%feed http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/08/23/instagrams-stories-are-better-than-snapchat-but-im-still-not-using-it/ Instagram's ‘Stories' are better than Snapchat, but I'm still not using it Contrary to many of its users, I wasn't immediately turned off by Instagram stealing a feature from Snapchat. The execution was better, the admission that it borrowed heavily from Snapchat was refreshing and the timing couldn't have been better (right before the Olympics). I'm actually disappointed it didn't happen months earlier. While Snapchat continues to innovate, we must remember that this is technology and new features aren't new for long. Stories, released way back in 2013 was no longer new. Largely untouched by Snapchat, it was a feature that was too good to let sit idle for that long. It needed exactly what…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/08/23/zuckerberg-starts-making-good-promise-donate-99-facebook-stock-charity/ Zuckerberg starts making good on promise to donate 99% of his Facebook stock to charity In December last year, Facebook CEO and new father Mark Zuckerberg penned a heartfelt letter to his newborn baby girl, Max. As part of an on-going initiative with his wife, Priscilla Chan, the two pledged to donate 99 percent of their current Facebook shares — around $45 billion in total — to charity. We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to advance this mission. We know this is a small contribution compared to all the resources and talents of those already working on these issues. But we want to do what we…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/23/japan-may-craft-olympic-medals-old-smartphones/ Japan may craft its Olympic medals from old smartphones Japan could be using the 2020 Olympics to make a statement about sustainability. According to a report from Asian publication, Nikkei, Olympic organizers are considering using recycled electronics to forge the iconic bronze, silver and rose gold medals for the 2020 games. While hypothetically feasible to craft the medals from old smartphones, Japan is already recycling most of this material — to create more electronics. It could still happen though. The Olympic planning committee is asking companies to put their collective heads together and come up with an idea or two about how to collect electronic waste. The hope is that each citizen gets to…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/22/nasa-details-broadcast-plans-for-upcoming-spacewalk-and-spacex-dragon-iss-departure/ NASA details broadcast plans for upcoming spacewalk and SpaceX ‘Dragon' ISS departure If you have even a passing interest in NASA, you should know about two upcoming events set to air in the coming days. First, NASA will cover the departure of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft from the International Space Station on August 26. The Dragon spacecraft arrived at the station on July 20 to deliver 5,000 pounds of supplies, experiments and equipment. Part of the payload were the parts necessary to create an additional docking port for future missions. On July 20, you can watch NASA TV's coverage of the dragon departure beginning at 5:45 am EDT. The craft will detach from…
%feed http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/08/22/a-few-simple-modifications-can-turn-a-game-boy-into-a-drone-controller/ A few simple modifications can turn a Game Boy into a drone controller It's time to dig out the Game Boy classic. Dust it off, pop in some fresh batteries and use it the way the 1989 handheld was supposed to be used — to pilot a drone. With a few simple modifications, Gautier Hattenberger of the French Civil Aviation University (ENAC), managed to breathe new life into his classic handheld by using it to pilot an ARDrone2 from Parrot. After finding an old Game Boy at his parents' house, Hattenberger immediately thought: “can I fly a drone with this?” Turns out, he could. Using a GameLink — an accessory originally created to facilitate…
%feed http://www.designboom.com/art/john-yuyi-social-media-tattoos-08-23-2016/ john yuyi tattoos social media symbols to snapshot our online infatuations
the images emphasize our obsession with social media by affixing digital symbols to the human body as temporary tattoos.
%feed https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/aug/23/beyond-the-beatles-peter-blakes-pop-art-on-paper-in-pictures Beyond the Beatles: Peter Blake's pop art on paper in pictures
Peter Blake didn't stop at designing the Sgt Pepper cover, as this exhibition of rare and limited-edition works by the godfather of British pop art shows
%feed http://www.designboom.com/art/teamlab-resonating-spheres-trees-light-festival-tadasu-no-mori-shimogamo-shrine-kyoto-08-22-2016/ teamlab brilliantly illuminates an ancient shrine in kyoto and its surrounding primeval forest
two light installations animate the dense woodland surrounding shimogamo shrine in a mesmerizing display of color.
