– in which Dorn again avoids thinking of new topics.
1 In my post looking forward ten years post-Covid (here), I joked that Facebook had achieved the status of a sovereign nation. I’m now reading a book that takes this conceit to a whole new level: Qualityland by the writer and (apparently) cabaret artist Marc-Uwe Kling. Reviews have called it “hilarious and terrifying” and compared this book to the love-child of a three-way between George Orwell, Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams.
The premise of the book is that the newly-renamed country of “Qualityland” has allowed all the commercial and information-management techniques of Amazon, Facebook, and Google to run to their logical extreme conclusions. All citizens are fully characterized by ubiquitous AI algorithms, to the point that all the goods and services they want or need are predicted and delivered to them “without the hassle of having to ask for them”.
But warning: the book is so chock full of clever ideas that it gets headachy to read sometimes, and the consequences of business decisions that seem plausible in today’s world, while almost always funny, are also sometimes horrific to Third-Agers like me who grew up in a world without AI. Also it trash-talks Pride and Prejudice.
Still, give it a shot for a good funny, scary read. Or just wait—I hear HBO has already signed for the movie rights to the book!
2 I now have objective proof that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. After my bloody battle with invasive Arum Italicum, (chronicled here and here), I had hoped that I’d seen the last of that particular invader from the Old World.
But the evil Arum showed up again to get me when I was at my weakest—reading Facebook! I was innocently checking up on the doings of my friends and relations, when up popped an unsolicited ad, actually tempting me to pay money to get some new Arum Italicum plants. Oh, insidious! See how the invaders get in your head—if they can’t invade by one route, they find another.
3 I mentioned my own miminal contributions to finding a Covid treatment here. When I agreed to lend my computer’s down time to a massive computing project searching for Covid antagonists (literally, it’s the least I can do!), they gave me access to online statistics that claim to show the size and importance of my contribution. (That sentence ended up sounding pretty cynical. Can I believe nothing from the internet any more?)
Anyway, my contribution must be pretty significant, because they awarded me a medal for it. And not just some cheesy participation medal, this is a Gold medal for 90 days of partipation! Why, I have returned almost 600 computational results to the OpenPandemics project, and am now ranked as the 234,099th most prolific contributer worldwide (no lie!). It’s still not too late for you to join!
4 It would seem that the Illustrious Order of Immunati (revealed here) has a new member. President Trump yesterday announced his Covid immunity amid congratulations from his fans, skepticism from the medical community, and a flag from Twitter for “misleading Covid-19 information”. As a courtesy to my millions of micro-readers*, I will not make jokes that support or disparage any individual candidate, but I will repost an unattributed quote I saw on Facebook: “I got the China virus and I beat it, beat it very badly. Do you think Sleepy Joe would’ve beaten it? I don’t think so. Weak on crime, weak on immune systems. SAD!”
Illuminati spokesbeing E— R— would not come out from under the bed to comment.
Thanks, and, depending on your bent, Happy Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Dorn
10/12/2020