Stateless May 2015

STATELESS

MAY 2015 - jomec.co.uk/stateless

New thoughts on web, tech & culture

THE NET WILL NEVER DIE BUT THOSE IN CHARGE WILL

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STATELESS MANIFESTO Your pre-internet mind is gone for good, but with the situation as volatile and exciting as it is, you don’t need it.

STATELESS EDITORIAL TEAM XAVIER BOUCHERAT MAX GOLDBART EMILY BURT STEWART HUME ROBIN NIERYNCK JESSICA RAYNER AMELIA JONES TANGWEN ROBERTS JACK WETHERILL HANNAH SEATON MATTHEW EVANS

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The digital landscape is an increasingly dangerous realm.

This danger prompts resistance, and the creation of strange and fantastic digital subcultures. As such, it should be celebrated.

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Disconnecting from this landscape is not an option for most - provided you have access in the first place, which some 4 billion of us don’t.

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Therefore it is essential we equip ourselves with the tools and knowledge needed to counteract state surveillance and attacks on our privacy.

On the cover...

Riot police in Istanbul take to the streets to break up protests provoked by new laws designed to tighten the government’s control of the internet, Feb 2014.

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Web users everywhere need to familiarise themselves with basic concepts like dark web, encryption, and the consequences of burgeoning artificial intelligence.

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Even today there exist publications that, despite their preoccupation with future web and future tech, refuse to acknowledge the Orwellian situation that we’ve arrived in.

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Silicon Valley giants continue to push outdated, utopian visions of the net, free of hierarchies and collectively controlled by

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the people. These same global companies are compliant in mass online web censorship, state surveillance, and attacks on net neutrality.

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Stateless will speak for everyone who rejects this vision. We recognise that the internet, far from disseminating power, has further concentrated it in the hands of the few. It has provided underground platforms for criminals and creatives alike – platforms that, with a bit of knowledge and skill, anyone can access.

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As such, our editorial independence is paramount. We will never run advertising in our print publication, nor will we fill it with kneejerk reactionism – releasing bi-monthly allows for well considered and thought provoking content.

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The Internet has permanently transformed the way our minds and memories operate. We do not forget like we used to. Interactions that were once common place in real life are now considered strange, even inappropriate.

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Your pre-internet mind is gone for good, but the truth is, with the situation as volatile and exciting as it is, you don’t need it.

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CONTENTS SOCIAL MEDIA ARMY RAW CONTENT

Who is keeping our social media free from beheadings, child abuse and hate speech?

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Wars aren’t just fought on the battleground anymore. They are fought in cyberspace.

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PAGE 19 Reality is overrated

PAGE 6 Digital Institutions

PAGE 20 Ghostery

PAGE 7-9 Raw Content

PAGE 21 Cyborgs

PAGE 10-11 Heads of the Rogue State

PAGE 22 Weird App

PAGE 12 Interview: Arjen Kamphuis

PAGE 23 Google Farms

PAGE 13-15 Social Media Army

PAGE 24-25 Fuck your Apple Watch

TECH

PAGE 26-27 Robophobia

PAGE 16 Rise of the automated journalist

PAGE 28 Toys as Proxy Parents

PAGE 18 Simple Life Hacks

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YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE ALONE

Meet Madeleine, Stateless Magazine’s one-time invisible girlfriend.

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REVENGE PORN

From A-listers to your average girl, revenge porn is happening all around us.

CULTURE

ARTS

PAGE 30-31 You Don’t Have To Be Alone: Invisible Girlfriend

PAGE 40 Albert Omos: Computational Art

PAGE 32 Museum of GIF

PAGE 41 Ahmed Salahuddin

PAGE 33 Dear Anonymous

PAGE 42-43 Arts in Review

PAGE 34 Freaks, Fakes and Faceless Names

FARSIDE

PAGE 35 Documentaries

PAGE 44-45 I Remember The Future

PAGE 36-37 #WhiteGenocide

PAGE 47 Faces of Farside: Slender Man

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PAGE 38-39 The Fucked Up World of Revenge Porn

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Web

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F*CKINGWEIRD.COM: Perpetual digital art Weirdest website of the month explores the spiraling art of Zoom Quilt

The mesmerising world of perpetual art that is Zoom Quilt.

TODAY, gripping an online users’

attention for more than a few passing seconds is a difficult skill to master, but Zoom Quilt achieves it with style.

Upon entering the site, your eyes are drawn into a mesmerizing, immersive and surreal experience, the ultimate escape from reality. Be prepared to enter a world of dark fantasy that draws from popular cultural texts such as Disney, but with a sinister twist, moving inwards on itself in an endless artwork animation. Reddit user @nomoreinternetforme claims, “This is what happens when you spill a cup of crazy on a blanket and zoom in on it,” but

surprisingly its steady repitition creates a relatively calming experience.

The brainchild of Nikolaus Baumgarten, Zoom Quilt is a collaborative effort between a number of illustrators and artists, and dinspired by an early Internet platform of patchwork paintings.

The platform was Gridcosm, a similar ongoing immersive project, but Zoom Quilt aimed to make the abstract experience more seamless. The second edition allows you to control the speed and direction of the immersive art and when knocked up to high speed creates a positively trippy, immersive experience.

In terms of how it works, the concept could be replicated by anyone with the right software. The middle image is a third of the size of the previous level and artists add images around the centre until a new grid is completed. That level then shrinks and becomes the seed for the next level of the image creating an ever-expanding tunnel of images, which once completed will work in either direction. Simple, yet confusing, we know – it’s a mind fuck!

DIGITAL INSTITUTIONS

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In a new series of features, Stateless examines how the digital revolution is affecting institutions.

This issue - PRISONS

For the full uncut interview with Seth Ferranti, visit www.jomec.co.uk/stateless

IF you were to think that the social media

revolution had escaped America’s deep industrial prison complex then you’d be mistaken. While in the past the only form of outside communication for prisoners was epistolary, modern systems are allowing them to communicate swiftly with the outside world and get involved with social media.

And they are going about this with relative ease, both legally and less so. The main source of access for convicts to this pacy new medium is the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Communication System, or TRULINCS. TRULINCS allows prisoners to email content to relatives or friends who can then upload it onto their respective social media pages. Once they’ve sought out TRULINCS, prisoners can request to exchange electronic messages with someone from the outside.

After this has been approved the nominated individual receives an automated email from a company called CorrLinks, asking that they accept future electronic communication. If accepted, correspondence can begin.

Seth Ferranti is an ex-prisoner and author who now writes for Vice and The Daily Beast on issues concerning prisons in the digital age. He was sent down in 1993 for 25 years for his part in an LSD conspiracy, selling acid to students on the East Coast. Now a hugely successful writer and commentator, Ferranti is quick to point out the changing landscape of American prisons and how this had such an impact on his career: “Before TRULINCS my wife acted as a facilitator for me and I ran everything through her. She would print and send me my emails through regular mail. I would get two to three big manila envelopes full of my correspondences and emails every week from her. I would reply on the same email and send it back out. I designed my website, Facebook page and everything like this through the mail.”

But what of the prisoners who don’t have this connection with the outside world, those who don’t have a loved one prepared to click ‘yes’ on that CorrLinks automated message?

There are other ways, but they are by no means ideal - one legal, one not so much.

In the legality game, there are other far-less sanctioned services, which offer prisoners email communication with the outside world.

Voiceforinmates.com is just one of these specialised services, and stylises itself as an “advocate for fair and humane treatment

of inmates.” In reality it doesn’t shape up to the efficiency of the TRULINCS service.

One prisoner bemoaned to Vice that he paid $100 for the service for the past three years and was “rarely satisfied”. However, Ferranti is quick to point out that for some, where these services aren’t the only option, they aren’t necessarily all bad, “I know a lot of dudes that used those services, some were good, some were bad, but there are a lot of them so they must be making money.”

On the shadier side of the law, contraband smartphones are seeing a steep rise in their availability to prisoners and with these devices email communication can be bypassed and posts delivered straight to the social media platforms for which they are intended. Ferranti explains, “Prisoners still want smartphones because that is unmonitored activity and you can go on the Internet and watch videos and everything.

You can’t do any of that on TRULINCS.” Considering the dangers associated with sneaking them inside, prisoners tend to have to pay vast sums of money for smartphones but the demand, of course, remains. The posts are all made from false accounts for fear of prison officials bringing down the hammer. And this fear is by no means misplaced. In the South Carolina prison system, where accessing social media is a Level 1 violation, more than 400 disciplinary cases have been brought forward against prisoners using Facebook. According to Spate Magazine, one inmate has been sentenced to 37 years solitary confinement… for accessing Facebook off a smartphone?

It’s difficult to believe.

Whether through the regulated government channels, proxy sites such as Voice For Inmates or just straight-up contraband, prisoner interactivity with social media is growing. The question now for the authorities is whether to strengthen and popularise legal channels, and thus prevent convicts from gaining control of social media in ways detrimental to the justice system. For now, the punishment for accessing social media platforms in states such as South Carolina appears ludicrously harsh and demonstrates a gaping chasm of understanding that the authorities have towards prisoners’ relationship with social media.

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RAW CONTENT Who’s been keeping our social media free of beheadings, child abuse and hate-speech?

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“They work alone at their bedroom computers, in third world countries, with little training or support” OUR lives are ruled by social media. Our

profiles are idealised constructs to impress our friends, with Facebook at the centre of this online reality. A place where everyone is mates, a seemingly perfect world.

But simmering just below the surface of our newsfeeds are the atrocities that characterise ‘reality’, hidden from view.

We know they’re there, so why can’t we see them? Who filters through the hours of disturbing footage that ends up online and prevents it from appearing in mainstream social spaces?

Moderators. We all know they’re up there, sitting at their desks in their cushy offices in Silicon Valley. Yet these offices, much like our profiles, are another convenient construct, this time for the social media giants themselves.

Consider the sheer amount of content we upload to social networks every day. On Facebook alone there are 2.5 million pieces of content uploaded every single minute by the 1.4 billion users across the world. That’s 2.5 million videos, photos and recordings that people care enough about to merit sharing with the world.

This gargantuan amount of data means it wouldn’t be possible for Facebook to have a purely in-house moderating team; the costs would be astronomical, and the workforce would have to be enormous. The in-house teams that do exist are made up mostly of university graduates looking for a bit of post-graduation cash. And it’s well paid: $10 an hour for sitting at a desk and flicking through pictures of people showing off the lesser sides of their character on a night out.

They get two screens - one for moderating, and one for watching back-to-back Game of Thrones. Sounds ideal for those attempting to adjust to the real world after student life.

To assist the in-house moderation however, the work is outsourced to companies in countries like the Philippines. On the second floor of an elementary school just outside Manila, there sit rows of PCs manned by a hundred or so people. This is the office of TaskUs; just one of the many companies that moderate content for the social networks we’re glued to day and night. It may seem

a dirty job, but there are people out there prepared to do it, and seemingly enjoying it.

One reviewer on Glassdoor discussed TaskUs in glowing terms: “What I love most about TaskUs is that it’s a true meritocracy. Despite age or experience, everyone checks their ego at the door - the right answer is the one that gets results.”

Now that Facebook’s user-base spans every age and generation, all users have to be taken into account. Your grandmother won’t be logging in if the first thing she sees on her screen is a dick pic, or someone getting the shit kicked out of them. Social networks want to protect our delicate minds. They are safe havens, populated by family, friends, and funny listicles. A random beheading doesn’t quite fit this picture.

Outsourcing overseas for simple, mechanical roles isn’t unusual in any field.

But alongside these workforces overseas, companies working in social media moderation such as oDesk are reportedly commissioning freelancers to take on moderation roles, which is far more worrying.

According to a Telegraph article, these freelancers work alone at their bedroom computers, in third world countries, with a minimal amount of support. They get a few

WEB weeks of training before they start. They are given a list of things considered acceptable, and then have to use their discretion to decide if it should be deleted, in a system they call ‘delete it; ignore it; escalate it.’

Sounds pretty simple, but it’s anything but.

Moderation companies such as oDesk have convoluted policies on what content falls under an abuse of their standards: policies in a constant state of flux. Earwax is banned, including cartoon earwax, but snot in any form is fine. Crushed heads, according to the guidelines, are perfectly acceptable, as long as no insides are visible. Bodily fluids – with the exception of semen - were deemed appropriate in 2012, under the condition that no humans also featured in the photograph.

The ambiguity of these lists has caused high profile incidents in the news. Does the name Karlesha Thurman ring any bells? Last June, Karlesha posted a photo to Facebook of her breastfeeding her three-month-old daughter on graduation day.

The online backlash came thick and fast, with the developing issue of social media moderation flagged alongside the public stigmas about breastfeeding.

But few participating in the debates were aware that those at the helm of this

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moderation could potentially be living hundreds or even thousands of miles away, far removed from the haze of this backlash; and this displacement is one of many problems with using freelance moderators.