Hyperloop Explained: How Elon Musk's Futuristic Transit System Works…
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%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353690/ China Actually Built
China Actually Built That Crazy Traffic-Straddling Bus
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%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353686/ The Model S P100D wi
The Model S P100D with Ludicrous mode is the third fastest accelerating…
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%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629353687/ The Model S P100D wi
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%feed https://www.pinterest.com/pin/255016397629348649/ Effortlessly track w
Effortlessly track what's important to you in life or business
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%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fnews.google.com%252Fnews%252Furl%253Fsa%253Dt%2526fd%253DR%2526ct2%253Duk%2526usg%253DAFQjCNGGINFTffj4_1LiMcHZwKMs6FBskA%2526clid%253Dc3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331%2526cid%253D52779187741224%2526ei%253DH8a8V8iOHdf3zAbB1baoCA%2526url%253Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fmashable.com%252F2016%252F08%252F23%252Frobot-communication-study%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: New study points to how we may work with robots in the future - Mashable
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.mashable.com%252F%7Er%252FMashable%252F%7E3%252FgoRqO5obVbk%252F%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Humans may prefer expressive robots to competent ones, study finds
Humans may prefer to work with robots that can communicate and express emotions, even if that means they're less efficient, according to a new study from University College London and the University of Bristol.
Researchers tested how people reacted when robots messed up a given task. They had participants work with three different versions (A, B and C) of the same robot, BERT2. Each would bring the humans ingredients to make an omelet: BERT A never erred, but BERT B and C both dropped an egg at some point.
Only BERT C could communicate with the humans and say "I'm sorry." It would also be visibly dismayed at the mistake, with an exaggerated look of sadness displayed on its face. BERT C would then show that it was going to try a different approach to the task, thereby rectifying the mistake. Read more...
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Ffeeds.gawker.com%252F%7Er%252Flifehacker%252Fvip%252F%7E3%252FLze766_loY8%252Ftodays-best-deals-12-tumbler-puma-gear-cuisinart-gr-1785638858%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Today's Best Deals: $12 Tumbler, PUMA Gear, Cuisinart Griddler, and More
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If you're sick of renting carpet washers every time you spot a new stain, you can buy your own for just $96. The Hoover Power Scrub Deluxe has a squeaky-clean 4.4 star review average from nearly 6,000 customers, and this all-time low price is only available today as part of a Gold Box deal.
Vizio's 2016 M-series TVs include basically every feature you could possibly want, including 4K resolution, Dolby Vision HDR (the good one), Google Cast, local dimming, and even a tablet remote. Do I have your attention? The 55" model is on sale for just $619 right now, or nearly $200 less than usual. I know this came out of nowhere, but it's one of the best TV deals I've ever seen, and I wouldn't expect it to last.
Nose hair is a problem a lot of people have but, for some reason, few people take care of. For a limited time, score thisPanasonic nose hair trimmer for just $10, and you can be one of those people doing something about it. Harambe didn't die so you could look like The Missing Link.
The Razer BlackWidow Ultimate is one of the most popular mechanical gaming keyboards out there, and you can pick one up for $90 today, which is one of the best deals we've seen. For that price, you're getting five lighting options, mechanical switches rated to 80,000,000 keystrokes, and fully programmable keys.
Humble Indie Bundle 17 brings with it Super Time Force Ultra, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and Galak-7, along with four other games, some extras, and more to come.
If you like to do your own oil changes, or aren't afraid to tinker on the underside of your car, these inexpensive RhinoRamps are the quickest way to elevate your car. Obviously, they won't help you for tire changes, and they won't give you a ton of clearance, but for quick, basic maintenance, they should get the job done.
If you want a secondary TV for your bedroom, kitchen, or garage, you could do a lot worse than this 32” TCL. Yeah, it's only 720p and 60Hz, but it has Roku's streaming platform built right in, and it's only $150 today, an all-time low. It's not going to be your primary TV, but it's perfectly adequate for certain rooms and situations.
Huawei Watch, $125 off + $100 gift card on select models. Promo code SMARTW
If you've been waiting for a deal on Huawei's excellent-but-expensive Android Wear smart watch, B&H is taking $100 off select models, plus an extra $25 with promo code SMARTW, plus an extra $100 gift card for good measure (on certain models only).
If you've had your eye trained on the svelte new Xbox One S, you can get a 1TB Madden bundle for its standard $350 MSRP (with no tax for most), plus a $50 eBay gift card for good measure. That doesn't really hold a candle to the deals we've seen on the old Xbox One, but it's not bad if you need the new hotness.
