lolcat

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Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

ICanHasCheezburger.com has more than three thousand lolcat images—“i have bad day,” “im steelin som ur foodz k thx bai,” “BANDIT CAT JUST ATED UR BURRITOZ”—each of which garners dozens or hundreds of comments, also written in lolspeak. We are far from Ushahidi now. Let’s nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act. (There are other candidates, of course, but lolcats will do as a general case.) Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average lolcat image has the social value of a whoopee cushion and the cultural life span of a mayfly. Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second, related message: You can play this game too. Precisely because lolcats are so transparently created, anyone can add a dopey caption to an image of a cute cat (or dog, or hamster, or walrus—Cheezburger is an equal-opportunity time waster) and then share that creation with the world.

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For every remarkable project like Ushahidi or Wikipedia, there are countless pieces of throwaway work, created with little effort, and targeting no positive effect greater than crude humor. The canonical example at present is the lolcat, a cute picture of a cat that is made even cuter by the addition of a cute caption, the ideal effect of “cat plus caption” being to make the viewer laugh out loud (thus putting the lol in lolcat). The largest collection of such images is a website called ICanHasCheezburger.com, named after its inaugural image: a gray cat, mouth open, staring maniacally, bearing the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (Lolcats are notoriously poor spellers.) ICanHasCheezburger.com has more than three thousand lolcat images—“i have bad day,” “im steelin som ur foodz k thx bai,” “BANDIT CAT JUST ATED UR BURRITOZ”—each of which garners dozens or hundreds of comments, also written in lolspeak.

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Precisely because lolcats are so transparently created, anyone can add a dopey caption to an image of a cute cat (or dog, or hamster, or walrus—Cheezburger is an equal-opportunity time waster) and then share that creation with the world. Lolcat images, dumb as they are, have internally consistent rules, everything from “Captions should be spelled phonetically” to “The lettering should use a sans-serif font.” Even at the stipulated depths of stupidity, in other words, there are ways to do a lolcat wrong, which means there are ways to do it right, which means there is some metric of quality, even if limited. However little the world needs the next lolcat, the message You can play this game too is a change from what we’re used to in the media landscape.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

Instead, people loved them. A further macro came with an even more popular meme: lolcats. People started sharing pictures of blissed-out cats with overlaid text on the anonymous forum 4chan starting in 2005, in a Saturday celebration of cats known as “Caturday,” and the lolcat phenomenon eventually occasioned articles everywhere from academic journals to Time magazine. Like the earlier memes, the first lolcats had their text added manually, using graphics programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Paint. As lolcats became popular, so did a second kind of timesaving macro, which would place the text automatically on the base image—much faster than downloading it to a separate program.

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These meme generator sites promoted a consistent meme aesthetic: the all-caps, black-bordered white Impact font (a brilliant innovation in automatic caption generation because it stands out easily no matter what colors or patterns are behind it). Making lolcat generation easier became controversial. Putting text on top of an image had formerly required a certain amount of technical knowledge of photo-editing software. Now, it was easy. Too easy, according to some “insiders.” Technologist Kate Miltner documented this split among two kinds of lolcat fans in the late 2000s. Self-described MemeGeeks had liked the early kind of lolcats on 4chan but had moved on to other memes, like Advice Animals, as lolcats became more popular and easier to create. Self-described Cheezfriends, on the other hand, tended to reside on the site I Can Has Cheezburger and demonstrated their community membership through fluency in the stylized lolspeak itself, rather than technical prowess creating the memes.

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“What Is the Best Term to Categorize a Lolcat Image and Text?” English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. english.stackexchange.com/questions/69210/what-is-the-best-term-to-categorize-a-lolcat-image-and-text. Hugo. September 11, 2008. “Antedatings of ‘image macro.’” LINGUIST List. listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2013-September/128420.html, via Ben Zimmer. 2011. “Among the New Words.” American Speech 86(4). pp. 454–479. People started sharing pictures: Lev Grossman. July 16, 2007. “Lolcats Addendum: Where I Got the Story Wrong.” Techland, Time. techland.time.com/2007/07/16/lolcats_addendum_where_i_got_t/.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

If I come across someone who’s never heard of Internet memes, the first thing I usually say is, “Have you ever seen lolcats?” That’s because it’s not only the biggest thing to come out of 4chan, it’s the undisputed biggest Internet meme. Here’s the idea: A humorous photo of a cat accompanied by a caption written in a pidgin English derived from rushed IM speak. The stupidly funny broken English coupled with the inherent cuteness of the cat images made for a viral phenomenon. lolcats were dumb, catchy, and approachable enough that anyone could pick up on the humor after seeing a few. lolcats first showed up on 4chan in 2005 as a cute joke contrasting with the site’s usual stream of gross-out content, but they did not achieve cultural ubiquity until 2007, when Ben Huh bought http://www.icanhazcheezburger.com and formed the site around lolcats.

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And anyone who’s slapped a few words on a picture of their cat has already crossed that gulf. The invitation to make something and share it with other people on that scale is so radically different from what we were capable of doing in the twentieth century, that even a lolcat, one of the stupidest creative acts, is still a creative act. Clay explains that we regard lolcats as an inexplicable novelty because the network on which they happen is so new. But the drive to share funny or interesting things with each other is a deeply entrenched human (not to mention animal) trait. So people who shake their heads and say, “Why would anyone waste their time with this stuff?”

