In a twist on the trends of globalization, Zazzle inadvertently outsources, automates, and disperses not only the concrete labor and manufacture of goods but also the intellectual labor that engenders them. By analogy, one sees in Zazzle the the contours of the oft-misquoted misquote by Marx on the conditions that precede the death of state capitalism: The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” It dies out. Ironically, by way of mass-customization, Zazzle may represent the final spasm in another long-protracted demise—the death of the author. (via Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine)
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
[…] The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot.
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There are companies operating now whose job is to make fake shopfronts. These days many high streets up and down the land contain empty shops, and the idea is to make them look ‘inhabited’ - even though they aren’t. Here’s one in Nelson Street, Bristol, between a branch of Greggs and The Money Shop. This unit used to be a newsagents called Martin’s (still visible on Google Street View).”
Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG, #1 (by kingcosmonaut3000)