$68 would be a pretty great price for the Griddler on its own, but the waffle iron plates usually sell for $25-$35 by themselves, so this bundle represents a pretty massive discount.
I've probably seen more USB battery packs than 99.9% of people living on this Earth, but I've never seen one like the ZeroLemon ToughJuice before. You get 30,000mAh of juice, five (!) USB ports, including a Quick Charge 2.0 port and a USB-C port, and a ruggedized exterior.
It's niche, and at $70 (with code JUXKCZZ4), it's not exactly cheap, but it truly stands apart in a world of commodity USB battery packs.
Everyone knows about Roombas, but did you know iRobot made a robotic mop as well? The iRobot Braava Jet has three different modes: Wet mopping, damp sweeping and dry sweeping, and can select the proper one automatically depending on which cleaning pad you attach. You can put it to work on your floors for just $169 today, the best price Amazon's ever listed.
Want wireless streaming and handsfree calling in your older car? This $13 dongle receives the Bluetooth signal from your phone, and transmits it to the FM radio station of your choice.
We've seen several deals on Bluetooth car kits in the past, but most require that your car include an AUX jack, whereas this only needs a working FM radio.
Note: The description of the product confusingly contains references to AUX cables, but that's optional. You can use this completely wirelessly, if you so choose.
What's that noise the car's making? It's all the crap rolling around in your trunk. This $24 pop-up organizer will keep everything in its place, and it even comes with a free bonus car cooler, as well as a reflective warning triangle for roadside emergencies.
Today you can grab a Fitbit Aria smart scale on eBay for just $67, the best price we've ever seen for a non-refurb. It only really makes sense to buy this scale if you own (and regularly use) a Fitbit, but if you do, the Aria sync your weight, BMI, and body fat % to the Fitbit app to track your goals and progress over time.
Playing With Power: Nintendo NES Classics promises to be an enlightening retrospective on your favorite classic video games. The book will feature overviews of 17 NES titles, interviews and commentary from Nintendo employees, hand-drawn maps, and more goodies when it's released in November
But let's be honest here, the real reason to buy it is the NES cartridge slip case.
Here's 20% off various chocolates and candies because....Halloween is about two months away? Trump is running for President? Your favorite blog is shutting down? Anyway, enjoy.
We see lots of deals these days on the original Philips Hue starter kit, but the second generation set includes a Siri-compatible bridge and brighter bulbs (800 lumens vs. 600), and you can save $20 on it today, with a $50 Best Buy gift card thrown in for good measure. That's easily the best deal we've seen to date.
There's almost always a $40 PlayStation Plus deal available through some eBay seller or another, but today, they're all suspiciously missing. We don't know if it's related to the price hike, but you could wait a few days to see if another one pops up. If not, I think it's safe to assume that those days are over.
Between shedding fur on your seats and a seemingly biological need to jump into the front seat while you're passing an 18-wheeler on the freeway, it's no secret that a lot of dogs don't do particularly well in the car. Personally, I put my dog in a collapsible fabric kennel in the backseat, but if you want your pooch to have a little more freedom, this backseat dog cover looks like a perfect solution.
The cover hooks into the headrests on both the front and back seats, creating a kind of loosely enclosed room that will keep your dog safely in the backseat, and her fur a layer removed from your upholstery.
Just when you thought you'd seen it all in the USB battery pack world, this 5,000mAh battery from RAVPower includes a Qi charging pad to power up your phone wirelessly. Sure, that's a little bit of a gimmick, but it does mean you don't have to carry an extra charging cable, and unlike most battery packs, this one can serve a purpose when you aren't traveling.
If you need a little extra push to get out and go for a run, Amazon will sell you a pair of Mizuno Wave Sayonara 3 running shoes for just $45 today. These shoes typically sell for about $60-$70 around the web, and you even get to pick your favorite color; just click through to the product pages to find the color selector.
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%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Farticles%252Ftechnology%252Ffuture_tense%252F2016%252F08%252Fin_copyright_law_computers_and_robots_don_t_count.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Computers and Robots Don't Count
Copyright has a weird relationship with computers. Sometimes it completely freaks out about them; sometimes it pretends it can't see them at all. The contrast tells us a lot about copyright—and even more about how we relate to new technologies.