Workers who have spoken out about their treatment on platforms such as Wired and Gawker, have discussed how, after seeing so much horrendous activity, they have become desensitised to the acts of violence and terror. Employee testimonies state there is little or no counselling at the overseas companies. Even at the Silicon Valley head offices, counsellors are hard to access, with staff not being told they’re available unless they are explicitly requested.

Whether young graduates in the US, or outsourced freelancers abroad, moderators are likely to face exposure to violent and disturbing material. Beheadings become almost commonplace, to the point where the lines between what’s normal and what’s not become blurred. Speaking to Gawker, former freelance moderator Jake Swearingen described the moment he was confronted with one such video on his monitor. “I didn’t want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them.”

When contacted by Stateless on how they moderate their content, the major social networks replied with standard press releases. “We have an in-house moderation department as well as outsourcing to several overseas companies.” There was no mention of their usage of freelancers. Given the ethical dimensions at play, their reluctance to admit to the fact is hardly surprising.

Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, both beheaded by ISIS in January 2015

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HEADS OF THE JOSH HARRIS can best be described as one of Web 2.0’s leading contributors. Growing up in an environment where television was his best friend, this young, rather odd twenty-something travelled to the Big Apple in the mid-1980’s to seek his fortune and found success with an incredible speed and immeasurability. He began with just $900 in his pocket and within a short period had founded the technology consulting firm Jupiter Communications; from where Harris launched a platform for himself to imbue the at-that-point barely-existing Internet with his weird and wonderful influence.

Cue Pseudo.com. Pseudo was the first website dedicated entirely to live audio and video webcasting. It was a platform for a new wave of farside and intrigue to sweep across the Internet, containing such programmes as Launder My Head, a computer animation two years in the making. Launder My Head featured Harris and co-creator Jaques Tege with their heads encased in televisions delivering their dystopian visions. What Harris achieved with Pseudo was to develop the Internet less as a profession and much

JOSH HARRIS “Lions were kings of the jungle, one day they wound up in zoos. I suspect we’re on the same track” more as a culture. Nerds being cool was his legacy. Internet culture was real and with the dot com bubble of the late 90’s, this culture fed even further into society’s psyche.

But the noughties, for Harris, were only to bring with them a descent further into the world of the weird. He cut ties with Pseudo, claiming a few years down the line that it was simply a “fake company” and “the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art.” To fill his time, he attempted further trailblazing works including an Orwellian megaproject whereby volunteers were placed

AARON SWARTZ “If you’re not working on the most important thing you need to be doing, ask yourself why?”

FAR more than just an internet-shaper, Aaron Swartz spent his limited number of years on this Earth as one of the most important political activists of the millennial generation. Born into a loving home, early indications that Swartz was streets ahead of his peers, intellectually and mathematically, were plentiful. By age 12 he had developed infogami.com, a platform for like-minded individuals to upload content, and not much later he played a major part in the formation of Reddit in 2005.

But once mass media company Condé Nast had enveloped the community-driven UGC site, he became disillusioned and was

all but voluntarily fired. Swartz despised the control Condé had exerted over the supposedly free-minded forum. He developed aspirations of a totally opposing nature: That of releasing American government and multinational control over research and public online content. Swartz’s philosophy centered on trying to break what is essentially a highly depressing publishing cycle in which large companies force students to pay for access to cutting-edge research that may have taken years to develop. Yet the money doesn’t trickle down to said researchers, it remains with the publishers. In an act of defiance, he downloaded and shared thousands of

inside a huge terrarium in New York, and weliveinpublic.com, a 24-hour surveillance project shadowing him and girlfriend of the time Tanya Corrin.

Now a self-proclaimed ‘Ethiopian national’, Harris spends his days far-removed from Internet culture. But trundle through its endlessly dense array of forums and mediasharing sites and his influence can be found in all corners. Today’s web is allowing everyone their ‘15 minutes of fame’. For better or for worse, Josh Harris is one of those most instrumental in this.

articles from leading academic research collection JSTOR, to be accessed for free. He was immmediately placed on the FBI’s radar.

This was to signal the beginning of the end for Swartz in the US government’s eyes. He was to be ‘made an example of’ - a phrase to be heard consistently and punitively in reference to Swartz over the long course of his ensuing trial. Not content with being hushed, Swartz used his jail time to further his political campaigning, trying to halt the advancement of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. The campaign culminated in an epic one-day online blackout in January 2012.

As many will remember, it was a beautiful example of collective activism, led in the most part by Swartz. The legislation is still yet to be passed.

Almost a year to the day later, and with a final trial looming, Swartz was to tragically take his own life. He has left behind him a legacy of free knowledge and the mantra that ,“If you’re not working on the most important thing you need to be doing right now, then you must ask yourself why.” It s eems fitting then that the counter-proposal to SOPA has been dubbed ‘Aaron’s Law’.

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ROGUE STATE

The heroes and villains shaping the net

ROSS ULBRICHT “A life sentence is really a death sentece. Either way, you die in prison - one just takes longer” THE mastermind behind the infamous online black market Silk Road, 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht did more than shape the illegal online drugs trade, he defined it. Ulbricht, the alleged creator of Silk Road created a Tor hidden service on the deep web dealing in Bitcoins to keep it off radar. His revolutionary free-market concept allowed its users, both consumers and suppliers, to browse and purchase anything from LSD to heroin at ease and anonymously, without tracking. His site enabled more than 1 million online drug deals and it is thought to have made around

FOUNDER of now-defunct file hosting service Megaupload and its successor Mega, internet entrepreneur, businessman and political party founder, Kim Dotcom has certainly made his mark on the digital landscape.

Kim Dotcom rose to fame during the 1990s as a self-proclaimed hacker and has been convicted for a number of digital crimes, including compute fraud, data espionage, insider trading and embezzlement. More recently he was convicted of copyright infringement for the running of file sharing sites Megaupload and Mega, which have been branded by the Digital Citizens Alliance as “shadowy cyber lockers.”

The sites create a cloud storage service with client-side encryption algorithms that prevent government or third-party spies from invading user privacy, as well as Megaupload and Mega themselves. The sites claim that this means they cannot be held responsible for what users upload, as they cannot decrypt it themselves, which seems like a clever loop hole that is sure to piss off the authorities, as the software effectively enables millions of people to bypass copyright laws.

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$18 million dollars in the process.

Supporters of Silk Road have described it as an experiment in victimless crime and suggested that its conception has removed the bloody and dangerous turf wars between violent street gangs, by moving the trade online. However, Ulbricht, convicted earlier this year for narcotics trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking, has been branded a villain in the media.

Following a series of online exchanges between one of the Silk Road users and the sites anonymous administrator “Dread Pirate

Roberts”, who the authorities are claiming is Ulbricht, now faces further charges for murder-for-hire. This was after the messages revealed a payment of $650,000 was made to a supplier to place hits on five traders who had been stealing from and blackmailing Silk Road.

In one of the messages, Dread Pirate Roberts says, “I would like to see him [FriendlyChemist] executed,” and goes on to say, “I would like to put a bounty on his head, it doesn’t have to be clean,” going on to make jokes about having only hired a hit once before. But many witnesses have claimed there were multiple administrators.

Either way, it seems the dangers, greed and power associated with the drug trade have most definitely not been left on the streets as intended.

Ulbricht’s family has blindly pleaded his innocence and his mother claimed “the decks have been stacked against him from the beginning.” She talks of his creative nature and states the only thing she really believes is that he did create the site as an “economic, free market experiment.” He is facing life in prison for his digital crimes and will be sentenced on May 15.

KIM DOT COM

“I am not a pirate. I’m an innovator. Because of my flamboyant character it’s easy to sell me as a villain”

Megaupload was seized and shut down in 2012, but Mega, its successor, is still running with over 500 million files being shared on it and 15 million registered users. It is thought that before Megaupload was shutdown, Kim Dotcom had cost the entertainment industry over $500 million in sharing pirated content with over 150 million registered users. Kim Dotcom denied any wrongdoing and the case has caused controversy across the globe over its legality. This controversy sparked denial of service attacks on a range of websites belonging to the US government and copyright organisations by Hacktivist group Anonymous.

If creating illegal online file storage and viewing site Megaupload wasn’t good

enough, Kim Dotcom, who now lives in New Zealand, also founded and is the main funder and visionary of New Zealand’s Internet Party. The party seek to promote notions of internet freedom and privacy in a culture where we are under increasing digital visibility and surveillance. The party was the first political party to ever allow membership sign up via an app. The party failed to gain any seats in the 2014 election and Kim Dotcom said to reporters, “I take full responsibility for this loss tonight, because the brand—the brand Kim Dotcom—was poison for what we were trying to achieve.”

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INTERVIEW: Arjen Kamphuis The information security specialist offers some tips on staying off the grid ENCRYPTION expert Arjen Kamphuis is

a man in demand. Since the Snowden revelations he has gone from a conspiracy theorist to one of the dominant voices from the world of internet privacy and encryption.

For the longest time, those campaigning for the right of privacy online have been deemed cyber-criminals. Only recently are many people becoming more aware of the the extent of the threats against our privacy.

In 2014, along with his co-author Silkie Carklo, Arjen produced Information Security for Journalists, a guide to online privacy and the protection of sources for investigative journalists. However, it’s not just journalists who need to be aware of surveillance. Arjen is with Stateless in belief that society as a whole needs to be better informed.

But what measures should you be taking to keep your private information just that private? Arjen talked us though some simple measures.

Searching the Web One of the simplest things that you can do is use multiple browsers: “Personally I always have three browsers” he explains. “One I use for social media stuff. Then I have another browser, Firefox, which is my main work browser were I do all my work related reading and then finally I have the Tor browser.

It is slow and clumsy but perfect if I want to do research on certain companies and I don’t want them knowing about it.”

Despite all these measures, however, Arjen explains that if you are using a computer built in China and that works on an American operating system (so a Mac of a PC), you are already at a disadvantage.

These systems have back doors in place, meaning that any interested party can access your information with minimal effort. To combat this, Arjen

suggests using Tails, a complete operating system that runs off a USB rather than your hard drive, as well as the Tor network which allows you to privately browse the web without potential data leakage.

On the subject of web browsing his main message is that people should be separating their most private information from their most public. Keeping your social media openness on a different browser to your private internet activity lowers the level of information that can be easily pinpointed to you. For those of you out there that really want to start searching off grid Arjen suggests using two laptops: one to search with Tails and the other completely offline, with all of your encryption keys.

That Smart Phone in your pocket “Right now phone security is lagging 15 to 20 years behind what we have with laptops,” explains Arjen. In his opinion all smart phones are fundamentally unsafe.

It is not just hacking your emails but the whole device that can be compromised, from pinpointing your locations to using your phone’s microphone to listen into your conversation. He makes the point that one way of scuppering surveillance on sensitive meetings is to leave your phone at home, thus increasing the costs and effort involved for those who are tracking you.

What about emails ?

So what email services should you use if you want to be private? Certainly not Gmail, according to Arjen. Although using GPG email encryption can protect context, the details of whom you are emailing is still compromised as many of the servers are still based in the US. One step that you can take to keep correspondence secret is by using an email service based in countries such as Switzerland, Germany or Austria. A Swiss example recommended by Arjen is Kolab which he explains, “provides a nice email service and they run it all with public source codes and run it on Swiss soil.” You will have to pay for a service like this, but it does mean that your data is not compromised. Team European email services like Kolab with email encryption and you are getting close to being off the radar.

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THE SOCIAL MEDIA ARMY

Wars aren’t just fought on the battleground anymore: they’re fought in cyberspace.. .

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“77 Brigade will play a key part in enabling the UK to fight in the information age” “WE shall fight them on Facebook, we shall fight them on Twitter,” a 21st century take on Churchill’s words to send fear racing down the spines of the enemy. The British army is a rapidly changing institution, with numbers and funds being cut. Since the gradual removal of troops from war zones in the Middle East, plans for widespread changes in the setup of the army are now in full swing. Troop numbers are set to be cut to the 80,000 mark by 2016 and the importance of reservists looks set to rise, most likely in order to cut costs.

This is Army 2020, a grandiose set of changes to be introduced over the coming years, in an attempt to instill within the army a far greater degree of fluidity. Part of these changes will institute the creation of a new brigade, not one that fights on battlefronts with weapons and tactics but one that uses social media and psychological operations to infiltrate the enemy in a manner befitting the 21st century. Psychological operations, or ‘psy-ops’, are methods of winning back the ‘hearts and minds’ of those on the home front. The landscape of war is changing, and those in authority know that we need to keep up.

But what do we know so far of this new outfit? The new 77th Brigade will become fully operational on 1 April and is currently in the process of recruiting. Its badge has been loosely based on The Chindits, a special force serving in Burma during World War Two who employed the innovative tactic of “long-range penetration”. 77th Brigade will be based at Denison barracks, Berkshire and will draw from both those experienced in army life, and skilled reservists. Stephanie Mann, spokeswoman for the MOD, informed Stateless that the Brigade “is an organisation that sits at the heart of trying to operate smarter.” The unnaturally high percentage of reservists is by no means unintentional; drawing from a wider pool of civilians will allow those with ‘bespoke skills’ to work alongside their military counterparts and bring the army up to speed on this fresh brand of warfare.