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lolcats first showed up on 4chan in 2005 as a cute joke contrasting with the site’s usual stream of gross-out content, but they did not achieve cultural ubiquity until 2007, when Ben Huh bought http://www.icanhazcheezburger.com and formed the site around lolcats. Now there are millions of lolcat images all over the web, generating millions of dollars. And it all came from /b/’s “Caturday” tradition of posting cute captioned cats each Saturday. Ah, here’s a big 4chan obsession: a camgirl thread. The words camgirl or camwhore describe a girl on the Internet who attracts the attention of men by using her beauty for fun or profit. Girls on 4chan will post photos of themselves on /b/, usually holding up a piece of paper (or sometimes drawing directly on their bodies with a Sharpie) that reads something along the lines of “APRIL 5TH, 4:47PM Sup /b/” in order to prove the authenticity of the photo.

Natural language processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper

bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, duck typing, elephant in my pajamas, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, information retrieval, language acquisition, lolcat, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, P = NP, search inside the book, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining, Turing test, W. E. B. Du Bois

Investigate this phenomenon with the help of a corpus and the findall() method for searching tokenized text described in Section 3.5. The post is at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002733.html. ◑ Study the lolcat version of the book of Genesis, accessible as nltk.corpus.gene sis.words('lolcat.txt'), and the rules for converting text into lolspeak at http:// www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=How_to_speak_lolcat. Define regular expressions to convert English words into corresponding lolspeak words. ◑ Read about the re.sub() function for string substitution using regular expressions, using help(re.sub) and by consulting the further readings for this chapter.

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The function has parameters for the text and the word length, and an extra parameter that allows the initial value of the result to be given as a parameter: >>> def find_words(text, wordlength, result=[]): ... for word in text: ... if len(word) == wordlength: ... result.append(word) ... return result >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'mat'] >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['ur', 'on'] >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'mat', 'omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'on', 'teh', 'mat'], 3) 'on', 'teh', 'mat'], 2, ['ur']) 'on', 'teh', 'mat'], 3) 'mat'] The first time we call find_words() , we get all three-letter words as expected.

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After calling the function, w is unchanged, while p is changed: >>> def set_up(word, properties): ... word = 'lolcat' ... properties.append('noun') ... properties = 5 ... >>> w = '' >>> p = [] >>> set_up(w, p) >>> w '' >>> p ['noun'] Notice that w was not changed by the function. When we called set_up(w, p), the value of w (an empty string) was assigned to a new variable word. Inside the function, the value 144 | Chapter 4: Writing Structured Programs of word was modified. However, that change did not propagate to w. This parameter passing is identical to the following sequence of assignments: >>> >>> >>> >>> '' w = '' word = w word = 'lolcat' w Let’s look at what happened with the list p.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

This led to yet more mockery, as commenters hunted down original images of the model, Filippa Hamilton, and compared her unaltered body (skinny, but within a human range) to the extraterrestrial manipulations of Ralph Lauren. The precise moment that text-picture memes went mainstream was probably with the LOLcat—a picture of a cute animal layered with intentionally illiterate text. As the joke spread across the globe, pundits soon began castigating the LOLcat as another example of the dumbing down of digital culture. But LOLcat-crafting skills can become quite powerful when applied to other areas—even as political speech. In China, visual creations have been crucial in subverting the government’s censorship regime.

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For example, when the mobile phone was expensive and in the hands of the few, it was purely a corporate mechanism; when the price dropped and everyone had one in their back pocket, it became a vehicle for sousveillance, for self-organizing bar crawls, for inventing rebuslike short forms of expression, for staying in ambient contact with the world. Technological habits that seem laughable (sending smiley-bedecked text messages; making LOLcats) turn out to also be world-changing (sending text messages to Ushahidi to manage a crisis; using captioned pictures to outwit Chinese censors). We’ll truly figure out what Watson is for only when people begin using the software to make jokes, to play games, to hassle each other. Or to seek not answers but questions: Andy Hickl, an AI inventor, once developed a contradiction engine that took any statement and found contradictory evidence.

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See attention/focus; cognition; education and learning Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 12 Lessin, Sam, 242 letter writing, 48–49 Lévy, Pierre, 172 libraries access to information in, 121–22 search, instruction in, 205–6 use, lack of knowledge of, 207 Libri deflorationum, 119 Lifebrowser, 39 lifeloggers, 29–44 benefits of logging, 31–32, 35–36 methods of, 29–30, 34, 36–39, 41, 43–44 search problem, 32–35 social issues, 41–42 Lineage (video game), 196 Linux, 171 literacies, new, 83–113 data literacy, 83–93 meaning of, 86–87 photographic literacy, 105–10 and reading versus writing, 50–51 search literacy, 204–6 3-D design literacy, 111–13 video literacy, 94–105 location. See geolocation; mapping Loftus, Elizabeth, 24–25 Logo, 190–93 Logo Microworlds, 192 LOLcat-crafting, 108–9 Looxcie, 41 Los Angeles Times wikitorial, 159 Lost (TV show), 96 Lostpedia, 187 Luff, Paul, 213 Lunsford, Andrea, 66–68 Luria, Alexandr, 40 Luther, Martin, 249 McCain, John, 88 McIntosh, Jonathan, 100 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 270, 276 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 102 McPherson, Sam, 187 Mad Libs, 191 MadV, 101 Magna Carta, 276 Maher, Ahmed, 255 Mahfouz, Asmaa, 259 MakerBot, 111–12 maker movement, 103 Malebranche, Nicolas, 119–20 Manjoo, Farhad, 261 Mann, Steve, 266–67 Many Eyes, 91–92 mapping electoral districts, tool for, 84–86 Haiti earthquake relief, 265–66 Ushahidi, development of, 62–63 Marconi, Guglielmo, 59 Marcus, Gary, 14 Maree, Daniel, 265 marginalia, 82 Mario Kart (video game), 37 Mark, Gloria, 135–36, 137 Mark, Kevin, 79 Martin, Trayvon, 264–65 mash-up videos, 100 math digital instruction, 175–78, 181–83, 191 learning difficulty related to, 189 “Mathematical Creation” (Poincaré), 131–32 Maverick, Augustus, 6 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 42, 241 Mechanical Turk, 1 media convergence, 111 medical diagnosis supercomputer, 284–85 meditation, 137–38 Meier, Patrick, 266 memex, 123, 143 memorization opponent of, 119–20 proponents of, 132–33 memory.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