Start with the freakout. One thing that computers are good for is making copies—lots of copies. Drag your music folder from your hard drive to your backup Dropbox and congratulations: You've just duplicated thousands of copyrighted songs. If you look up the section of the Copyright Act that sets out what counts as infringement, the very first Thou Shalt Not is “reproduce the copyrighted work.” In theory, Congress could have added some language saying that putting your music in your Dropbox that no one else can access isn't infringement. In practice, well, it's Congress.
Congressional inaction has meant that the problem of explaining why the internet isn't just an infringement machine in need of a good unplugging has been kicked over the courts. (Yes, the courts staffed by judges who call Dropbox “the Dropbox” and “iDrop.”) And in the process of keeping computers legal, the judges who make copyright law have developed some surprisingly broad rules shielding automatically made copies from liability.
Take, for example, the 2009 case A.V. v. iParadigms, in which high schools compelled students to submit their term papers to Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection site. First it compares papers to those already in its database, looking for suspicious similarities; then it stores the paper to compare to future submissions. Four students sued, arguing that these stored copies infringed their copyrights in their papers.
The court disagreed, because of course you shouldn't be able to use copyright to keep your teachers from finding out whether you cheated on your homework. But its reasoning is fascinating. Turnitin, the court held, made a “transformative” use of the papers because its use was “completely unrelated to expressive content.” Turnitin's computers might have copied the papers, but they didn't really read them. The court added, “The archived student works are stored as digital code, and employees of [Turnitin] do not read or review the archived works.”
Courts use similar logic in case after case: It's not infringement if computers “read or review” the new copies, only if people do. Google famously scanned millions of books. Completely legal, fourcourtshaveagreed, because it's not as though Google is turning the complete books over to people. “Google Books ... is not a tool to be used to read books,” wrote one judge. In another strand of the litigation, the parties at one point proposed a settlement that would have allowed “non-consumptive” digital humanities research on the scanned books, defined as “research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more Books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays substantial portions of a Book to understand the intellectual content presented within the Book.” This was fine, in the view of the author and publisher representatives who negotiated the proposed settlement. Computers can do what they want with books as long as no one actually “understand[s]” its “intellectual content.”
This attitude—computers don't count—isn't new, either. A century ago, the cutting edge in artistic robotics was the player piano. The Supreme Court heard a player-piano case in 1908 and held that the paper rolls “read” by the player pianos weren't infringing. The rolls, Justice William Day reasoned, “[c]onvey[] no meaning, then, to the eye of even an expert musician.” Instead, they “form a part of a machine. ... They are a mechanical invention made for the sole purpose of performing tunes mechanically upon a musical instrument.” The anthropocentrism is unmistakable. I've cataloged many different settings where copyright law finds ways to overlook copying as long as no humans are in the loop.
On the one hand, this makes perfect sense. Copyright is designed to encourage human creativity for human audiences. If a book falls in a forest and no one reads it, does it make an infringement? It seems like the only sensible answer is “No harm, no foul.” On the other hand, there's something strange about a rule that tells technologists just to turn the robots loose. It encourages uses that don't have much to do with human aesthetics while discouraging uses that do.
This hands-off approach to robotic readership stands in sharp contrast to copyright's surprisingly obsessive fretting about robotic authorship. We're at the dawn of a golden age of algorithmic authorship. Twitter bots like Olivia Taters and Hottest Startups, simple as they are, are capable of amazing poetry. From Push Button Bertha to Microsoft Songsmith, computer-generated music ranges from beautiful to banal. Special-effects artists and video-game programmers use procedural content generation to make vast imaginary worlds far beyond what any one person could hope to draw or design. And of course spambots and telemarketing robots (and counter-robots) are getting eerily good at mimicking human expression.
If all you knew about copyright was the way it treats computer-generated copies, you might think it would similarly look the other way and ignore computer-generated creativity. But no! No two plays of a video game are the same; the computer produces a new and different sequence of sights and sounds every time through. Copyright doesn't care; video games are still copyrightable. Now, of course they are; it would be ridiculous if you could just completely rip off games, and case after case holds that you can't.
But even as copyright law goes on recognizing copyright in computer-generated works, it can't help obsessively worrying about them with the same kind of nervous energy it gives to monkey selfies and for the same reason: What if there's no author? What if a creative work just popped into existence, without being clearly traceable to the artistic vision of a specific human? What then, buddy?