The majority of the armies’ ‘enemies’ today are smaller in size but far more reactive in the world of social media. There is no better example of this than the striking social media strength of an organisation

who’ve been getting a lot of airtime over the last few months; The so-called Islamic State.

When Robin Williams tragically took his own life last August, the outpouring of support from Twitter was colossal. Amongst the various celebrity condolences came one tweet of support from a more unexpected source. An account with the handle @Mujahid4life praised Williams’ starring role in Jumanji with this: “Good movie. Loved it as a kid.” Mujahid loosely translates as ‘Jihadist warrior’, and further inspection found it was an account belonging to a British-born ISIS supporter named Abdullah. It is a practice that lends the supporters of the ISIS machine a sense of personality; if Abdullah can be a fan of a much-loved western comedian, then he can burrow into the psyche of potential western recruits. Brigade 77 take note - the conversation doesn’t have to start with extremist ideology. Far better to filter it in later.

Elena Cresci, Community coordinator at the Guardian, was heavily involved in an investigation on the influence ISIS yield online. “It was literally a case of trying to figure out which accounts were actually ISIS fighters and what information we could glean from them as a result. We mainly did it via

Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.” Elena and colleagues found that ISIS were attempting to hijack popular Internet hashtags in order to best spread their message. Back in September the ISIS Twitter account of Abdulrahman al-Hamid sent out a tweet to over 4,000 followers in Arabic asking for the top British hashtags At this point in time, they mainly centered around the Scottish referendum. Followers were told to embed #voteno hashtags “with the video of the British prisoner.” And, with that, British space had firmly been invaded.

The issue can barely stay away from our tabloids and broadsheets for more than a few days at a time; only in the last few weeks did we see three British teenage girls fall victim to the ISIS social media drive and make the crossing to Syria using fake black-market smuggled passports. Telegraph Women’s editor Emma Barnett claimed that the girls were in control of this decision and that it was made fully ‘of their own volition’.

This is willful ignorance. The disturbing reality is that ISIS is using social media to ensnare potential western recruits, and the practice is spreading. Bethnal Green Academy, the school from which these girls were lifted, has now blocked access to Facebook and Twitter

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from school computers.

Gawker’s Sam Biddle mused, “ISIS has nearly perfected the dissemination of violent propaganda, much as BuzzFeed has nearly perfected the dissemination of quizzes and videos.” American tech companies have since caught up with these accounts and have instituted a policy of en-masse deletion but this can hardly halt tech-savvy militants who can simply create dozens more accounts under pseudonyms to evade the social media authorities.

The focal point for ISIS social media control is the Al Hayat Media Centre, which has been in operation for almost a year now. The beating heart of the propaganda machine lies here, pumping blood through 20 further bases spread across ISIS territory.

From the glossy ISIS magazine Dabiq to the most gruesome of torture videos, recruits are highly trained in the use of social media, as well as visual design and editing software.

And those at the Al Hayat media centre are not short of innovation either. In April 2014, the ISIS Palestinian branch was

commissioned to develop an Android App, dubbed the Dawn of Glad Tidings. This app, which “gives news from Syria, Iraq and The Islamic World”, is available to download from Google Play and now has thousands of users signed up to it. Once again we see propaganda not confined to the underground, but well within our media sphere. Dawn of Glad Tidings could easily have played a part in encouraging Western recruits to make the trip to the Middle East.

All these examples are indicative of one thing; the grasp ISIS have on social media is exemplary, and a response is required. With said response now impending, the question remains as to what will be the effectiveness of Brigade 77. According to Stephanie Mann, “77 Brigade will play a key part in enabling the UK to fight in the information age.” Fighting talk, but there is much that the brigade needs to counter. With the ISIS media dragon now nestled firmly in the Western consciousness, the lines between us and them are blurred. In order for the Brigade to be successful, it needs to be savvy

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and work out how to win back those being lost to the fight in the Middle East.

An understanding of just what it is that is allowing ISIS to have such a master grasp of social media is paramount, but the fear remains that the armies’ reaction time has already been too slow. Too many have already been won over and it is hard not to imagine the British army will continue to lag behind, failing to wrestle away a digital stranglehold from a collection of the most 21st century of extremists. 77th Brigade will commence operations in April 2015; where were they in April 2010?

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TECH

RISE OF THE AUTOMATED JOURNALIST In an age of instant news around the clock, is the reporter that never sleeps the future of journalism?

AS the pace of the digital age shows no sign of slowing down, the conventional ideas surrounding journalism are in flux.

Journalists and news agencies fight to adapt to the relentless concept of 24-hour news and impact of social media on the way we access information.

When we sleep the world does not stop, stories happen over night and the race to be at the forefront of ‘breaking news’ continues to intensify.

But as technology lies uncomfortably close to outgrowing us, does the future of journalism have grounding in technology?

“Aerie Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AERI) on Tuesday reported a loss of $13.1 million in its third quarter.

The Research Triangle Park, North Carolina-based company said it had a loss of 54 cents per share.

Losses, adjusted for stock option expense, came to 44 cents per share.”

A concise and informative piece of news, admittedly not the most riveting story but can you pick up on anything out of the ordinary? The story, published by the Associated Press (AP) has no byline - more accurately it has no human byline.

The story is an example of AP’s use of a programe known as Automated Insights, an automated system that can write breaking business stories at a rate much faster than any human.

The conventional human journalist might write 300 stories in a set time frame, whereas reports claim automation technology can produce as many as 4,400.

Although these ‘journobots’ may not carry the same apocalyptic, ‘rise of the machines’ sci-fi rhetoric, the thought of robots writing stories is still a pretty unsavory one for writers such as myself. Sleep is a basic human need but with the 24-hour nature of news setting the pace, media organisations are increasingly looking to developers to come up with smart ways use computer algorithms.

This is not a new concept, if we go back to dawn of March 17th 2014, when the inhabitants of LA were awoken by a mild tremor, less than three minutes later a story was published on the LA Times website. A story that again does nothing other than state the facts, but innovation lies in the story being sourced and written by data imported into a computer software system. The LA Times were able to produce a story within minutes of the tremor beating every other news outlet, which to some extent proves the technology’s worth. Since then, automation technology continues to grow in popularity, with Japan going as far as creating the very first robot news anchor, an android that is potentially able to read news stories better than humans.

SIMPLE LIFE HACKS

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TECH

Watch our video about email encryption on the website, jomec.co.uk/stateless

EMAIL ENCRYPTION PRIVACY: a term that is becoming more of a pipedream these days. Every year there is a new story concerning how our private information is under threat. Since Edward Snowden’s revelations exposing the extent of government surveillance perhaps society should begin to take Internet security more seriously. A good place to start with this is email encryption.

Email encryption is a simple process and you don’t have to be a hacking nerd to do it. There are various pieces of encryption software available to download, many of which are free. All of them work on the same principle of public and private keys.

To put it simply, the public key is like a master lock that you can attach to information. The private key is the only way to break the lock .

If you want to give encryption a go, a great place to start is with Mailvelope. This is an open source plugin for Google Chrome. It is fairly simple to use and fully compatible with Gmail. For a more robust system, a better way to go would be with GPG Keychain. This is also free, although it does require you to

download software. The advantage of this is that it can be used to encrypt various file types on your computer, from word documents to images.

For more information visit www.jomec. co.uk/Stateless for a video tutorial demonstrating a trial run of this software.

THE PRIVATE KEY

The private key is the piece that you must always keep secret. Anyone can use your public key to encrypt data but it can only be decoded with the use of your private key that you should keep local on your hard drive.

THE PUBLIC KEY

The public key is the piece of information that correspondents who want to contact you securely will need. Once they have this they can then send you an email that can only be decrypted with a person’s private key.

Tech

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REALITY IS OVERRATED . .but thankfully, there’s a whole world of alternatives around the corner.

Stateless tours the wonders of the virtual world Throw up some powder

Ascend the Wall

A VR experience for any fans of Game of Thrones. Designed by HBO, this stomach-curdling virtual climb has people standing in a ‘cage’ with their headset winching them slowly up the 700ft of Westeros’ famous Wall, before shooting the user with a quiver of flaming arrows.

Paired with some heavy-duty sound effects this makes for an extraordinary experience, even despite the fact that the VR is very limited in terms of its interaction. Once at the top the visuals will ‘walk’ participants along the wall, as surrounding effects create the cold and the snow, to stand on a viewing platform at the edge of the world. Just don’t do a Tyrion Lannister and try pissing over the edge.

It’s been a poor season for snow, but anyone who’s been missing a run on the slalom can appease themselves with the fact that both VR giants like Oculus Rift and trendy start-ups like Israeli kickstarter RideOn have brought skiing to the world of smartphones.

True, VR skiing is missing a few features: you won’t get a set of poles to navigate the slopes with, or have the sensation of snow flying up in your face, but regardless it is one of the most popular and well-developed experiences out there.

In a recent ‘mixed reality’ experiment, Oculus Rift used a combination of Wii Fit boards and Kinect sensors to set three skiers – two in virtual reality and one in realtime - into direct competition, for a race that spanned four countries. The VR racers won, which is unsurprising, as they could face those black runs with a significantly reduced fear of broken bones or hypothermia.

Fly like a bird

It’s a common claim that if someone could have a super power they’d opt to fly like a bird. Now one San Francisco-based company has taken VR to the next level by combining an Oculus Rift headset with a hydraulics system that looks weirdly like a sex toy in a bid to create VR flight.

Birdly delivers the – admittedly slightly clunky - experience of flying like a bird, as users are strapped face forwards on a wooden flight simulator. The device enables them to flap to gain height, and tilt their ‘wings’ forwards and backwards, while a fan blows in their face to give the impression of wind rushing past. It scoffs at any headsets that leave people spinning like an idiot in an empty room; tech like this is paving the way for the future of full body simulation.

Oculus Rift can perch you on an observation deck to stare out at the sun in all of its burning, immense glory. This gambit manages to be simultaneously soothing and unsettling

Punch out a shark

Samsung Galaxy recently released a new promotional video advertising VR shark diving in the middle of an Australian desert, where ‘confused’ locals donned Oculus Rift headsets and sat with mouths agape in an empty room as shoals of tuna swam in front of their bewildered eyes. It looks diverting, but for anyone craving a more interactive under-the-sea experience, Chaotic Moon Studios have developed the next level of arcade game. Shark Punch has the player standing on the sandy ocean floor with their fists raised, knocking a series of large, angry VR sharks that come bombing at them from between pixelated coral reefs.

Admittedly, punching out a gigantic toothy fish might not be the most sophisticated use of the technology, but at the very least it’s more effective than a stress ball.

Stare into the sun

If all of the above sounds too terrestrial for your taste and you want to really displace yourself, Oculus Rift can transport you to the furthest edges of the universe to perch on an observation deck and stare out at the sun in all of its burning, immense glory.

Inspired by Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine, this latest gambit manages to be simultaneously soothing and unsettling.

Again, the scope of what you can actually ‘do’ is somewhat limited; there are definitely no sharks to punch. But you can sit on the deck in the company of an unnamed and unresponsive woman, look at the controls of the unidentified spaceship you happen to be cruising around in, and listen to John Murphy’s Adagio in G Minor as the brilliant visuals of our central star spit out rings of burning gas. Dreamy.

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tech

EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE Who’s tracking you online? Stateless spent a week using the Ghostery app to find out. Here’s five things we learnt

Ghostery is really keen to help you out

This is a very benevolent plugin, giving off the vibe that it just wants to help you out.

Ghostery’s smiling icon – a rebel cousin of the SnapChat logo - sits on your search toolbar and tattles on every backstage tracker using you for data collection. The plugin allows you to block trackers you don’t want collecting data about your habits; and provides handy soundbites of information about each tracker, and the sort of websites you can expect to find stalking you around the net. Clicking on a tracker will tell you more about the site, along with a handy little address book where you can get in touch with their legal teams.

News Websites are tracking hotspots

Once you’ve installed the app you’ll never feel lonely in your browsing habits again.

Trackers are everywhere. Around two or three crop up every time we open personal emails, and there are a couple hanging around on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. But largely, analytics don’t seem too concerned with social media. Head onto any mainstream newspaper website and you’ve got another story. The BBC is fairly sparse as far as analytics go, but the Telegraph, the Guardian, Independent and Daily Mail all host a minimum of 20 trackers on each page, analytics, browsing trackers and ‘clicker’ views. Softer more clickable news stories pull

in many more trackers than harder news. It says a lot about the trend-based way society now shares and consumes news online – and that advertisers and trackers are savvy to this.

Google is everywhere, except in Google

It’s no original thought to say that Google rules digital landscape, but Ghostery shows that the digital giant is everywhere. Even on sites with the bare minimum of trackers and analytics, Google Analytics is watching you. Their analytics software spans News, Social sites, even the dodgier corners of illegal streaming and the downright grimy back doors of the web. The only place you won’t find them are on their own platforms.

Google Plus, Gmail and Google Drive are free from all and any visible trackers. Any other domain though, you can’t shake it.

