An AI-generated game, and analyzing memes (Spam Mail #37)

The outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp this week was a reminder how integral, and yet, fragile communicating on the web can be. On top of our reliance of a series of undersea cables, DNS, and server farms to make it all work, the web has changed the context of how we communicate. The articles I was reading this week explore this topic and are absolutely worth reading.

I’ll be off next week. See you in two weeks.

Greg

💩 Cool shit

AI Dungeon -  This truly blew me away. It’s an AI-generated text adventure game with infinite possibilities. An impressive new way to expand what’s possible in a video game.

Beer Game Demo - I just learnt about The Beer Game. It’s a simulation used to teach students about management and supply chain (more info here). Try it out with the demo tutorial.

Submarine Cable Map - It still seems hard to fathom that global communications are powered by a bunch of undersea cables. Here’s a map of them.

Textfiles.com - An archive of txt files, largely from the 80s that’s a fascinating trip through that era of computers.

Faith in Humanity Score - A simple counter, letting people vote up or down.

The Walkman Archive - Another archive site, this time for the iconic Walkman.

Pyramid - A brilliantly funny and bizarre satire of so many contemporary tropes; NFTs, media hype, and everything in-between.

💎 Word gems

The Meme Is The Message (Taraneh Azar)

This essay analyses memes from the lens of media theory. It explores their format, their power, and their contemporary use. A key takeaway from this essay: memes have changed the mode of communicating online.

When it comes to political messaging, the ability of memes to encode and convey layers of meaning makes them a particularly valuable tool for both sharing and spreading information and political sentiment, but also for rallying around that particular sentiment for those who relate.

They are a medium of communication that allows users to combine creativity, humor, irony and complex sentiment into a package that can resonate with others in a space where the ability to share, alter and spread the idea is readily available. But given the context collapse of social media, memes are particularly valuable because they increase the potential for any variety of audiences to get in on the joke or idea, even if they don’t intrinsically agree with the underlying message or ideology that’s being transmitted — at least right off the bat.

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous (The New Yorker / Chris Hayes)

This article explores the impact of internet fame, and how it has democratized opinions, again changing how we communicate. It isn’t strictly about memes, but this quote makes a nice companion to the essay above.

The Internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that, for too long, had been controlled by far too narrow a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to pre-TV logocentrism. The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it was a bit insufferable while it was happening). The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the Internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for.

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