The funny thing is that just as the player piano roll shows that mechanical copying long predates computers, so does algorithmic creativity. You know what's a device for making art according to rigidly specified algorithmic rules? A spirograph. You know what else is? A Musikalisches Würfelspiel (sometimes apocryphally named for Mozart): a game in which you roll dice to select measures of music to string together into a minuet. Computers are faster and fancier but for the most part not fundamentally different. There's no need to futz around with speculating on whether your iPhone is a copyright-owning “author” of a Temple Run maze, any more than a spirograph is the author of a hypotrochoid drawing. Typically either the programmer or the user or both are authors, and that's good enough.
There will be harder cases of what Bruce Boyden calls “emergent works” that arise out of unpredictable algorithmic interactions. Where neither the programmer nor the user can reasonable foresee what a computer will do, the case for calling either of them an author is weak; they lack the kind of artistic vision copyright is supposed to promote and reward. But what's interesting and tricky about these emergent works is not that they come from computers but that they're unpredictable by anyone involved in their creation.
In an age of police killbots, worrying about whether Bender owns a copyright in his dream about killing all humans may seem a little beside the point. But copyright provides a useful window for thinking about hot-button issues in law and technology, ironically because the stakes are so much lower. There are low-tech precedents for new high-tech puzzles, if we care to see them.
The key is not to treat “computers” or “robots” or “drones” or other new kinds of technologies as unified phenomena we have to figure out all at once but instead to look at the different kinds of ways they operate and can be used. The Dallas bomb robot was under direct police control at all times; it was a tool for safely delivering lethal force from a distance in the same way that a sniper rifle is. The most important issue it raised was the security of its communications channel—because the last thing you want when you strap a pound of C-4 to a robot is for someone else to hijack the controls. That's a very different kind of problem than worrying about delegating life-or-death decisions to algorithms with a limited human presence in the loop. Lumping them together as “lethal robots” obscures more than it reveals; it makes it harder to identify which robots are dangerous and how and harder to figure out what to do about them.
The same is true for copyright, for privacy, for civil rights, and for the dozens of other pressing public policy problems surrounding new technologies. You learn more about augmented reality by thinking about Pokémon Go than vice versa. Technology policy is complicated because the world is complicated.
%feed http://redirect.viglink.com?u=http%3A%2F%2Fredirect.viglink.com%2F%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.slate.com%252Fblogs%252Fbrowbeat%252F2016%252F08%252F22%252Fmr_robot_and_why_television_twists_aren_t_surprising.html%26key%3Dddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8&key=ddaed8f51db7bb1330a6f6de768a69b8 r0B0t: Mr. Robot and Why TV Twists Don't Work Anymore
Spoilers ahead for Wednesday night's episode of Mr. Robot.
Well, what do you know? It turns out Elliot, the hacker hero of Mr. Robot, wasn't decompressing away from the internet at his mother's house while attending individual and group therapy and getting to know a half-kindly, half-menacing street criminal named Ray (Craig Robinson). He was actually in prison the whole time! His “mother” is a prison guard. Ray is a fellow inmate who apparently is running some kind of Tor-routed website that lets him deal in drugs, prostitution, and weapons from behind bars.
This is the big twist of Season 2, apparently. The big twist of Season 1 was a variation of the one in Fight Club: The title character (Christian Slater), the crazy-badass visionary renegade who “recruits” Elliot, turned out to be a figment of the hero's imagination, a stylized mental re-creation of his father, a computer salesman who died of leukemia caused by toxic leaks at a plant owned by Evil Corp.
Can we expect a twist, or “twist,” along these lines in every season of Mr. Robot? Because, if so, I might have to stop watching—not because it's devoid of other merits (it's brilliantly directed, photographed, edited, and scored and has a superlative cast), but the insistence on building perceptual tricks like these into the narrative diminishes the show's real and far more substantive virtues.
Series creator Sam Esmail, who wrote or co-wrote most of the episodes and directed all of Season 2, has gone on record repeatedly to say that he's not trying to fool anyone by doing this kind of thing. There are just enough clues dropped from the very beginning so that alert, film-history-conscious viewers have no trouble figuring out each season's structural sleight of hand. That's all true and fair. He's working in a tradition that also includes films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, A Beautiful Mind, and, in its own way, The Usual Suspects: You get pretty deep into the film and realize that what you thought was one thing was actually another thing.