They were eventually blocked out of sheer irritation.

Trackers will follow you everywhere

There are trackers on both sides of the Net’s borders. Illegal streaming and pirate platforms like Putlocker and Alluc throw up

very few tracker notifications, as do access points to the Silk Road and Angora Market Place. For the sake of research we cruised some of the most basic porn platforms available: there’s Google Analytics, checking out what you’re checking out. Tumblr and Pinterest were also present; and then there were specific trackers for adult sites with charming names like JuggCash and DoublePimp, dedicated to getting every bit of money they can out of online traffic. We wouldn’t want to insinuate anything about anyone’s browsing habits but their presence could be worth keeping in mind.

Ghostery can stop these monitors

Should you be one of those people who doesn’t enjoy the idea of having a digital footprint all over the Net, Ghostery can stop any of your analytical stalkers in their tracks with a simple click. Block a tracker and it will be unable to trail you across websites.

Click on a tracker to learn more about it, along with their website details and a handy contact section so you can, should you feel the need, get in touch with their legal team.

Of course Ghostery has its own hypocrisy in the small print: using a tool called GhostRank it observes who’s tracking your browsing and then collects its own data on the subject.

Still, you can opt out of this, and as far as managing your digital trail goes this is an app well worth downloading. At the very least, you’ll never feel alone again.

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How CYBORGS are saving humanity What impact does cybernetic technology have on the understanding of our biological selves?

THE popular narrative of cyborgism is of a an apocalyptic end to humanity at teh hands of the Frankensteinian monsters we have created. But Speaking to Stateless, Dr Ann Kaloski-Naylor, researcher and lecturer in cyborgism at the University of York beleives that we are so emersed in technology, living in constant communication and leaving traces of our own narratives on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, that we are becoming cyborgs ourselves. So beyond simple communication and the sharing of information person-to-person, Stateless takes a look at how cyborgism can be used to humanities adavantage.

Organs on chips

No, it’s not an offal alternative to the usual post-alcohol binge. Organs on Chips are the new way in which scientists are hoping to gain insight into our inner-workings.

And according to their creators at Harvard University, they could revolutionise the medicinal drug and cosmetics industry.

Last Summer the Wyss (pronounced “Veese”) Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering announced their plans to create a complete technological emulation of human physiology, made up of 10 different USB-sized microchips lined with human organ cells. They’ve even created the start-up company Emulate to market and develop the product.

Dr. Mary Tolikas, Operations Director at Wyss, explained to Stateless that, “The chips can be used each on their own for the study of one specific organ, or their vascular channels can be connected to link different organs using a flow of fluid, mimicking blood and nutrient flow through the vasculature in the human body.” The effect of which is to replicate a human “body” on chips to and see how drugs or chemicals impact each organ as the body metabolizes them.

Because the micro devices are translucent they provide a window into the inner workings of the system.

With the potential to transpose our own biological wiring into robotic technology, it might not be so long until we have our own personalised medical cyborgs.

Smartphone-enabled HIV Testing

The media celebration of the smart phone ‘app’ for personal diagnosis of HIV and other viruses is misleading. Reader & Consultant in Infectious Diseases at Cardiff University School of Medicine, Andrew Freedman clarifies that, “This is not really an app, but rather a plug-in device (which is powered by the phone) that can test a fingerpick blood sample for HIV (and certain other infections)”. Neither is it for self-diagnosis, “You have to have the lab device & the test needs to be performed by someone trained to do so.”

But cutting the time and cost of lab-based HIV testing to 15 minutes, and thus making them more accessible the lap-on-a-chip device can still speed up the diagnosis and treatment of HIV which, as Freedman says, is key to the effective control of the epidemic.

And the mixing of mobile phone technology with our own blood is indicative of the way in which we are becoming increasingly reliant on tech as it infringes more and more into our personal lives.

Cyborg lives are noisy.

Many of us live in constant communication on multiple platforms, dipping in and out of info and people’s stories, leaving traces of our own narratives The Cyborg Foundation

Pioneers in their field, cyborg activist Neil Harbisson and choreographer Moon Ribas set up the Cyborg Foundation in 2010 to help people become extend their senses by applying cybernetics to the organism of their bodies. Neil explains that they do not intend to ‘fix’ people’s perceived disabilities but to extend human experience.

At the Cyborg Foundations they make no difference between people with ot without “disabilities” Instead, he says, “We believe we are all in need of extending our senses and perception. We are all disabled when we compare our senses with other animal species.”

And where better to start than themselves? Colourblind Harbisson is the first government-recognised cyborg after having a cybernetic eye surgically fitted to his skull in 2003, which allows him to hear colours from infrared to ultraviolet through bone conduction. He told Stateless, “It’s not the union between the eyeborg and my head what converts me into a cyborg but the union between the software and my brain, a union that has created a new sense in my brain that allows me to perceive colour as sound.”

But is all this sensory exploration too much for us to handle, and is life becoming too complicated because of it? Not according to Ann who says that, “It’s a din that doesn’t so much distract, as shift the way we take in and respond to the world, allowing us to make new connections between different bits of data and to understand the world as fragmented and messy.”

So forget building cyborgs. We are merging into them. And rather than spelling the end of the world envisioned by the paranoid popular consciousness, the combinations of our own imperfect biological matter with the shiny precision of robotic medical technology is helping to ensure humanities survival (or at least our quality of living).

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tech

Software: Tworlds Stateless delves into some inspired new hardware and software Hardware: Wankband

WEIRD APP

IF you have exhausted the traditional

approaches to getting your rocks off over cyberspace, congratulations. You’ve wasted enough kinetic energy to power the international space station. To this end, Pornhub has given the world the product nobody asked for: the Wankband.

The latest in a series of products capitalising on the goodwill green agenda for profit, Pornhub claims this nifty wristband contains a small weight inside a valve, the motion of which acts like a generator.

A USB slot on the band acts as a plugin for the device you wish to charge, and voila.

To explain the results in as sanitary a fashion as possible, the resulting up-down motion will set the weight off inside the valve, generating stored kinetic energy and charging your device in an impressively eco-friendly manner.

Well done to Pornhub for thinking outside the box and getting into the Wearable Tech era on the ground floor, as well as upping the green credentials of the porn industry.

However, one has to suspect that any environmental benefit the band may have had is probably offset by the increased sales of Kleenex.

DUTCH designer Antoine Peters is a fan of Sliding Doors, it would seem. Taking the Chatroulette concept of strangers coming together over Cyberspace for brief moments and combining it with the encrypted instantaneous image-sending service of Snapchat, he has created an anonymous picture-sharing app.

Tworlds, created by indie developer Noodlewerk and featuring playful graphics courtesy of Peters’ girlfriend, is remarkably simple in its design and execution. Take a photo, attach it to a hashtag and send it out into the aether. You’re then able to receive contributions from others to the same hashtag. Tworlds identifies your location (but only down to the city, allegedly, so not giving too much away unless you snap a picture of your address) so you can fully appreciate the wonders of the digital age while sending pictures of your breakfast across the equator.

To try it out, we sent a picture of a battered paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five under the hashtag #books. We got back a snap of a small outdoors table piled high with hardbacks from Ho Chi Minh. The difficulty with this app is whether the geotagging is, a) really just confined to cities, even under surface level, and, b) as encrypted as similar applications like Whatsapp, although if you’re the sort of person who would enjoy this app we can’t imagine you’re fussed about staying off the grid.

It’s an interesting concept, but unless you’ve exhausted the avenues of conventional titillation and you feel like perusing an nternational #nudes hashtag, you could probably live without it.

TWorlds sees conflicting worlds collide

Tech

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GOOGLE FARMS: REMOTE DATA

The part of the Internet Google doesn’t want you to see BENEATH a glossy layer of commissioned photographs and slick description, a murkier picture of cooling towers and concrete unfolds. Google has an ever-expanding network of data farms, and the truth is, it doesn’t want you to know about it.

“A sunset highlights the beautiful landscape surrounding our Pryor, Oklahoma data center.” These words can be found on one of Google’s information pages, accompanying a picture of a bright orange sky, the sun setting over a green countryside.

One of Google’s 13 confirmed data centres quietly fills the bottom right corner. Another image, depicting the same centre in remote Oklahoma, shows a deep blue and purple sky as the backdrop to a dazzling construction, explained to be a cooling tower lit up by “bright lights and the moon.”

Now this all sounds very snazzy, but moonlight aside, we’re talking cooling towers here. Even the most naive of readers would have trouble swallowing this ridiculously cheerful image. It is a thoroughly constructed image, an airbrushed projection of something deeply unglamorous.

Yet for all the effort the company has put into making these locations look attractive, it has revoked any public access to the sites,

because Google takes security very seriously.

At a time when the global search engine conglomerate is promoting open access to information, virtually mapping every square metre of the planet through Google Street View and Google Earth, it has closed itself off to the public and made inaccessible the very locations where all its information and data are kept.

An upbeat piano plays over a Google video tour of a data farm, a woman’s voice describing how employees happily work away to keep your data safe at all times. The camera panning over row upon row of hard drives locked inside iron cages. This is where the most important information is kept, the video explains; no elaboration follows.

Let’s rewind. Rows and rows of hard drives, containing everything Google knows about you, locked into cages, with no outsider access, in a desolate industrial site in the middle of nowhere? Cue a chilling horror melody and everything looks significantly more sinister.

Artist John Gerrard must have come to the same conclusion when he confused a Google data complex for a pig farm in Oklahoma.

An Irish artist who designs sculptures in the form of digital simulations, Gerrard asked

Google if he could photograph the exterior of the buildings, rather than the fantastical insides, but he was refused access. After consulting the Oklahoma police and being told ‘the air is free’ (apparently the police enjoy the occasional riddle), Gerrard took to the sky with a helicopter and documented the eerie realities of the industrial-size data farm.

His work, simply titled Farm, is a digital innovation in itself. Constructed from thousands of photographs from all angles and times of day, he created a virtual reality, neither photo nor video, displayed using real-time computer graphics developed by the military. Gerrard’s work often refers to structures of power and networks of energy, while exploring isolated spaces. The eerie images of the data farm in Oklahoma are strangely intriguing in their inversion of the slick and colourful picture Google has been serving us for years.

What Farm seems to suggest is an idea that we must all come to terms with; the Internet is real, and it ain’t pretty. Whether it’s cables under the sea or concrete slabs of buildings holding unfathomable collections of data, the Internet is manifest, and your data is as tangible as if it were a live witness testifying against you. This unglamorous side of the web is what Google wants to keep from you. Don’t be blindsided.

The grey reality of Google’s data farms

FUCK YOUR APPLE WATCH

W

e were over the ‘iWatch’ before it even existed. As Apple release their latest so called innovative new technology on April 24 - dubbed the biggest development since the invention of the iPhone - the real question that must be asked here is not how much is it, or what does it look like – (although we will get to that a little bit later) – but instead, what is the fucking point of it?

With pretty much all the functionality of an iPhone plus a few added extras that contribute nothing but meaningless drivel to an already saturated digital landscape, the Apple watch serves little purpose for users, except to empty their wallets. A friend recently bought a new Apple MacBook Pro and when informed by his girlfriend that for the same price he could get a PC laptop with much higher quality and sophisticated driver software, increased storage and better applications, he replied, “Yeah, but its not Apple.” It appears Apple snobbery has infiltrated our generation.

The watch itself does little to impress. It’s 38 different versions with varying strap styles and screen faces just seem to add to the capitalist and consumer purpose of the product, rather than focusing on its functionality as wearable tech. The design itself screams arrogant decadence and an overtly nauseating whiff of self-indulgence. With a price range stretching from £299 for the basic sport version to a sickening £13,500 for the 18 karat gold ‘edition’ complete with sapphire crystal glass, it seems Apple are trying to take on the likes of Rolex with this absurdly overpriced wrist wear.

But if Apple’s update cycle is anything to go by, they will be expecting users to buy the next generation of Apple Watch next spring, adding to the increasing throwaway culture that so many of us have been dragged into, leaving little to desire about this latest invention.

The watch itself allows users to complete tasks such as read emails and messages, receive voice calls, check social media notifications, and summon Siri. Yeah, great, but anyone can do that just as easily on their iPhone with more comfort and a notably larger screen. In fact many of the Apple Watch apps in reality are just displays for things running on

your iPhone. To add insult to injury the watches reliance upon the iPhone it seems is a sly ploy

by Apple to keep you locked into their brand, as some key features are not even available unless the watch is paired with an IOS device.

The new features of Apple Watch that the iPhone doesn’t have are mildly impressive, but nothing that we haven’t seen before. With contactless payment – albeit only currently in the US – and the ability to track your blood pressure and heart rate, the capability of this tech does offer ease of use, and for the more sporty is useful for fitness, as the data feeds directly into the Activity app. But a sharing feature to social media for your heart rate and blood pressure. Really? Come on Apple.