How NASDAQ Will Save the World From Milk Shakes to Molotov Cocktails Why Hipsters Make Better Revolutions In Search of a Missing Handle chapter two - Texting Like It’s 1989 WWW&W Cyber Cold War Nostalgia’s Lethal Metaphors Why Photocopiers Don’t Blog Which Tweet Killed the Soviet Union? Hold On to Your Data Grenade, Comrade! When the Radio Waves Seemed Mightier Than the Tanks chapter three - Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat How Cable Undermines Democracy The Denver Clan Conquers East Berlin The Opium of the Masses: Made in GDR Watching Avatar in Havana Online Discontents and Their Content Intellectuals The Orwell-Huxley Sandwich Has Expired Mash ’Em Up! The Trinity of Authoritarianism chapter four - Censors and Sensibilities Dress Your Own Windows The Kremlin Likes Blogs and So Should You Dictators and Their Dilemmas When Censors Understand You Better Than Your Mom Does Time to Unfriend We Don’t Censor; We Outsource!

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Simply opening up the information gates would not erode modern authoritarian regimes, in part because they have learned to function in an environment marked by the abundance of information. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that, contrary to the expectations of many in the West, certain kinds of information could actually strengthen them. chapter three Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat “The Tits Show” sounds like a promising name for a weekly Internet show. Hosted by Russia.ru, Russia’s pioneering experiment in Internet television supported by Kremlin’s ideologues, the show’s format is rather simple: A horny and slightly overweight young man travels around Moscow nightclubs in search of perfect breasts.

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All potential revolutionaries seem to be in a pleasant intellectual exile somewhere in California. The masses have been transported to Hollywood by means of pirated films they download from BitTorrent, while the elites have been shuttling between Palo Alto and Long Beach by way of TED talks. Whom exactly do we expect to lead this digital revolution? The lolcats? If anything, the Internet makes it harder, not easier, to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much more pleasant and risk-free. This doesn’t mean that we in the West should stop promoting unfettered (read: uncensored) access to the Internet; rather, we need to find ways to supplant our promotion of a freer Internet with strategies that can engage people in political and social life.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

Take agreement between the subject and the verb: we say The bridge is crowded, but The bridges are crowded. It’s not a hard rule to follow. Children pretty much master it by the age of three, and errors such as I can has cheezburger and I are serious cat are so obvious that a popular Internet meme (LOLcats) facetiously attributes them to cats. But the “subject” and “verb” that have to agree are defined by branches in the tree, not words in the string: You might be thinking, What difference does it make? Doesn’t the sentence come out the same either way? The answer is that it doesn’t. If you fatten up the subject by stuffing some words at the end, as in the diagram below, so that bridge no longer comes right before the verb, then agreement—defined over the tree—is unaffected.

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The verb vulcanize means “to strengthen a material such as rubber by combining it with sulfur and then applying heat and pressure.” Many of these rules have become entrenched in a vast community of English speakers, who respect the rules without ever having to think about them. That’s why we laugh at Cookie Monster, LOLcats, and George W. Bush. A subset of these conventions are less widespread and natural, but they have become accepted by a smaller virtual community of literate speakers for use in public forums such as government, journalism, literature, business, and academia. These conventions are “prescriptive rules”—rules that prescribe how one ought to speak and write in these forums.

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In a 2013 press release President Barack Obama praised a Supreme Court decision striking down a discriminatory law with the sentence “No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like.”47 In doing so he touched one of the hottest usage buttons of the past forty years: the use of the plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves with a grammatically singular antecedent like no American. Why didn’t the president write because of what he looks like, or because of what he or she looks like? Many purists claim that singular they is a LOLcat-worthy grammatical howler which is tolerated only as a sop to the women’s movement. According to this theory, the pronoun he is a perfectly serviceable gender-neutral pronoun; as grammar students used to be taught, “The masculine embraces the feminine, even in grammar.” But feminist sensibilities could not abide even the illusory sexism of using a masculine form to represent both genders, and so they engaged in a campaign of linguistic engineering that started with a mandate to use the clumsy he or she and slipped down a slope that ended in singular they.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Since it launched in 2003, 4chan has become an immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious imageboard. Composed of over sixty-three (at the time if this writing) topic-based forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, it is both the source of many of the Internet’s most beloved cultural artifacts (such as lolcats memes), and one of its most wretched hives of scum and villainy. The “Random” forum, also called “/b/,” teems with pornography, racial slurs, and a distinctive brand of humor derived from defilement. It is where trolling once flourished. One “/b/tard” (as the forum’s denizens are called) explained to my class that “everyone should have a good sense that /b/ is an almost completely unfiltered clusterfuck of everything you could imagine, and lots of stuff you couldn’t imagine or wouldn’t want to.”