I didn't outright predict that the character of Mr. Robot was going to turn out to be a Tyler Durdenstyle hallucination, but I was worrying about it all the way up to the episode where Esmail finally showed his cards—dreading it, really, because the show was so good at constructing a partially subjective universe shaped by Elliot's sardonic narration and star Rami Malek's introverted yet expressive acting, which I still think constitutes the best ongoing performance by a lead actor in a serialized drama. In Season 2, I didn't think Elliot's “detox” might turn out to be a fantastic construction, à la Mr. Robot himself, because it just seemed like too much of an M. Night Shyamalan thing to do, and since Esmail had done that once, drawing more criticism than praise, why would he do it again immediately? (My colleague Abraham Riesman figured it out right away, and as I read his evidence for Elliot's latest fantasy, I felt my heart sink, because if he turned out to be right, it would diminish my respect for a show that's so original and unpredictable in so many other ways.)
I should probably ‘fess up here and admit that I don't watch Mr. Robot, or any other TV series, to test my knowledge of TV tropes and say, “I called it!” whenever I successfully predict where a show's plot might be headed. That particular viewing approach doesn't interest me. I know there's a pretty sizable contingent of people who watch films and TV series mainly to see if they can successfully guess what will happen next—Reddit is a virtual mecca for this sort of viewer—but I've never encouraged that impulse, because it seems to me that it rewards screenwriters who are thinking about their plots and characters on the most superficial level, constructing a puzzle for others to solve and to feel good about having solved; this also encourages some writers to cheat a bit, withholding evidence that might tip their hand early, or just obscuring details and piling twist upon twist and reversal upon reversal until none of the characters make sense anymore as anything but figures in a nonsensical dream.
I'm not saying Esmail is doing that: He dropped enough hints in both seasons that you could figure things out early if you were so inclined. He even salted the dialogue and the scenes themselves with what feel in retrospect like winks or shrugs. After Elliot figured out that Mr. Robot was a hallucination of his dead dad and Darlene was actually his sister, the show played an acoustic version of Fight Club's closing-credits theme, the Pixies' “Where Is My Mind?” In last week's episode, Elliot seems to half-sheepishly apologize to his unseen “friend”—the TV viewer—for the prison twist. “I know what you're thinking. And no, I didn't lie to you. All of this really happened.”
In an interview with my friend Alan Sepinwall, Esmail said that these sorts of techniques are not intended to outsmart anyone but to reflect the hero's “ability to reprogram his life: E Corp was turned into Evil Corp. When we thought about him being in prison, what would be that coping mechanism, this came to mind. The other approach was his relationship to us—to his ‘friend'—and how we left him at the end of the first season. He basically didn't trust us anymore, he felt we were keeping things from him. So we wanted to develop that relationship as well. That was the one approach of, ‘This is what Elliot would do in this situation, to cope with being in prison,' and then the other of keeping it from us because he felt betrayed by us from the first season.”
Fair enough, but that still leaves us with another question, not about Elliot but about Mr. Robot as a work of popular storytelling: Do twists or tricks like these add to the story or detract from it? I'd argue that, in this case, they detract.
What makes Mr. Robot so innovative, audacious, and delightful aren't the narrative overlays of “Is this person real?” or “Is this situation real?” It's the detail and conviction with which Esmail and his actors build this mesmerizing alternate universe, which is essentially our world unfolding along what Abed on Community would call “the darkest timeline.”
Experts have hailed the show as the most accurate portrayal of computer programming, hacking, and the fine points of cybersecurity that TV has ever seen, and it's so good at weaving this crucial material into the characters' lives that you don't need to be an expert yourself to grasp what's going on. The show's mastery of tone—sardonic and satirical but ominous—is just as unusual. Its distrust of both capitalism and the possibility of revolution and reform are unheard of on commercial television, and its alternately idealistic and despairing worldview is so sincere and distressed that you can't just hit it with the usual complaints of hypocrisy (“If it's so anti-Establishment, what's it doing on commercial TV, eh?”) and walk away thinking you've delegitimized Esmail as a political storyteller. The show is at least as good at world-building as Game of Thrones—every episode brings more tidbits about the economic and political effects of the 5/9 hack and makes sure you understand the motivation for, say, blackmailing Evil Corp and then forcing its CFO (Brian Stokes Mitchell) to burn the ransom money in a public park, where the act will be captured on camera phones and uploaded to social media, furthering the idea that the corporation literally has money to burn and that fsociety isn't in this to enrich themselves.