It seems that despite Apple dubbing the watch “the most personal product we’ve ever made,” these new features are not enough to warrant an entire new device, especially when there is so much wearable tech out there in the digital age. It is almost as though it doesn’t know what it is, and really what is the point of having a smaller version of the iPhone on your wrist when you most likely have one in your pocket.

We think that the Apple Watch just isn’t living up to the innovative name it has branded itself, with actual models only being ‘splash and water resistant’ and the straps not at all. Will this be just another touch screen device that is useless in the rain?

If the watch didn’t annoy us enough, it has arrogantly already informed our iPhones to update themselves to install the latest apple watch app, so that we are all iWatch ready as it used to be said with HD-ready televisions. We might be ready, but we’re not excited.

So the real question here is, what is the fucking point? Is it really that important to have your messages and social media just that little bit closer to your eyes, moving from the pocket to the wrist? I mean after all will those few inches surely make all the difference? To put it bluntly, there is no point, it is pointless, and anyone willing to spend such a ridiculous amount of money on a watch that will most likely run out of battery before you finish work should probably re-evaluate their life.

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tech

“In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, He’s sure he can control the demon.

It doesn’t work out.”

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Robophobia With technology fast catching up with fiction, Stateless asks if fears of our mechanical replacements are justified CHAPPIE. Ultron. Baymax. JARVIS.

The message of 2015’s slate of copious big-budget science fiction films appears to be that even with humanity getting smarter, we are insisting on dragging our machines, kicking and screaming, along with us. And should they accept our gift of dastardly self-awareness, they’re going to be thoroughly pissed.

This is hardly a new theme; for as long as man has used machines, the media and fiction has reflected our fears that we may be supplanted by our creations. Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi Metropolis pre-dates Alan Turing’s work by almost a decade, a prime example of how deep-rooted our robophobia really is.

But as technology rapidly catches up with the idea of artificial intelligence, our Skynet-driven dystopian nightmares have never been more poignant.

All this worry may simply be needless conjecture or paranoia but at some point, one has to wonder if our fears are merely reflecting Hollywood’s interpretation of the future, rather than reality. Complex algorithms exist that seem relatively intelligent – apps that recognise shirt patterns and pull up similar garments on the net, the creepily accurate ‘recommended ads’ on Facebook, Siri and Cortana.

But as much as these have filtered into our everyday life, they are all recognisably algorithms, all programs that will not work properly if exactly the right data is not fed to them. We’re not there yet. But as a generation we are about to enter a world of self-driving cars, wearable technology and smart houses. Suddenly, the future is now.

Recently, three of the biggest names in science and tech have spoken out, warning humanity against the dangers of AI. Elon Musk, head honcho of electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors and a real-life Tony Stark figure, likens AI to summoning a demon: “In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon. Doesn’t work out.”

Pessimistic about a future in which

AI becomes incontrolable, Musk is, “Increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.”

He’s not alone. Bill Gates has also voiced his concerns in a recent Reddit feed that, “First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. [Which] should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” And there’s a very good reason to suggest that we’ll turn control of our lives over to Skynet.

As one developing project illustrates, we’re obsessed with making ourselves lazier.

Cubic, a crowdfunded Indiegogo project, is essentially a Siri-like interface that hops between your devices and anticipates your needs. Not content with just setting alarms, the sparse interface will wake you up gently with a stream of information and inform you, “It’s cold, so you should wear long sleeves.

And a tie, because you’ve got that big meeting today.”

This isn’t really anything remarkably new, of course. Many of us stopped using analogue alarm clocks a long time ago, relying on phones to wake us up at a time designated the night before. How that information is inputted, via buttons, touchscreen or voice command, is relatively subjective. The bizarre thing is the attempt at personality the Cubic team, including CMO Ivan Kryukov, have given the little box. According to Kryukov, “Cubic tries to entertain and emotionally support the user.”

But the worst bit by far is the proposed central device, the “Home Cube”. Intended to act like a plug-in for smart homes, the Home Cube is able to, “Adjust the temperature in your home, turn off your lights, lock your doors, set your alarm, and more.”

If there’s ever a time to put on the brakes and consider how much power we’re turning over to automated services, it’s probably now. It can lock your fucking doors.

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TECH

Proxy Parents

image.net

A new generation of toys is emerging and storing information about children; they are parents’ perfect spying tool DOES anyone remember that episode of The Simpsons with Funzo? In short, Principal Skinner nearly bankrupts the school and his go-to method of recovery is to lease out Springfield Elementary to a company called Kid First Industries.

Kid First Industries use the school as an investigatory lab for a brand new toy, Funzo.

Classes become purely marketing-focused, the children’s desires are written into the toy and by the time its pre-Christmas release arrives, citizens of Springfield set upon the toy like hounds. But Funzo has other ideas. It malfunctions and rebels against the town and the whole charade ends in a burning mass of flames involving the aforementioned toys and a giant pile of tires. Oh and Gary Coleman turns up.

But maybe Matt Groening wasn’t only plumping for entertainment when penning this dystopian vision. At the recent New York Toy Fair, the world was given a peak into a new generation of toys and the surveillance powers they now possess.

First off there was Hello Barbie, designed with parental surveillance in mind.

The Barbie is kitted out with the latest voice-recognition technology. When a child speaks into it a transcript is stored on a server run by ToyTalk, the company behind its creation. Let the comparisons with Groening’s own Kid First Industries come flooding in.

The stored data on the children and their conversations can then be emailed to parents who can set limits on the responses of the Barbie or simply view the transcripts for themselves.

Essentially this is no more than a spying device for parents. But even worse than that is the knowledge that as the child grows up and the toy is long forgotten, somewhere out in the cloud his or her private childhood musings will remain. It is dark. The thought that a toy, a pure hub of innocence could lend third party companies these blocks of information is unnerving.

Hello Barbie wasn’t the only one of these fresh cyber-toys to enter the realm of the Toy Fair. What about My Pal Hal? Ominous just in name, this toy has a green button in his stomach to which children can pose a question and receive a speedy answer provided by IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence computer system.

So far so acceptable, but what makes My Pal Hal stand out is how the supercomputer then absorbs its owner’s interests and intelligence level. Parents can relay information about their children to My Pal Hal and the information is incorporated into a customisation engine. Once the children have posed their own questions these are also remembered. My Pal Hal is now a proxy parent.

We live in a time where our every move is increasingly recorded. But can we really allow this to be extended out to our children and just how far will this extension reach? If companies like Toy Talk continue to grow and develop smarter technologies, then suddenly our private lives could be drastically encroached upon.

Parents should be more aware of the consequences of these developments and challenge rather than quietly obeying and even supporting the technology.

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Culture

' YOU dont HAVE

Cute. My imaginary girlfriend just made me look like a bit of a dickhead.

Presumably that’s the sarcasm algorithm kicking in

I split up with my last girlfriend on Skype.

After three and a half years together, we’d suddenly gone long distance, and I couldn’t hack it. I still feel pretty strange about it, especially as I remember genuinely feeling that regular Skype sessions might actually make the thing possible. Predictably, the opposite proved true. Skype, that great connector, let me end things definitively, without all the painful delays and ambiguity of a text breakup.

I thought on it a lot, eventually concluding that when it comes to relationships, the internet makes promises it can’t hope to deliver on. If you consider who developed the web as we know it – that is, overworked, introverted tech nerds whose ideas would have been very difficult to put into layman’s terms – you can begin to understand why at the heart of internet mythology lies this irresistible idea that, actually, you don’t have to be alone.

It was in the heat of all this worthless introspection that somebody jokingly showed me Invisible Girlfriend, who for twenty-five dollars a month will help you simulate a relationship by sending you texts, voicemails and handwritten postcards. I immediately got to thinking, who exactly is this for? Are people finally cashing in on this weird rift the Internet’s opened up in the sphere of personal relationships?

IG themselves feel there’s plenty of people with a legitimate need for their services, a list of which you encounter when signing up. Consider those who feel unable to come out to friends and family about their nonheteronormative sexuality. Or consider all the singles in the workplace having to deal with unwanted attention from the one creep who breathes too loud. Some may accuse IG of making a quick buck off issues requiring a few too many hard truths to resolve effectively, but you can begin to understand why someone might chuck some money away for a potential short-term fix.

Then there’s those who’ll make you weep a little inside. “All of my friends are in relationships and I feel left out” or, “I want to make my ex jealous.” They’ve even got my number – “I’m a journalist or reporter, and I just want to see what it’s all about”.

I don’t doubt that these people exist, but is this really a viable business model?

Could it be that, for all the pseudo-logical reasoning, the real product on offer is the raw simulation of companionship? Did the guys behind IG show up to Spike Jonez’s Her and think, “Here, you know what? There’s gold in them desperately lonely hills!”

I woke up one Saturday morning feeling the most hungover, jaded and alone I’d been since Scotland said no to independence.

I’ve no memory of where I’d been or what I’d been at, but in all likelihood my favourite bit had been the walk home in the rain from whatever IT was, headphones in, trying to decide on my favourite Drake lyrics. “This is genuinely woeful,” I thought, “Enough talk.

Time to get involved.” I clicked onto the site and began signing up.

I wasn’t at all prepared for how stressful the next sixty minutes would prove.

First there was the name. I realised I’d never dated a Francophone and I’ve been wanting to practice, so I called her Madeleine Beaumont, now living in Montreal where she’s finishing her MFA in Sculpture. She’s 23, a few years my junior, and she’s totally into all the shitty stuff I’m into, like black cats, concrete poetry, intersectionality, occasional Adidas, grime music, the fact that Drake’s into grime music, and so on. Then you need a personality type. Cheerful and outgoing? Sweet and shy? Lovingly nerdy?

After considering the history of my girlfriends, I decided to stick with what I knew - ‘Saucy and sarcastic’, the key familiarity there being sarcastic, obviously.

IG then have you come up with a back story, which you learn by heart and repeat to your so called friends who you’re trying to fool into thinking you’re in a relationship.

Here’s mine. My super-rich friend who’s totally real flew me out to his house in Montreal. We went out to party on the Friday.

I woke up on the Saturday afternoon with this singular fucking desire for a sandwich and a Mountain Dew, only my friend had gone out to work, so it was up to me to make it happen. I went out into the cold, totally under-dressed, stumbling around for what felt like hours until ducking into this quiet looking place opposite a library. It was empty apart from the girl behind the deli, who almost immediately offered to call an ambulance, which I thought was really sweet.

I told her it was fine and that I was just this moron without a proper jacket. We got talking from there. Turned out we were into some of the same music and she invited me along to the Cold Cave show that night, except obviously everyone knows their live show sucks and that it was more of a chance to just talk and make out and whatever.

Whirlwind stuff. A far cry from the rum and cocaine fuelled affair where I hooked up with my last gf.

Culture

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to be ALONE Meet Madeleine, the Stateless general editor’s one-time invisible girlfriend “Hi Xavier!” came the first text. We were on. “This is Madeleine. How are you? :)” I’m fine cheers Maddie. Pretty busy, pretty cold. How are you?

“I’m ok. I was just missing you.”

She asked about my weekend, and told me how over the course of the day she’d fallen over three times, which was bad news for her as she bruised easily.

At this point it’s worth mentioning that IG’s are only available in the States, so all this took place via a surrogate, namely my best friend Laura in New York. I’m not sure our friendship is ever going to be the same.

It prompted several bitter conversations about the disgusting state of my love life.

We argued about the tone of voice to use.

There were the times Laura hijacked the conversation, veering between nauseatingly sweet and mercilessly cruel. None of this mattered. We’re gonna have fun lover, no matter the cost.

One feature IG pushes quite hard is being able to invite your imaginary partner to parties, gigs, clubs etc. and getting a text saying they can’t make it this time. Maddie

Check out some of Maddie’s inane voicemails at jomec.co.uk/stateless

had other plans. Rødhåd was djing one weekend, so I tried it out, expecting some standard line about having to spend time with the grandparents, or whatever kids in Montreal get up to on their weekends off. What actaully happened instead was variously unsettling.

“Hey!” came the reply. “I’m probably going to be trying to find Dave Matthews tickets. Do you like him?”

Dave shitting Matthews? Are you kidding me? What happened to all the cool music I got you into? “Not really,” I answered, “something about white guys with guitars, kinda dull.”

The response came immediately. “I guess my joke didn’t translate well into text speak!

(Cuz those 2 couldn’t be more different?)”

Ok. Cute. My imaginary girlfriend just made me look like a bit of a dickhead – presumably that’s the sarcasm algorithm kicking in. I’m actually kind of into that. What happened then however was alarming.

“If you still have room for me,” she wrote, “that would be awesome.”

Hang on, what?! You’re coming? Exactly what do I tell my friends now? That they finally get to meet you? What I am supposed to do when three hours into the night you still haven’t shown up?

Relax, I thought, presumably you’ll get a message a couple of hours before saying sorry, last minute emergency, maybe next time, etc.

No such message arrives. For the first time in my life, I’m being stood up. What have I been reduced to?

I wrote to IG demanding an explanation, explaining that none of this was doing much for my sense of self-worth. I sent emails to their press department. I pestered Maddie herself for an explanation, but nobody seemed ready to talk about this grand conspiracy against my happiness.