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Aesthetically, the more extreme a piece of content is, the better, for it ensures the interest of lsparticipants, and motivates replies to threads (keeping them alive). In particularly novel cases, an extreme piece of content can even circulation beyond the board—to distant lands like the message board t community, reddit, bodybuilding.com, and, eventually, mass cultural awareness. Remember, Lolcats got their start on 4chan. Trolls, in particular, focus on the collective pursuit of epic wins—just one form of content among many. (To be clear, 4chan houses many trolls, but many participants steer clear of trolling activity. Still others avoid activity altogether—they are there as spectators or lurkers.)

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On January 2, 2011, a hacker named “rubik” (not his real pseudonym), who had been working on two private channels, swooped in to announce that a Tunisian website had been defaced (all pseudonyms have been changed): rubik: http://www.pm.gov.tn/pm/index.php—defaced OT: way to go anons!!!!! OT: wayy to fucking go! rubik: Fucking A! Nice Job OT: More to come biotches :P rubik:: http://www.marchespublics.gov.tn/ also. K-rad: http://www.pm.gov.tn and http://www.marchespublics.gov.tn/ DE-FUCKING-FACED! lafdie: btw mad props on the lolcats: http://www.pm.gov.tn/pm/index.php vvom: http://www.pm.gov.tn/pm/index.php BOOYA MOTHERFUCKERS A group of hackers had been hard at work, cooperating as a team, for some time. Yet the majority of journalists couldn’t resist the opportunity to pinpoint a “mastermind” or “leader,” the architect ostensibly maneuvering everyone else.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

At first, 4chan was a place to post pictures, but it has evolved into a place where anyone can come and talk about or share anything. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people will be on 4chan.org at once. It’s an online home to millions of people and the birthing ground for many an Internet meme, including Lolcats, “probably the Internet’s top meme—the hundreds of thousands of pictures of cats that float around every corner of the Net, with cat-speak captions: ‘om nom nom goes the hungry cat.’” Other noteworthy 4chan accomplishments include lodging a swastika on Google’s list of breaking trends and spreading a “rumor that Steve Jobs had a heart attack,” causing Apple shares to plummet.43 In 2008, as 4chan.org was approaching its fifth birthday, it began to develop something of a political consciousness.

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Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), 53. 40. http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678169/afghanistans-amazing-diy-internet 41. To this trinity, Morozov adds a fourth hallmark, provided to a large extent by the technologies of radical connectivity: entertainment. In a chapter titled, “Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat” he writes, “Another Sakharov seems inconceivable in today’s Russia, and in the unlikely event he does appear, he would probably enjoy far less influence on Russian national discourse than Artemy Lebedev, Russia’s most popular blogger, who uses his blog to run weekly photo competitions to find a woman with the most beautiful breasts (the subject of breasts, one must note, is far more popular in the Russian blogosphere than that of democracy). … But efficiency and comfort—which the Internet provides—are not necessarily the best conditions for fomenting dissent among the educated classes. … If anything, the Internet makes it harder, not easier to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much more pleasant and risk-free.”

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

“Hi, I’m the future and you’ve got a choice to make.” The future announced it was already here and it presented you with two options: Option 1: The realisation of human potential that could be unleashed by adopting the behaviour of artists, inventors and entrepreneurs. Option 2: The slide into passive consumption of content, of lolcats, of meaninglessness, of being nudged and controlled by siren servers. A mere drone serving the Machine. Globalisation, connectedness, robotics, social sharing and intimidating computer power have changed the world in a decade and demonstrate how fast the future is becoming the present. The distance between the weird future and the present that we’re still adjusting to is ever shrinking, ever faster.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As Bradley Bloch explained in a recent Huffington Post article, the ease with which amateur media productions can be distributed online actually has the paradoxical effect of increasing people’s media consumption far more than it increases their media production. “Even if we count posting a LOLcat as a creative act,” observes Bloch, “there are many more people looking at LOLcats than there are creating them.” Bloch runs the numbers on one oft-viewed YouTube entertainment: “One of the most popular videos on YouTube, ‘Charlie bit my finger—again!,’ depicting a boy sticking his fingers in his little brother’s mouth, has been viewed 211 million times.

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

Thus “take off and nuke the site from orbit” has become geek shorthand for putting a decisive end to any dangerously messy problem. Overkill? Maybe. But sometimes you just have to be sure. In our personal version of the Alien universe, Newt and Ripley and the cat are all off somewhere living happily ever after. They deserve it. “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS.” —CAPTION FROM THE LEGEND OF ZELDA, TURNED INTO A LOLCAT MEME SMART PEOPLE ARE OFTEN self-sufficient and confident, particularly when it comes to our particular area(s) of expertise. The average geek is often the only person in the group who’s capable of solving some arcane and specialized problem. Which presents a whole ’nother problem: Even though geeky confidence and competence can sometimes lead to obnoxious and undeserved arrogance, the plain fact of the matter is that, frequently, when it comes to a particular topic, the geek really is the most knowledgeable person in the room.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Weird pornography, in-jokes, nerdish argot, gory images, suicidal, murderous and incestuous thoughts, racism and misogyny were characteristic of the environment created by this strange virtual experiment, but it was mostly funny memes. Poole has called 4chan a ‘meme factory’ and it undoubtedly created countless memes that made their way into mainstream Internet-culture. The most famous early examples of these were probably LOLcats, a cat-picture based style of image macro, and rickrolling, the use of a link to seemingly serious content that sends its user to a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. The users of 4chan/b/ acted collectively on things like making Chris Poole person of the year in Time magazine’s online poll in 2008 and the collective cyber bullying of a random 11-year-old, Jessie Slaughter, in 2010.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

That diet will be the massed strata of human experience preserved in our daily electronic media. The statistical baths in which we immerse these potent learning machines will thus be all too familiar. They will feed off the fossil trails of our own engagements, a zillion images of bouncing babies, bouncing balls, LOLcats, and potatoes that look like the Pope. These are the things they must crunch into a multilevel world model, finding the features, entities, and properties (latent variables) that best capture the streams of data to which they’re exposed. Fed on such a diet, these AIs may have little choice but to develop a world model that has much in common with our own.