But all this is diminished by the games Esmail plays in presenting Elliot's view of the world. What's the point, ultimately? Why do it at all? And if you're going to do it, why not ‘fess up immediately and let the narrative tension come from juxtaposing reality and “reality” in ways that illuminate the hero's internal struggles? The show seems to be hedging its bets here, arranging the material in a way that suggests we're going to be gobsmacked and mind-effed at some point, while simultaneously building enough signals into the story that if viewers complain that they figured out the twist right away, it's because it was never meant to be a twist. Bear in mind that I'm not saying Esmail shouldn't make the show he wants to make and is making—only that Mr. Robot is devoting an inordinate amount of energy to an aspect of storytelling that's vastly less interesting than the things the tricks are meant to enhance and support.
I wouldn't mind seeing a moratorium on this kind of screenwriting for that very reason: It just never works anymore.
The twist movies of the late 1990s occurred during the last possible cultural moment when a storyteller could do something like that and not have millions of people instantly take to the internet to figure out what was “really” going on. You might figure it out on your own and share your evidence with your friends on a chat board or in the comments section of a blog post, but the phenomenon of literally millions of viewers simultaneously joining forces to stay one step ahead of a storyteller was still about five to 10 years away (depending on which social-media platform you think did more damage to a screenwriter's ability to keep a secret, Facebook or Twitter).
The funny thing is, you often find yourself appreciating the substance of a story more once you've gotten past the adrenaline rush of “What's going on?” and “What's really going on?” and are able to concentrate on the details of characterization, performance, and storytelling. As one personal example of this phenomenon, I offer The Sixth Sense: I accidentally found out the twist before I saw the film when my eye randomly fell on a particular paragraph of an Entertainment Weekly story with a spoiler warning at the top. But I still loved the movie because it painted such a haunting (in every sense) portrait of the human mind's capacity for denial and delusion. At its heart, the film is not merely about a man who had no idea he was dead but a man who refused to accept his fate and was going through the motions of an old life that no longer existed. Most people who saw it for the first time were probably preoccupied with guessing the twist, and if they guessed it early, they might have decided the film was a waste of their time: You promised you were going to be smarter than me, movie, but it turned out I was smarter than you, so I'm disappointed.
Seventeen years on, there are Facebook and Reddit and Twitter threads, video essays and blog posts dedicated to figuring out every last twist and trick that storytellers naïvely hope they're holding in reserve. For some reason—perhaps the social-media-age rush to jump ahead to the next thing—this kind of viewing has become endemic. Whether the topic of discussion is the meaning of the ending of Inception or The Sopranos or the lineage of Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it's guaranteed that somebody (or somebodies) will eventually guess the correct answer or, worse, insist that they've “solved” a work that was meant to be ambiguous and unresolved. The end result of this kind of discussion diverts attention from the deeper values of storytelling and re-centers interest on the hook, or on what viewers mistakenly believe is the hook, of any given tale. Art becomes a math problem, or a gift-wrapped present whose identity can be deduced by shaking the box a little.
Mr. Robot is encouraging this kind of reductive approach to engagement with art, however accidentally. And it's a shame, because the rest of the show is so rich with imagination and meaning that it could probably rivet us if it dropped the gimmicks entirely and just concentrated on doing what it already claims to be doing: telling the story of Elliot and the cruel world that he's trying to destroy and remake. As I've said of other series, including Mad Men, this show is smarter than the people who think they are smarter than the show. But it's not easy to make that case when Esmail is pulling another variation of “it was all a dream.”
%feed http://insider.si.edu/2016/08/linn-meyers-view-time-lapse/ Linn Meyers “Our View From Here” Time-lapse
Linn Meyers (American, b. Washington, D.C., 1968; lives and works in Washington, D.C.) created her largest work, “Our View From Here,” at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, on view May 12, 2016May 14, 2017.
This time-lapse highlights the process behind the site-specific wall drawing, which stretches the entire circumference of the inner-circle galleries on the museum's second level, more than 400 linear feet. Meyers creates her works by hand-drawing thousands of closely spaced, rippling lines, each nested beside the one that came before it. Drawing alone for long hours each day with a type of marker often used by graffiti writers, she welcomes the imperfections that are a natural part of working without templates or taped lines. The resulting patterns flow and pulse with energy.
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