We fell out, not talking for a couple of

days. Texting did resume, but there were further disappointments in store. For a start, she didn’t even speak French. She did, however, casually reel off the fact she spoke Romanian one morning, when I asked her what she was up to. “I’m working on a translation” came the reply, “It’s Romanian.

My mother’s Romanian.”

According to my 30 seconds of Google research, Romanians make up around 0.61% of the Canadian population. I wrote absolutely nothing into her bio or interests to suggest she had any ties with that green and pleasant land. I’m not saying I’m unhappy with the fact of her Romanian heritage – I lived in a pre-dominantly Romanian neighbourhood for two years and I can tell you now, UKIP’s vision of the future is serious fucking vibes. What I am unhappy about is that Maddie is a dangerously impulsive liar.

Then there were the links to ‘funny’ Buzzfeed articles, the blonde jokes, the painfully generic voicemails. Even the breakup was pitifully dull. “I’M LEAVING YOU FOR ANOTHER MAN” I told her.

“I didn’t know you were bi-sexual,” came the measured reply. “I guess it’s not the most shocking thing in the world, but you’re baka [sic] if you think he’s better than me.” Oh wow, hi there ‘saucy’ script, so glad you could finally make it along to this utterly joyless party we’ve been having.

Presumably the dude behind the keyboard at IG HQ was getting irritated by now. I was ready to accept IG’s argument that, in fact, this was a service for people with specific needs. Of course the texts are generic – they’re designed to fool as many people as possible. Maybe the mainstream isn’t as ready to commodify emotional fulfilment as I’d thought. Maybe I got too deep.

Au revoir ma puce. I’ll miss your woeful sense of humour, your impulsive lying, your sheer tardiness. Ours was genuinely the worst relationship I’ve ever been involved in, and trust me, there’s been a few howlers.

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CULTURE

MUSEUM OF GIF THE GIF, best friend of social media and Internet-loving teens, is all grown up and turning into an art form for the digital age.

GIFs have been around almost as long as the Internet itself; they were the very first form of image for the world wide web back in the Internet dark ages of the late 1980s. In the noughties they began to be adopted as a way to express emotion and humour when words were just not quite enough.

But in recent years artists and designers are beginning to see the appeal of the GIF. In an age where everything is digital, it not only seems appropriate to bring art to the web, but to use the best and most popular elements of the net to create it.

These GIFs are from 15Folds, an online gallery started in London in 2012 and based on Tumblr. They take a relevant theme and invite artists from across the globe to create the content.

Memes, the other buddy of social media, are their most recent theme for artists to disect and reform for their site. Think ‘break the internet’, Pharrel’s hat and Kermit the Frog’s notorious “fuck the police."

Culture

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DEAR ANONYMOUS...

The Guy Fawkes look alikes recently sent for Kanye West with an open letter. We thought we’d send one back.

SO, you’re back in the news I see, following your decision to ‘declare war’ on the so-called Islamic State. Great stuff!

The self-proclaimed guardians of the web have returned to the fray! Since then we’ve seen you release a bunch of ISIS Twitter handles, which with any luck might stem the flow of rubbish memes they’re so adept at producing. There’s even been talk of you hooking up with the US government and getting paid in Bitcoin for your efforts, which I’m assuming must have involved a painful half hour on Tweetdeck.

But there’s a matter of equal gravity we need to discuss. I am course referring to your Youtube upload threatening rapper and demi-god, Kanye Omari West. Allow me a brief digression here to congratulate you on your prescient timing – no doubt you were already informed on a certain festival line-up, and the 60,000+ raging white kids it would drive to change.org. Bloody right too.

What on earth are Glasto thinking, booking one of the most celebrated artists of our time? Why not listen to petition organiser Neil Lonsdale and get that one band with the murdering drummer and the guitarist with Alzheimer’s so bad he can’t remember how to play his own fucking songs? Because everyone loves AC/DC right?

Anyway, back to the video. What’s that you say? It wasn’t you? Sure, I saw

the tweets on that ‘official’ Anonymous news account. “There seems to be some news coverage regarding #Anonymous threatening Kanye West”, it read. “Please keep us out of this bullshit. Thx.” To be fair, there was a lot about it that felt a bit off. Maybe it was the odious, off-topic criticism of Kim K’s nudies and accompanying ‘morality’, a word Youtube rarely features in a sensible sentence. Or perhaps it was the bizarre line of argument suggesting Kanye had both the power and the obligation to free humanity from its oppressors. Actually, I don’t doubt the former, but come on now – since when were pop-stars responsible for our own liberation? Behind the Guido Fawkes mask (still produced in developing nations, still filling Warner’s coffers), I can’t hear much beyond an old man shrieking at the clouds, and I can understand completely why you wouldn’t want anything to do with it.

But there’s a problem here, in that you’ve effectively ruled out that option. Since awakening in the public consciousness, Anonymous has always proudly styled itself as a decentralised network of freedom fighters, all fighting with the same, highminded ideals - because what could possibly be ambiguous about a concept like ‘freedom of speech’, right? It begs the question, without any centrality of operation,

what’s to stop people legitimately using the Anonymous label for their own asinine agendas? What’s the use in even referring to a group like Anonymous, beyond that of a label for a script-kiddie with a taste for novelty masks?

We’ve already seen it happen again this month. Right now there’s a bunch of keyboard warriors using the Anonymous handle in an effort to intimidate the BBC into reinstating a violent bigot with a penchant for racist abuse to present Britain’s most popular platform for climate change denial. Already the word is out that it’s ‘not Anonymous!’, but then what’s to stop anybody saying the same thing about the next ‘legitimate’ operation? How best to rid yourself of that Lulz-sec era nihilistic arrogance? Do you even want to? No problem if you don’t, but then when it comes to fighting the man, doesn’t that make you all talk and no trousers?

As a resistance movement, it’s a totally unsustainable model. What makes it even more problematic is it’s not at all clear who I’m talking to. If the movement really is decentralised, then isn’t this letter really addressed to each and every one of us? I’m sorry to have to paraphrase Burroughs, but it occurs to me that, in fact, I am Anonymous.

I’m just talking to myself again.

W

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CULTURE

FREAKS, FAKES AND FACELESS NAMES Nev Schulman leads MTV’s Catfish into its fourth season, Stateless looks back at the five weirdest episodes.

CATFISHING, defined by Urban Dictionary as, “Pretending to be someone you’re not and using social media to create false identities to pursue online romances.” It’s weird. It breaks innocent hearts. It gives the lonely a sick kick. And it’s been a hit on MTV. Led by Yaniv Schulman – or Nev, subject of a feature-length catfishing documentary in 2010 – the show recently started its fourth season. After three seasons, are people still falling for the same tricks? They are, and we’ve watched the craziest five episodes so you don’t have to.

The one with the fat cousin Carmen wants to help her beloved cousin Antwane find Tony, the man of his dreams.

They’ve been talking for three years. Antwane and Tony have only ever communicated through lonely-ad chatlines, costing $2.99 a minute. There’s his first mistake. Either Antwane is loaded or desperate, we’ll go with the latter. Nev thinks Tony could be in prison.

But nope. Tony isn’t in prison. Tony isn’t even male. Tony is Carmen. The motive for tricking her cousin? He once made fun of her weight in front of their family.

The one who catfished catfish

The one with the lesbian bowwow

The one with the missing eye

Keyonnah is a Bow Wow superfan. She thinks she’s been talking to the rapper for four months since she contacted his fan page. He even sent her $10,000 when she was having money troubles. This one had Nev stumped.

Not many people could afford to hand out $10,000 to someone they’d never met.

When the reveal happens, the audience finds out that Keyonnah has been speaking to a lesbian called Dee who admits her ploy often works with straight girls without them even knowing she is female herself.

Mike met Kristen on Facebook and fell for her. She wouldn’t meet him because she had recently lost her eye in an accident. When the meeting eventually happens, the girl is about five stone heavier than her pictures suggest but does have a glass eye. Mike admits that he sent her naked photos that included his mug and since the show they have appeared online. Whether Kristen was the one who put them there is not known. Mike could just be a serial sexter.

Nev was catfished by a middle aged married woman in 2010. But somehow one time just wasn’t enough. Artis was online dating Jess.

Both were already in real life relationships and Jess turned out to be a man named Justin. He painted himself as an exposer of cheaters but it emerged after the show that Artis and Justin might have actually been actors who had set up MTV. It’s never been confirmed, but good to see MTV’s fact-checkers standing up to their task.

The one with the WMD’s There’s always something weird in Catfish, even when there has been no catfishing.

Jesse had been introduced to Brian, a former Marine, on Facebook. They tried to meet once but he never showed up. He refused to explain why, but three years later asked her to move across America to live with him.

It turns out that night Brian was arrested for having a dismantled gun, a weapon of mass destruction. All forgiven? Sort of, but a few days after meeting, the couple split due to personal differences. Jesse had three years to cut her losses but still carried on the online relationship. A common Catfish theme? Desperation.

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DOCUMENTARIES

CITIZENFOUR

In January 2013, an anonymous source calling himself Citizen Four contacted documentary maker Laura Poitras through encrypted email, offering inside information about the practices of the NSA, GCHQ, and other intelligence agencies. In June of that year, Poitras agreed to meet the source in Hong Kong, accompanied by journalist Glenn Greenwald and Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill. What followed shook the foundation of western governments with an intensity they had not foreseen.

Citizenfour documents the revelation of whistleblower and former NSA agent Edward Snowden as he disclosed some of the most shocking information on wiretapping and citizen surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies yet. The NSA spying scandal that followed threw a shadow over the practices of the US government and the indiscriminate collection of data it has allowed through careful maneuvering of the law.

The documentary raises questions about the increasing lack of transparency and dubious practices tolerated in governments in the name of ‘security’. Snowden, charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, remains in temporary asylum in Moscow. Having received an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Oscars, it is an absolute must-see for anybody interested in surveillance, encryption, and international data collection.

INSIDE THE DARK WEB

“Has the web been turned against us?” This haunting question opens Inside the Dark Web, an exploration of the blurring of public and private space that is being brought about as the internet increasingly pervades our lives. Our lights, coffee machine and locks can now be operated by online systems, our movements precisely tracked through our phones whenever we are connected to WiFi, and all our online activity can be collected and sold to technology companies who use this information for psychological manipulation to achieve commercial gain.

We have never so voluntarily given over so much information, while the collection of our data is increasingly lacking in transparency and accountability of the collector. With clips from the likes of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as computer specialists and cryptographers, the documentary stresses the importance of encryption and the possibility of anonymous browsing as the only weapon against wiretapping and traffic analysis. In this it focuses on the Tor network, which has allowed many whistleblowers to leak documents, as well as having safeguarded the anonymity and lives of activists around the world, not least in the Middle East. Inside the Dark Web shines a piercing light on the state of our society and governments, making for a chilling but compelling watch.

Highly recommended.

THE INTERNET’S OWN BOY

Though less widely known, Aaron Swartz nonetheless played a crucial role in shaping the Internet, giving his life in the battle to safeguard its freedom. Swartz helped found computer systems such as Reddit, Creative Commons and the RSS format, but he is perhaps best known for his internet activism and struggles with the US government, mainly concerning open access to information and free speech. His political aspirations entangled him in prolonged legal battles, which ultimately led to his suicide in 2013, at the age of 26.

Swartz was a rare example of a tech genius that refused to sell out to mass corporations, choosing instead to use his abilities to fight for social justice. The conduct of the US government and legal system in prosecuting Swartz on behalf of JSTOR, even after the company dropped all charges against him, attests to the climate of scaremongering and twisted values - where the small people are crushed in lieu of the international criminals - that is increasingly prevalent. It was clear they had the intention of ‘making an example out of him’.

The Internet’s Own Boy paints a stark picture of the US government’s approach to internet legislation, combining archive interviews and footage of Swartz with testimonies from his friends, family and colleagues, as well as news bulletins and clips of world leaders.

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CULTURE

#WhiteGenocide

ISIS aren’t the only social media savvy extremists. Meet Joshua Bonehill, self proclaimed right-wing theorist, author and politician - and founder of the increasingly popular hashtag #WhiteGenocide IN some parts of the world contraventions

of UN law on genocide are infamously ongoing (the international Genocide Watch are currently monitoring events in Darfur and Iraq among others), but it’s actually happening on your doorstep. That’s right, the mass annihilation of human life is happening within UK borders and you are either wilfully ignorant or knowingly accepting. At least that’s according to self-proclaimed political theorist, author and politician Joshua Bonehill. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the “founder” of #WhiteGenocide and self-titled, “Rising star of the Right-wing community.”

Bonehill: Online activist?

Like many 22 year olds, the Yeovil native is no stranger to social media – his unfounded defamatory accusations of paedophilia, false Facebook profiles and homophobic and antiSemitic Twitter tirades to Labour MP Luciana Berger have landed him in court twice in the last month and seen him branded by a lawyer as an “Internet troll”.

