Media Machines
Orson Welles in Iran, radio through teeth, exploitation film, cyberdecks and the technologies that manufacture belief.
- 1An Open-Source Plan for Combating Fake News on the Internet: Joining together the Left and the Right
“The effort to differentiate between legitimate and fake content is completely out of the picture.” -@b0rkj0rk
- 2Walt Disney World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag Here is the complete original film from Walt's "Epcot / Florida Film" - a 24 minute preview to EPCOT that Walt recorded on October 27, 1966 - just a few…
- 3The Fall of Ye
The timeline in which this has unfolded has undoubtedly been a spectacle over the last few weeks. Ye, the artist formally known as Kanye West, went from being a multi-billionaire as a celebrated musician and fashion designer…
- 4Neo’s Trinity
Public conversations about artificial intelligence tend to split into two extremes. On one end are the people who are not deeply engaged with digital technology—the workers whose daily routines resemble those of thirty years ago.…
- 5Token Gravity
Most people think interacting with an AI is little more than typing inputs into a machine. You press keys, the model processes “tokens,” and you get a reply. The whole thing sounds mechanical, almost insultingly simple. But…
- 6The Exocortex
From the moment “AI” entered mainstream consciousness, it was framed as an enemy. Not by engineers, but by culture. Films, novels, conspiracy theories, corporate marketing—decades of storytelling trained the public to see…
- 7The Shah’s Last Movie: Orson Welles, Iran, and the Machinery of Manufactured Reality
Orson Welles spent much of his later career chasing money from one country to another. He acted in other people’s films, recorded commercials, appeared on television and took narration work, then fed the proceeds back into…
- 8Radio Dentistry: Lucille Ball, the Habsburg Jaw, and the Strange History of Sound Through Teeth
Lucille Ball once told Dick Cavett a story that sounds almost engineered to become an urban legend. During the Second World War, after having dental work done, she was driving home from the studio when she began hearing what…
- 9Cyberdecks, Radio, Retro Handhelds, and The Return of The Offline Machine
Imagine walking into an old supermarket or warehouse on the edge of an American city and finding something very different from another row of self-storage units or a furniture outlet. Along one wall are bins of switches…
- 10The Forbidden Record: Sex Magic, Secret Archives, and the Power of the Image
In the television series Strange Angel, a California rocket engineer named Jack Parsons becomes involved with a religious community that treats sexual experience as a source of spiritual power. Parsons was a real person, one of…
- 11Sexual Revolution, Secret Networks, and the Weird World of Nazisploitation
Thirty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, its uniforms were enjoying an international career in erotic entertainment. In the Canadian exploitation film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975), a fictional camp commandant became both…