…

Computers can recognize Internet images only because millions of real people have reduced the unbelievably complex information at their retinas to a highly stylized, constrained, and simplified Instagram of their cute kitty, and have clearly labeled that image too. The dystopian fantasy is simple fact: We’re all actually serving Google’s computers, under the anesthetizing illusion that we’re just having fun with LOLcats. And yet even with all that help, machines still need enormous data sets and extremely complex computations to be able to look at a new picture and say, “kitty-cat!”—something babies can do with just a few examples. More profoundly, you can generalize from this kind of statistical learning only in a limited way, whether you’re a baby or a computer or a scientist.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Digital Media City’s plans were bold—massive building-sized screens, obelisks projecting social-media streams into public plazas, and free Wi-Fi everywhere. Compared to that design, which echoed Generator in its celebration of the messy human side of the city, Songdo seems intent on engineering serendipity out of the urban equation. In a world of YouTube, FaceBook, and LOLcats, something about Songdo just doesn’t feel authentic, fully reflective of our everyday digital existence. For now, Songdo’s potential lies mostly in the somewhat distant future. The real magic of a fully networked and automated city won’t be seen until designers start writing code to program truly novel behaviors for entire buildings and neighborhoods.

…

We thought the Internet was about transcending the globe, and then it took a hyperlocal turn and became about swapping reviews of restaurants and getting free coupons for the local shop. We thought it would isolate social groups, and then it connected us all into one big network. We thought it was about staying home and looking at physics papers or LOLcats, and then in just a few years it powered over a million meatspace meetups. Smart-city hackers can’t do it alone. While we can show our business leaders and politicians how to build a more just, social, and sustainable future, we need their help to reach critical mass. Like Patrick Geddes, I believe that it will take a social movement that enlists science, the humanities, and us all to address the challenges we face building a planet of cities that can survive.

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Adding a second layer Social media platforms can become collaborative when they add an additional layer of coordination. On a micro-blogging platform like Twi er, this layer might take the form of an instruction to “use the #iranelections hashtag on your tweets” or on a photo sharing platform, it might be an invitation to “post your photos to the LOLcats group.” These mechanisms aggregate the content into a new social object. The new social object includes the metadata of each of its constituent objects; the authors name is the most important of this metadata. This creates two layers of content. Each shared individual unit is included in a cluster of shared units.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

Alongside gore and videos of abuse, pictures of naked women and men, and anime characters, there were endless photos of people’s cats. In 2005, users on /b/ had started encouraging each other to put funny captions under cute cat photos on Saturdays (or what became known as Caturday). These so-called image macros, photographs with bold white lettering at the top and a punch line at the bottom, eventually led to the LOLcats meme. It was the first of many memes to find mainstream popularity outside of 4chan, ultimately spawning other websites and even books. Thousands of image macros were made and then posted to 4chan and other image boards every day. A few went viral, turning into phrases repeated by millions of others for years afterward.

…

LulzSec revived the movement in the summer of 2011, with the vague goal of attacking government agencies and figures of authority in a sometimes superficial effort to expose corruption. /b/: The most popular board on 4chan, visited by about a third of the site’s users. /b/ was originally billed as the site’s “random” board by 4chan creator Christopher “moot” Poole. It ended up serving as a blank slate on which a host of creative Internet memes, such as Lolcats, were born, and is widely considered to be the birthplace of the Anonymous “hive-mind.” Many Anonymous supporters say they first found Anonymous through /b/. It is infamous for its lack of moderators. Black hat: Someone who uses knowledge of software programming for malicious means, such as defacing a website or stealing databases of personal information for the purpose of selling it to others.

The Good, the Bad, and the Furry: Life With the World's Most Melancholy Cat by Tom Cox

back-to-the-land, lolcat

For a cat lover, though, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. There’s the wonder of having access to innumerable funny cat videos and being able to share your love of cats with other ailurophiles around the world. At its best, it can be very creative – like a more sophisticated version of ancient Egypt, with LOLcats and viral potentiality instead of hieroglyphs. (And who knows? All history is distortion. Maybe the Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats but just liked to share stupid pictures of them, and stuff got exaggerated over time?) Yet, at the same time, the sheer overkill of cat-related memes – and, for all the great cat-related content, there is no doubt that a huge amount of it is mawkish, repetitive, platitudinous rubbish – has turned ‘cat’ into a dirty word for many Internet users: something lowbrow that gets in the way of the real issues of social networking, such as telling people what you had for breakfast, upping the ad revenue of the Daily Mail by posting outraged links to its articles, or arguing with a complete stranger about whether or not you tweet too much.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Facebook was just starting to transform from a college-centric site to the behemoth it’s since become. Fledgling messaging service twttr had just renamed itself Twitter. Google had just bought YouTube. The iPhone was about to launch. Pretty soon we’d be watching viral videos, rickrolling our friends, laughing at lolcats—and, of course, managing all that mundane stuff like banking and shopping from our screens. And that meant pretty much every business was aiming not just to have a website, but to figure out how technology might change the way it served its customers. So here we are, a decade later, and technology is so pervasive that a version of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with “WiFi” added to the base of the pyramid has become one of the most enduring internet memes around.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Mary Bale and Lola (youtube.com video) The “outing” was performed by a group who thrives on anonymity—members of the /b/ (random) board of the 4chan community. 4chan is closely linked with Anonymous, the group that is behind many high-visibility online retribution attacks. Although much of the content on /b/ will “melt your brain” according to Gawker.com’s Nick Douglas, /b/ members seem to have a soft spot for cats. They are responsible for the Lolcat meme and had previously interceded to ensure the welfare of Dusty, another cat who was seen being abused in a YouTube video. 4chan and Anonymous found a way to channel the anger of individuals within the community into coordinated action. Mary Bale commented after the event, “I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny.