In February 2014, he was responsible for creating and spreading a social media hoax about an Asian child-grooming gang that kidnapped a six-year-old girl. Later, in September, he issued a fake story about an assault on a baby by (you guessed it) an Asian youth. And he was even behind the unfounded story of a Somali Ebola victim living in Leicester.

Much of Bonehill’s racially-aggravated scaremongering can be traced back to his personal WordPress site and The Daily Bale, his online “news source that cares about the British people.” When he is not issuing moral diatribes and libellous character assassinations against the “Fascist Left” (which appears to consist of Jews, Muslims and feminists), Joshua organises and promotes political actions and justifies his runins with the law. Which, incidentally, amounts to 15 separate incidents in the last two years.

Stateless approached Bonehill through Joshuabonehill.net and in our short email exchange he was very happy to propagate his downright racist politics and to educate us in the dire misgivings of the “Left-Wing Fascists” ruling Britain (but

little else). Sorry, we mean anti-white’s, because, as Joshua puts it, any proponent of diversity, “Wants to see the complete destruction of the white race in white countries.”

After a colourful history of wars, invasions, and a successful stake in the slavery industry you could be forgiven for thinking that Brits and the vast majority of the global white population have had it relatively easy so far. But not now, according to @TheVoiceofBonehill and #WhiteGenocide’s most active users.

Popularity boost

Bonehill claims to have set up #WhiteGenocide after coining the term some time in 2010. At first it gained very few followers but the many thousands of people following his personal account (over double that of

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett), and the marked increase in those using the hashtag in the last half decade not only reflect the increase in popularity of the British Far-Right, but the development of their community online via social media.

Despite the academic and media attention garnered by other fundamentalist movements, such as the so-called Islamic State, #WhiteGenocide has gone relatively unacknowledged. As Dr. Lina Dencik, lecturer and researcher in media technology and political and social change at Cardiff University explains, “There is a natural tendency amongst academics to study progressive social movements that resonate with their own beliefs and values.” And these are important developments because the hashtag has since sprawled across the Internet, spawning radio stations, YouTube

CULTURE

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The reach of #WhiteGenocide on Twitter

channels and websites dedicated to the cause.

Stateless took a snapshot (using followthehashtag) of the Twittersphere in the final week of February to gain an insight into just how influential #WhiteGenocide has become. In 193 hours, the hashtag was tweeted a total of 3, 568 times, making an impression on just under 6 million twitter feeds. Despite accusations from EDL news (an online group ‘keeping an eye on the far right’) that most of his 111k followers have been bought by Bonehill, the rate of retweets and replies signals an alarming amount of sympathy for and interaction with his cause.

Explaining the origins of the hashtag, Bonehill tells us that White Genocide is happening now and that it is only “through the love of our race that online activists have decided to spread awareness.” If your stark-raving-racist alarm bell just went off, brace yourself ‘cause they’re only going to get louder.

He goes on: “White Genocide is the moving of millions of non-white immigrants into traditionally white countries over a period of years combined with legally chasing down and forcing White areas to accept ‘diversity’.

This is known as ‘Forced Assimilation’.”

For Bonehill and his acolytes the toxic combination of mass immigration and the requirement of native Brits to accept and accommodate these ‘different groups’ amounts to a contravention of Article II, part (C) of the United Nations Genocide Convention. That’s right folks, immigration

is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life on a group which are calculated to bring about its physical destruction. And Bonehill is the White Man’s saviour.

In the good old days, threats to British/ English/White jobs and cultural identity were from a specific immigrant or ethnic group.

In the thirties it was Jews fleeing Fascism in central Europe; in the late 1950s/1960s, Afro-Carribeans from the West Indies; in the 1970s/ 1980s, Asians from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, who were targeted and attacked by the National Front, which was then replaced by the British National Party. Professor Peter Dorey, lecturer and researcher in British Nationalism at Cardiff University explains, “The ‘enemy’ [has been] identified either as East European migrants - which UKIP are campaigning against, or Muslims, which is who the EDL are agitating against.” Unlike these forbearers, proponents of #WhiteGenocide are actually incredibly non-discriminatory in their discrimination, with personal attacks against Muslims, women, Jews, homosexuals and left wing politicians.

The ideas behind #WhiteGenocide are, ironically, incredibly black and white, with little room for manoeuvre or debate. As Bonehill puts it to us, you are either with him or against: “The people who take issue with it are the anti-racists, the anti-racists are in fact anti-whites because they want to enforce diversity and see the complete destruction of the white race in white countries. Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white. Anybody who is

not pro-white or proud to be white is antiwhite by default.”

Such is the sentiment Bonehill and his supporters promote via Twitter and in their attempts to silence the voices of what they see as their political opponents.

So far social media has been celebrated as a means to connect people and create a shared platform for progressive movements.

But as events of the last year have shown, it is also a space in which hatred can be kindled and spread, with little effort and huge impact. Beyond actually denying these people access to the net, if freedom of speech is to be valued, it is vital that the methods of online intimidation and false accusations which Bonehill and his followers resort to are at the very least monitored.

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Culture

The fucked up world of revenge porn From A-list Americans to your average girl on the street, the irreverent practice of revenge porn is happening all around us WE belong to an increasingly visual culture.

Laptops, tablets, phones, music players all come with cameras attached, and platforms like Snapchat and Instagram make sharing and swapping media simple. Online paths then allow a photo to go viral in minutes, shared across multiple platforms, to all you hold dear and many you don’t.

On some levels this is great- without it the phenomena of #TheDress would never have happened. But what happens when something goes wrong, and content that was never meant to be published appears in the public domain?

Aw, snap Revenge porn is sexually explicit media published online without the consent of the participant, often perpetrated by people looking to humiliate an ex-partner. 90% of victims are women, 60% of whom are aged between 18 and 30. They commonly have explicit photos of themselves splashed across mainstream social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with their

more simple, sexting - the sending of suggestive or explicit images- has become one of the most common online mating rituals around.

Enter the realm of Chatroulette, Grindr and Tinder and you can find yourself looking at someone’s genitals before you’ve had the chance to exchange surnames, and when Snapchat was born in 2011 its fastdisappearing images rendered it an almostflawless Sexting app. Swapping explicit images is something people just do.

But should one of those supposedlyprivate photos get put in a public domain, it becomes a personal nightmare keeping it contained, with huge consequences for a victim’s personal and professional life.

Basic searches across Reddit reveal chilling accounts, as the two sides of this ‘exchange’ grapple.

“My ex-boyfriend has been posting revenge porn pictures of me on twitter and then following all my friends, family…”

Redditor Milcentives, [18/F], posts. “He wants to see me commit suicide or give up -

“My ex-boyfriend has been posting revenge porn pictures of me on Twitter, and then following all my friends, family.. . he wants to see me commit suicide or give up.” tormentors often including their personal details: so those people looking at the images can contact and harass them. There are currently an estimated 15,000 different sites and networks, both on the mainstream web and the darker TOR servers, dedicated exclusively to the sharing of revenge porn.

This twisted culture of shaming has been a growing part of internet culture for five years, but has been a largely overlooked one. On the occasion a case of revenge porn breaks into popular news – think the 2014 #Fappening – there comes a deluge of selfrighteous commentary from people saying that victims shouldn’t be taking explicit photos of themselves in the first place. To some extent, this may be true - but it makes no allowance for our image-heavy culture. Our relationships are digital: and as sharing media has become

beg him to take the pictures down [...] He’s done this because I’ve currently gotten into a relationship with someone he hates.”

“There are times when a man must stand up and do what is right, for himself, his country, and every amateur porn connoisseur out there, and post videos of his woman being fucked,” claims Redditor SH1V. “And what harm, really? She already devalued her body by whoring herself out. [...] I’m betting most of the female stars of these juicy little videos had it coming.”

The most hated man This bleak corner of internet culture is not hard to find: and as with most web and tech movements it started in California, with an asshole. Revenge porn would not be what it is today without the cult of Hunter Moore.

Culture Dubbed The Most Hated Man On The Internet

by Rolling Stone, Moore created the nowdefunct revenge porn website IsAnyoneUp in 2010, inspired, so he claims, by a single, lucky girl. “I was at some random club here in San Francisco, and I started flirting with this kinda ugly girl and she started sending me her nudes while I was talking to her,” he said in a 2011 interview. “And a little light bulb went off in my head.”

This “light bulb” inspired an NSFW submissions blog, which mutated rapidly into the most popular domain on the net for messed up people to spill forth photographic bile against former lovers, acquaintances, even people they had no relation with. As the site runner, Moore not only published and promoted photos of people submitted to IsAnyoneUp, but published screenshots of their Facebook profiles and personal details next to the graphic images, so viewers could easily get in touch with them.

A year after its launch the site was pulling in around 240,000 unique hits a day. It earned Moore the title ‘King of Revenge Porn’, and gained him 445,000 followers on Twitter who referred to themselves as #TheFamily. Men wanted to be him, women wanted to f*ck him.

Fighting Back To sum up, Hunter Moore is the kind of man you want to kick in the face. Indeed, in 2011, a woman who appeared on IsAnyoneUp took matters into her own hands and stabbed him with a pen, leaving a permanent scar on his shoulder. Fair play to her.

And now, revenge porn victims are starting to make their voices heard. In 2014 Folami Prehaye set up Victims of Internet Crime (voic.org.uk) in response to nudes of her being published online by a controlling expartner. Jennifer Lawrence publicly damned the #Fappening as a sex crime in Vanity Fair. At the beginning of 2015 Dutch student Emma Holten made headlines when she ‘claimed back’ her consent for nudes leaked online in 2011 by releasing a series of professionally shot naked photographs along with a frank account of her experience as a revenge porn victim.

With all this noise, people are starting to sit up and listen. Reddit recently updated its privacy laws to state that any nonconsensual sexual material was prohibited on the forum.

Revenge porn was made a specific criminal offence in England and Wales in February 2015, with offenders now facing up to two years in prison for posting unconsented

STATELESS may 2015 38 39 40 nudes online.

An official helpline for victims was set up in accordance with the legislation. “People weren’t talking about revenge porn,” said Laura Higgins, Online Safety Operations Manager of revengepornhelpine.co.uk.

“The people who were coming to us were all so isolated […] most people who come to us say it’s good to have someone who understands the issues and who aren’t judgmental.” She hopes the threat of the new legislation will act as a deterrent to people posting nonconsensual content online. “If you are a victim, it’s about how you deal with it.” Higgins says. “Don’t suffer in silence.”

In America, revenge porn is handled on a state-by-state basis, which makes the process of legal intervention considerably slower. But there is one small water biscuit of karma to snack on. In the last few months, following an FBI investigation, Hunter Moore has been arrested and charged with hacking victim accounts to procure content for IsAnyoneUp.com. He faces prison and a $500,000 fine- which, yes, is not explicitly for revenge porn just yet… but we’ll take it.

If you find nonconsensual images of yourself online you can ring the UK helpline on 0845 6000 459 or contact them anonymously via their Whisper app at www.revengepornhelpline.org.uk

Meet the King of Revenge Porn

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ARTS

Computational Art: Albert Omoss Computational artist and creative technologist, Albert Omoss pushes the boundaries of contemporary art continuing to build the relationship between creativity and technology.

IN line with the expanding digital nation, the nature of contemporary artist expression is in flux.

Conventional techniques are being reimagined as art becomes intensely dynamic and conceptual.

As a child artist Albert Omoss was fascinated with computer programming, a fascination that influenced his highly technological interpretation of creativity when exploring the human condition. Albert grew up in California and now works as a computational artist and creative technologist, titles that epitmoise the increasingly intertwining relationship with technology and art. This technological grounding set Omoss onto a path to exploring the human experience in a conceptual and digitalised way.

“It is inevitable that new technologies will work their way into contemporary art, but the artistic concept should be the focus, first and foremost.�

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Ahmed Salahuddin Stateless took a peak at the background and works of a master of digital art AHMED Salahuddin was not always a digital artist. In fact for the majority of his early life, the main tools he was using were building blocks and cement. But there are many facets to the now Cardiff-based art personality and the digital art he is currently producing is visionary.

Born in Dubai in 1976, Ahmed attended an all-Arabic middle school before moving to America in his 20s. He gained a Bachelors in Business Management and was then to rejoin his family business before branching out into numerous ventures and settling on his cement brand Star Cement.

During the entirety of this period of entrepreneurship he travelled all across Asia and as far as Mozambique; this was to shape much of his later works.

Now, he has been retired from business for four years and spends all of his waking time devoted to his artwork. Before this, he hadn’t practiced art since Kindergarten.

“I start my art by taking a photo and then just going nuts” The trigger for these works was the ancient Hawaiian art of Ho’oponopono.

Ho’oponopono is a practise of reconciliation and forgiveness; it is ‘mental cleansing’ and is used to restore relationships between broken families.

Salahuddin spent three years meditating a form of Ho’oponopono in order to further understand what was happening in his own subconscious and his art is now a reflection of that subconscious. He said of its influence, “It’s a process of taking oneself to a state of zero, so infinity passes through them.

