley’s interviews with scientists who say the planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction with Earth’s wildlife running out of places to live. And also from 2023, Bill Whitaker’s story on virus hunters who are searching for new pathogens to help prevent another pandemic.
12,000-year-old ritual passed down 500 generations may be world’s oldest
Buried deep in an Australian cave, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that an Aboriginal ritual may have been passed down 500 generations and survived 12,000 years, making it the oldest known continuous cultural practice in the world, according to a new study.