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

I know it's scary, but if you're dealing with someone who sucks at e-mail, sometimes you just have to pick up the phone and call. David Cohen aiming for “inbox zero” on a summer Saturday at The Bunker. Use What's Free Ben Huh Ben is the CEO of The Cheezburger Network, owner of popular sites such as Lolcats, Loldogs, and FAIL Blog, and has made more people laugh than anyone we know. He's been a TechStars mentor since 2009. One way to get leverage over all of the big players out there that you're competing with is to build your business to be more efficient than theirs. This is really easy for me because I'm a cheap bastard.

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

Unlike the graduates of the empty new-employee orientation events that companies inflict on recent hires, I could proudly say I'd simultaneously helped customers, improved my knowledge of the product, and befriended more than a dozen coworkers through actual work. But as good as I felt this was for me as an employee, I was thrilled to finally join my team and build something new. Notes 1 Caturday is a reference to the LOLCats meme, the popular images of cats doing cute things. All of the internal tools at Automattic referred to Saturday as Caturday. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/caturday. Chapter 4 Culture Always Wins Before my story continues, I need to tell you about how WordPress started. This isn't simply because it's a great story, although it is, but to introduce its culture as a character in this book.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

With their ample budgets, they can get their products onto our screens whether we want them there or not, buying advertising or the endorsement of A-list stars or securing other attention-grabbing signals. The idea, too often promoted by people who write books and command large followings, that things like LOLcats and comment sections have made culture “participatory” is hollow. Democratizing culture means choosing, as a society, to invest in work that is not obviously popular or marketable or easy to understand. It means supporting diverse populations to devote themselves to critical, creative work and then elevating their efforts so they can compete on a platform that is anything but equal.

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence by Antonio Cangiano

23andMe, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, bitcoin, bounce rate, cloud computing, content marketing, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, revision control, Ruby on Rails, search engine result page, slashdot, software as a service, web application

If a multitude of blogs are born over time, they’ll progress into a network.[115] Each site promotes the network, typically at the top and the bottom of each site, in turn sending each other visitors, as shown in Figure 30, ​A network bar​. One such example is the Cheezburger Network.[116] It all started with the popular LOLCAT blog I Can Has Cheezburger? and has expanded to now include dozens of blogs, including FAIL Blog and Memebase.[117] * * * Figure 30. A network bar Despite the humorous nature of these sites, networks like this can be very serious business. For instance, the aforementioned network received a $30 million investment.[118] Another example of one of the oldest blog networks is Gawker Media,[119] which includes popular blogs such as Lifehacker and Gizmodo.[120] Keep in mind that you don’t always have to come up with new domain names.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Such was 4chan’s influence on the internet culture of the 2000s and beyond that even the Wall Street Journal, in its 2008 article naming Poole, acknowledged it as ‘one of the most talked-about sites when it comes to launching new memes’. If you’ve ever been rickrolled, thank 4chan. If you’ve ever seen a lolcat: 4chan. If you’ve ever used the strange online vernacular of ‘o hai’ or ‘I herd u lik memes,’ that was born on 4chan too. Since its early days, 4chan played a unique role on the internet. It was a small core of people who spent a huge amount of time online and generated very particular memes and elements of online culture.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

This may sound utopian, but such practices have become a quotidian part of digital cultural experience. We tell collective jokes and stories using comment threads and hashtags, building shared narratives and farragoes that can evolve into sophisticated technical beings in their own right as Internet memes as superficial as #lolcats or as potent as #blacklivesmatter. These are moments of collective augmentation, leveraging digital platforms to build attention and consensus in ways that were previously impossible. This emerging channel for collective, ad hoc imagination has started to transform more staid cultural practices from the twenty-four-hour news cycle to the scholarly conference.

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

But the next night, when the music resumed at midnight, I was really worn out, and it was more self-important Wagner rubbish, with pompous crescendos that consistently woke me up every time I finally drifted off to sleep, and I had no choice but to go sit in the living room and look at pictures of lolcats until it stopped, which it finally did, around 1 a.m. The next night I had had enough. When the music started at about midnight, I got dressed and started exploring the apartment building. I crept around the halls, listening at every door, trying to figure out where the music was coming from. I poked my head out windows and found an unlocked door leading to an airshaft where the music was amazingly 90 More from Joel on Software loud.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Still others, including the ‘Octopi Wall Street’ meme, rely on verbal play but appear in both electronic and physical form. ‘Occupy Sesame Street’ and the various uses of Star Wars characters represent the absorption and perversion of popular culture icons by the movement. The migration of online imagery to the streets – the Guy Fawkes masks of Anonymous; lolcats on protest signs – combined with the ironic sensibility that infuses Occupy placards – ‘I’m So Angry, I Made a Sign’; ‘This Is A Sign’ – speak to the importance of bricolage and self-parody to the movement’s culture. Beyond the bounds of this section, the texts of protest signs – earnest and sarcastic; insurrectionary and peaceful; classic and innovative – appear throughout this volume.