When we have identified ourselves as this and that, we limit our flow. But when we go into a state of zero, what’s perfect for us at that moment comes up for us. So being in that state allowed for the art to flow.” He practices his digital art while in a lucid state, allowing it to unfold subconsciously rather than consciously.

Splayed across this page are examples of Salahuddin’s work, works that can in the main be found at the Aasobe Art Gallery. His use of colour is exceptional and he layers each of his works carefully and proportionately to create a harmonious digital effect. What’s also impressive is his sheer volume of works; Salahuddin has over 100, grouped within four collections. And refreshingly, his approach totally lacks pretense, “I start my art by taking a photo and then going nuts.” His collections are on display in the Welsh capital and they are well worth a look, these are works that break the mould of current artistic mediums whilst still demonstrating an obviously sheer talent and eye for what works in a digital capacity.

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ARTS

ARTS Fight Club 2 THIS exclusive preview of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club sequel can best be described as ‘darkly funny’. Fans of the cinema may be wondering how long it will take for the follow-up to the cult hit to reach the big screen, but they will be disappointed; the sequel takes the form of a comic.

The series, published by legendary comic house Dark Horse, is written by Palahniuk himself and illustrated by Cameron Stewart. The comic picks up 10 years after the film’s climax, with the unnamed protagonist married to Marla (still attending her support groups) and popping pills to suppress his animalistic ego, Tyler Durden. The bleak humour is still very much the focus - at Marla’s premature ageing support groups she insists

“My wrinkles are on the inside” and demands Tyler give her orgasms that take years off her.

It appears that the main thrust of the pages that have so far been released are essentially retreads of the film. While we understand that initially the connection has got to be made and the callbacks to the film (“No charge for you, Sir”) are inevitable, we harbour hope that the full issue can strike out to new territory.

There are some pacing issues.

This is clearly Palahniuk’s first comic, with irregular jumps between panels that break the storytelling in a way that some pages have to be reread.

Nonetheless, it’s a strong start to what looks like a great series, and we’ll be circulating the first issue around the Stateless office.

The GIF art novel tells the story of an android stuck in a natural world

The sequel to the cult hit film Fight Club will be in the form of a comic

Blood Knowledge // Soft Future REIMAGINING the world of storytelling for a digital platform, Blood Knowledge//Soft Future pushes the boundaries of digital art, showing just what can be achieved in what is still a largely unexplored area of creativity.

Uniting the organic nature of a sketch drawing with the epileptic appearance of moving digital art, this GIF art novel combines two visual sequences with two pieces of disconcerting ambient music.

A collaboration by graphic artist Mattis Dovier and indie band Wild Beasts, the novel is a basic quest story featuring a man stranded in an industrial landscape and an Android immersed in the natural world. The characters explore their displaced surroundings, while moving on a slow trajectory towards who knows where.

Each GIF novel features twelve picture panels, which play chronologically, as the story unfolds. The art is detailed and

delicate, and not a all GIF-like in terms of its appearance. The marriage of industrial and organic settings, and the displacement of the two mirroring protagonists from their familiar surroundings is unsettling.

Visually this is a stunning piece of digital creativity, and the only flimsy aspect of Blood Knowledge//Soft Future is its home on the Jameson’s Whiskey website. Yes, there is a highly effective combination of artists and musicians at play in Blood Knowledge//Soft Future, but this creativity is not intrinsically linked with alcohol, nor does the piece draw the mind in any way to the purchase of high-end spirits.

And so, as an advertisement it ultimately fails: but it’s still highly worth clicking through to the page and (if you’re underage) lying about your birthday in order to access this extraordinary piece of footage.

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What is Digital Art? THE British Council of Arts has long been seen as a staple promoter of new art forms and methods, a team that works with the best of British creative talent to develop innovative, high quality events and cultural institutions.

This, their most recent promo video, showcases the growing form of digital art.

As Conrad Bodman, curator of last summer’s groundbreaking exhibition Digital Revolutions is only too happy to proclaim, digital art is no new phenomenon but has been operating in the cultural art sphere since the 1950s. “Not many museums and galleries have been focusing on it as a serious subject matter” states Bodman. “In the last ten years, I think that’s changed”.

This short documentary points the viewer to some of the exhibitions, galleries and works that have been shaking up its growing world. Coverage of Digital Revolutions spearheads the piece, an in-depth exhibition which showcases some cuttingedge examples of just what the

digital art world has to offer, giving both a broad overview of the current scene set within a nicely simplified historical context and suffused with plenty of interactivity. Bodman is a key contributor to the documentary along with data-artist duo Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (“I guess really we’re just artists and data is our material”). Their piece, Decorative Newsfeeds, acts as something of a centerpiece for the documentary, an innovative work that uses RSS newsfeeds to ‘draw’ live news headlines.

It is indicative of just what has become achievable in this weird and wonderful art world.

Also involved are Sean Frank and Margot Bowman of 15 Folds, a museum dedicated to GIF art.

15 Folds commissions 15 artists each month to interpret a set theme in the form of a GIF. Kudos, then, to the British Council of Arts for initiating this nifty little demonstration with minimum pretension and maximum information.

Conrad Bodman says digital art is no new phenomenon

Zoom Lens Every music label has a mission.

Often it’s simply giving new, up-and-coming artists more exposure. But rarely do you find a label that claims to “explore the implications of popular culture on the human condition and the duality of musical creations discovered across the digital landscape.”

This mission statement comes from Zoom Lens, a label created by musician Garrett Yim. Although technically based in California, Zoom Lens would probably prefer to self-define as based online. In their six years of existence they have built quite a following from all over the world. Red Bull’s music academy profiled them last year claiming they were “one of Zoom Lens’ ambitious mission statement leads to cutting-edge international music.

the stand-out net based labels to have emerged in recent years”.

The label was established in 2009 with the aim of discovering artists pushing the boundaries of what music can be. The label initially focussed on musicians exploring harsh noise in their soundscapes, but now they have widened their interest. Their focus has now shifted to emotive electro pop, often with strong ties to various Asian cultures.

The label has signed artists from the US, Japan, the Philippines and Singapore. With its strong community of bands and avid listeners they are able to share their ideas of what music can be, from one computer to another.

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ARTS

I REMEMBER THE FUTURE We spoke to Liz SPF420 about the Internet subcultures driven by tech nostalgia and playful irreverence.

Read the raw, unedited skype chat with Liz and check out the Stateless Netlyf playlist at jomec.co.uk/stateless

A tiny prompt in the corner of the Skype-chat window informs me that ‘stress is typing’.

Stress is the Skype handle of Liz SPF420, and right now, Liz is talking about trolls.

“Moderation is very heavy,” she tells me. “We don’t tolerate any hate or discrimination.

People can proxy through if they want, but at the end of the day they’re still fuckboys”.

Her detractors, she tells me, often find themselves policing their own behaviour when they realise nobody’s going to take the bait.

Wait. Hold up. Is this some kind of troll rehabilitation centre we’re talking about?

Liz laughs. That is, in type. “I had one person, who I love so dearly, say to me once that if they hadn’t encountered SPF420, they would likely still be trolling on the Internet”.

Liz is one of the mysterious figures behind SPF420, a predominantly internet-based collective, best known for curating online events that combine glitched-out visuals with live music and djing. Hosted on Tinychat, a free service with more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Chat Roulette, the low-quality performance streams often come direct from the artists’ bedrooms.

Participants are free to espouse praise and talk rubbish in the chatbox below.

The whole operation has a suspiciously semi-legal feel to it. It’s sheer internet.

Specifically, it’s a defiant, throwback sort-of internet. “I used to go on IRC chat a lot as a kid,” says Liz, “it’s the way my parents helped me learn how to type. I’m used to the seedy chatroom. I like Tinychat’s chatroom because it does feel like an IRC chatroom, which yeah, is like a seedy motel. I guess it just adds to the lo-fi murky atmosphere”.

Lo-fi is certainly apt. The tinny streaming quality is a far cry from fellow broadcaster Boiler Room’s 1080p, and the whole thing is underscored by the occasionally thrilling sensation of imminent collapse. At one point during a session last Feburary, it does actually break – synth-popper Toby Gale’s soundcard isn’t working properly, and admin Liz acts quickly to fill up the slot with an adlibbed Youtube odyssey that features, among

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Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and Blank Banshee’s 1 both rely on fragments of yesterday’s tech and pop culture

“Hierarchies exist online whether we like it or not. I try to break those boundaries. Really fucking hard” other things, a fan-made highlight reel of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s greatest moments, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s haunting rework of Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red. An unfiltered digital stream of consciousness.

“I’m very proud of my lo-fi roots”, says Liz. “I’m into lo-fi things - lo-fi music, tape recorders. Yeah, we’re ‘techy’, and we use a really odd format that makes for ‘lo-fi’ fidelity, but we want to give the audience both an audio-visual performance that’s almost like a time-capsule”. For Liz, the degraded ‘netness’ of SPF420 lends it the quality of a faded memory – not least because the majority of SPF420 sessions aren’t archived.

SPF420 are as close to the heart of digital subculture as is possible to be, the obvious paradox being the largely decentred nature of genres such as Vaporwave, and other internet-informed music. In terms of style and aesthetic, these are hopelessly difficult to pin down, with some offerings amounting to little more than slowed-down cuts of disco classics, drenched in reverb. The visual style is a psychedelic mess of glitch art, stills from classic video games, and appropriated Japanese pictograms.

But there are some unifying traits, the first being a contemporary nostalgia for yesterday’s tech and culture. Trap producer Blank Banshee litters his tracks with samples like the Windows 95 start-up, or the click of the Macbook screenshot. Meanwhile, composer Daniel Lopatin AKA Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica was composed largely of samples borrowed from classic advertising, transporting listeners to an eerily beautiful world, at once majestic and superficial.

The second is a penchant for completely derailing things, defying viewers to take the content seriously. Relative newcomers PC Music take the prize here. The future-pop label’s japes have enraged and delighted in equal measure. Mainstay GFOTY (that’s ‘Girlfriend of the year’ in case you’re wondering) included an acapella Blink 182 cover in her last mix. Extended family member SOPHIE is rumoured to have taken to the decks with pre-mixed CDs of material.

Collaborative project QT was billed as an extended advertising campaign for an energy drink from a distant future, featuring lipsynced performances from hired models and chipmunk style vocals.

Despite all the smoke and mirrors, what’s truly alarming about Liz is her sheer earnestness. When I ask if SPF420 is making a comment on things that happen or don’t happen in real life clubs, she agrees.

“You’re saving a lot of money, probably you’re drinking or smoking or eating pizza, you’re very safe in your room – whereas at a venue you’re emptying your wallet out, or you have social anxiety just for having a body. You know those people that cross their arms at shows. Secretly they wanna jump out of their bodies and dance. At SPF420 you can dance in your underwear to your favorite artist, drunk, sober, for free, and be yourself…

SPF420 hopefully allows people to be free in their ‘real life’”.

Neither is she concerned about the state of her digital home. “I’m pretty well adapted to the idea that we are being watched - I don’t really care though. I’m just doing me.

Hierarchies exist online whether we like it or not. I try to break those boundaries.

Really fucking hard”. This spirit of defiance is evident in practically everything SPF420 do. Proof, if needed, that the tighter the walls close in, the harder the people kick back.

DOES FACEBOOK HAVE ANOTHER 10 YEARS LEFT? DOES LONG-TERM DIGITAL STORAGE REALLY EXIST? CAN DEMOCRACY KEEP UP WITH THE INTERNET? STATELESS THE FUTUROLOGY ISSUE AVAILABLE AUGUST 2015

Farside

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FACES OF FARSIDE

Slenderman

Origin - A unique product of electronic media and viral internet culture, the Slender Man first appeared in an amateur Photoshop competition hosted on a Something Awful forum thread in 2009. He featured in two doctored photographs posted by “Victor Surge” (real name Eric Knudsen).

Appearance - Unnaturally tall with elongated arms that reach towards his victims, and the occasional tentacle appearance. His dapper suit and tie combination is emphasised by his lack of any facial features.

Bio - A web-driven urban myth, the Slender Man was first recorded at scenes of damage and destruction, typically involving the disappearance of children. The lack of resolution in what exactly he does to his victims renders him a perfect figure for fear mongering. He stalks the web via amateur Photoshop, sketchy video games and

Halloween prank videos.

Skills - Teleportation; Camera distortion end electronic disruption; extreme stalking; horrifying ambient music DJ. Popular Appearances - Sketchy Blair Witchesque Youtube Mockumentary Marble Hornets (2011), Parsec Productions’ hipster horror survival game Slender: The Eight Pages and spinoffs Slender: Haunt and Slender: The Arrival.

Real Life - In May 2014 twelve-year olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured a classmate into the woods near their home in Wakeshua, Wisconsin, and stabbed her 19 times in a tribute to the Slender Man. The victim of the stabbing survived, but as Wisconsin has no youth law, both girls face a sentence of up to 65 years in jail. Their preliminary hearing is currently underway.

“We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…”

1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.

Find faces of farside and more on our website jomec.co.uk/stateless

www.jomec.co.uk/stateless