jQuery UI 1.8: The User Interface Library for jQuery by Dan Wellman

Firefox, lolcat, web application

Custom localization is also very easy to implement. This can be done using a standard configuration object containing the configured values for the options from the previous table. In this way, any alternative language, not included in the roll-up file can be implemented. For example, to implement a Lolcat datepicker, change the configuration object of datePicker6.html to the following: var pickerOpts = { closeText: "Kthxbai", currentText: "Todai", nextText: "Fwd", prevText: "Bak", monthNames: ["January", "February", "March", "April", "Mai", "Jun", "July", "August", "Septembr", "Octobr", "Novembr", "Decembr"], monthNamesShort: ["Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "Mai", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"], dayNames: ["Sundai", "Mondai", "Tuesdai", "Wednesdai", "Thursdai", "Fridai", "Katurdai"], dayNamesShort: ["Sun", "Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Kat"], [ 179 ] The Datepicker Widget dayNamesMin: ["Su", "Mo", "Tu", "We", "Th", "Fr", "Ka"], dateFormat: 'dd/mm/yy', firstDay: 1, isRTL: false, showButtonPanel: true }; Save this change as datePicker19.html.

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

Still, lost era or not, observing with a hand on the telescope and the stars seemingly literally at arms’ reach is a wonderful sensation to imagine and a great story to tell. CHAPTER THREE HAS ANYBODY SEEN THE CONDORS? Thwump. The odd sound was enough to get me to shift my eyes a bit to the left, dragging them away from their previously critical job of alternating between the wind speed status window on one of the telescope’s computers and LOLCats. It was 2:00 a.m., I was sitting in the control room of one of the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory, and as evidenced by both the wind gauges and the number of time-wasting tabs I had open in my browser, we hadn’t opened the telescope all night. I’d long since finalized and refinalized my night plan, assiduously prepared backup programs for different cloud-cover scenarios, and reviewed old data, but my brain had turned to mush around midnight, and I’d steadily devolved from “work on writing my thesis” to “stare at the telescope’s instrument manual and pretend I’m reading it” to “maybe there’s a funny animal GIF on the internet that I haven’t seen yet.”

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

A deep-rooted culture of gleeful disdain for the establishment in any form made 4chan a haven for all sorts of creative rebels, oddballs, and outcasts; total anonymity made it a sandbox for extreme forms of expression. The combination was rocket fuel for fandom and subculture. Yet so too did it nourish trolling, fanaticism, and hate. On one hand, 4chan was a forge of fun, the birthplace of LOLcats and Rickrolling and doges, and countless other memes that have spread from its boards into mainstream Internet culture. Neither, though, can one discount its proven ability to radicalize marginal groups, ranging from the left-leaning social-justice activist collective Anonymous to the nihilist hacker group LulzSec to the alt-right white supremacy movement and all those “rootless white males” Bannon activated.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

This was particularly mortifying because Peggy had once suggested online that Poole was her “internet crush.” But she was also surprised to discover that the founder of 4chan was so sweet and handsome. 4chan was disgusting—teenage-boy disgusting, to be fair—the source of much of the internet’s early meme culture of lolcats and rickrolling, which was 4chan’s own language, but the site was also full of racism and misogyny and sick jokes, which, back then, didn’t put Poole beyond the pale. His peers in a mostly white, mostly male scene wrote the racism and sexism off as irony. The kids on 4chan were your little brother who you figured would eventually grow up, the way Poole had, and become a quiet, productive—hot—member of society; they weren’t yet actual Nazis.

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

The most recent of these was the potent combination of digital information and global connectivity that transformed the end of the 20th century. I like to call it "The Internet," and mark my words, it's going to be very big. The struggling record industry, the death of the newspaper, the rise of LOLCats - these are just warning shots. Everything is going to get swallowed up eventually, and it's all going to get loud and messy and complicated. Forget space travel, this is the future we need to imagine now, and quickly, before it overtakes us. 29 Luckily, we have Cory Doctorow; he thinks about the Internet, a lot.

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

Even in a formal or sensitive situation, it’s equally important to avoid blaming the victim when a problem occurs. Examples GetSatisfaction.com takes responsibility (“We couldn’t find it”) when a search turns up no results (Figure 2-10). Figure 2-10. Get Satisfaction doesn’t make the user feel bad when a search fails. Likewise, Twitter takes the blame for a failed search, makes light of the problem with a LOLcat image, and offers some links to help the user proceed. Ask Questions One of the most common structures for a human conversation or dialogue is the format of question and answer (Figure 2-11). Since the days of the oldest mailing lists, Usenet, and Gopher, frequently asked question lists (FAQs) have sought to answer a person’s questions with either the collected wisdom of the community or the answers from some authority.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Hell, even my mom told me that she “voted” for “privacy” (not quite Mom, but thanks for the support!). We created a movement. One that was decentralized, bottom up, and insanely chaotic. One that very much resembles the Internet. We created a meme—the SOPA meme—that propagated throughout the web and mutated into various forms (show toilet paper, tshirt, the day the lolcats died, etc). We harnessed the power of the Internet to reach out to millions upon millions of people. We rode the energy and momentum arising from the SOPA meme to kickstart the ACTA meme in Europe—members of the Polish parliament even wore Guy Fawkes masks in protest! And we showed the other side that we would not stand for backroom deals, special interests, or companies trying to preserve their outmoded business models at the expense of the open Internet.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

But those qualities belied a pugnacious streak. Smith had become known in Washington DC for never backing down from a fight. As a reporter at Politico he often sparred on Twitter with those he covered and those he competed with for scoops. When he moved to BuzzFeed in 2012, his mandate was to turn the outlet, long famous for its lolcats and list-oriented viral articles, into a respectable, hard-hitting news organization. Smith rebranded his division as BuzzFeed News, and soon built a serious outfit whose reporting standards and aggressive pursuit of scoops rivaled that of the most traditional newsrooms. Smith was thus shocked when he, a member of the media, found himself sitting across from an Uber executive who was so openly disdainful about Uber’s relationship with the press.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Users were handed more and more power to control corners of the Reddit universe. In late May 2008, Huffman more broadly opened up the ability for any user to create a section of Reddit—what would become known as “subreddits.” By default, the user who created the section, say, r/atheism, would be its moderator. Users quickly created r/WTF, r/lolcats, and r/offbeat, sections with little purpose aside from wasting time but that would over the next decade amass millions of regular viewers and loyal subscribers. There was higher-brow Reddit, too: Subreddits for entertainment, photography, and art flourished. For example, photos of the eerie art installation of a tiny freestanding Prada store in Marfa, Texas, got upvoted.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

., its ability to preserve texts that might otherwise get lost or badly damaged), ease of dissemination, and the tendency toward standardization. According to Eisenstein, the very technology of print endows texts with these new qualities—and the rupture is so significant that she elevates those qualities to the status of “print culture.” The latter gives us the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Big Mac, Steve Jobs, and LOLCats. Many scholars have noted the limitations of Eisenstein’s approach, which are extremely pertinent to the contemporary Internet debate. The first to ring alarm bells—in 1980, just a year after the book was published—was intellectual historian Anthony Grafton, who berated Eisenstein for pulling “from her sources those facts and statements that seemed to meet her immediate polemical needs.”

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

As the web became more image- and social media–friendly, what we know as the “internet meme” was born. These were images or short GIFs, often overlaid with text and easily shareable, that relayed ideas fast. Grasping their full meaning, however, required understanding not only the content at hand but also its previous iterations. For instance, the LOLCats phenomenon, comprised of tens of thousands of cat pictures with misspelled captions, becomes funnier (to a point) only if you’re familiar with the context to which it refers—the pervasiveness of cat images on the internet. Indeed, the most effective memes often build not merely on themselves but on other memes as well.

Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter

3D printing, A Pattern Language, air gap, carbon footprint, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, Donald Knuth, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fear of failure, food miles, functional fixedness, hacker house, haute cuisine, helicopter parent, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, lolcat, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, slashdot, stochastic process, TED Talk, the scientific method

For most of us techies, the largest obstacle in building something great has changed from a technical to a social one. The question is no longer can you build it, but will people want it? We’re becoming a different kind of community, one that has to relate to a half a billion Facebook users, Twitterers, and lolcats. (I can has cheezburger? See Simple Cheeseburger.) But what it means to be a geek today can also be broader. Overly intellectual. Obsessed with details. Going beyond the point where a mainstream user would stop, often to the bemusement of those who don’t "get it." Physics geeks. Coffee geeks. Almost-anything geeks.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Unless new technologies, such as widespread multicore fiber, are widely deployed in the next decade, the physical limits of how much information can actually pass through a given channel may introduce new economies of bandwidth scarcity, prioritization, and pricing.28 At the same time, newer networks with greater carrying capacity, as well as faster signal throughput, may provide new kinds of Cloud services previously only imagined, such as holodeck-quality virtual environments. Such accomplishments may steer primate evolution toward shared intersubjective experience, introducing fantastic new genres of narrative, design, architecture, poetry, medicine, and music at a planetary scale, or it may allow a select few to watch 8K LOLcat videos from 10 angles at once. The pressure of that physical limit also pushes against the geoeconomics of the Internet backbone and private Cloud platforms, forcing how their development impacts on political geography as a whole. Instead of thinking of the Cloud as a bunch of individual private computers connected to data centers by big public pipe, it is perhaps better to think of any (at least partially) gated Cloud network as a single vast discontiguous computer, linking servers to browsers and back again, such that functions that may have once happened “inside” any one device now happens on the device's “outside,” now on and in the network itself.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

They struggled to reach it from sluggish desktop computers and through screeching modems. In the following decades, the Internet expanded its reach, infiltrating phones and cars and refrigerators. By 2016, almost half the world was prowling its nodes. The early listservs and forums gave way to giant social media platforms. Across this new memetic ecosystem, LOLcats and the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger began to roam. A website called Know Your Meme cataloged thousands of digital replicators, to help the befuddled keep up with new memes, and to help the forgetful to recall those of years gone by. The 2016 United States presidential election became a war of memes as operatives looked for the stories and photographs—genuine or doctored—that could spread a political message.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

Even now, in the middle of the night, a tiny slice of Kulaap’s fan base is reading about checkerspot butterflies and American government incompetence. In my country, this story would not exist. A censor would kill it instantly. Here, it glows green; increasing and decreasing in size as people click. A lonely thing, flickering amongst the much larger content flares of Intel processor releases, guides to low-fat recipes, photos of lol-cats, and episodes of Survivor! Antarctica. The wash of light and color is very beautiful. In the center of the maelstrom, the green sun of the Double DP story glows—surges larger. DP is doing something. Maybe he’s surrendering, maybe he’s murdering his hostages, maybe his fans have thrown up a human wall to protect him.