Never News: something to chew on
Hello one and all and welcome to your regularly scheduled helping of Never News. Last time you heard from me, we were in the middle of stream week! If you'd like to go back and watch the VOD from those 5 days of madness, head over to twitch.tv/theneverpost and check it out.
I've switched the logo for Never News to my beautiful and fabulous iteration of our show logo. Will this be a permanent change? Probably not. But I wasn't done showing it to you, so here it is!
But now, it's time to get back into the swing of things with, you guessed it, the news.
TECHSPOT: the people yearn for physical media
I'm sure that you are as unsurprised to hear this as I am, but it's true. Vinyl records have enjoyed a steady uptick in popularity for a while, but now CD's have joined their ranks with a whopping 58.6% revenue increase. A huge part of this is the price uptick for streaming services. But another big reason for the push away from the digital and toward the physical has to do with ownership. Despite your monthly subscription to any given streaming platform, it's the platform that gets to decide what kind of media you have access to and when. If you purchased a TV show or a movie from a streaming site, and the site decides to remove it, then tough luck — turns out, you don't really own that media after all. I've experienced this firsthand when my corner of the Internet had a huge crashout about the possibility that beloved mini series Over The Garden Wall might disappear from streaming completely, which lead me to buy a physical copy of it from Ebay for [redacted amount of money that was definitely too much]. But either way, I'm heartened to see so much enthusiasm for (and actual money spent on) real-life, tangible things.
THE NEW YORKER: Flock tries an old playbook and fails
I was very struck by the way this piece talks about Flock's argument for mass surveillance as a post-9/11 style of rhetoric that most Americans are no longer falling for. And I do think this is a very interesting addition to the mass-remembrance/analysis of that period of our country's history. I can readily imagine that the reception to Flock's promise of a nation free from violence and crime would be markedly different in 2001 than it would be now in 2026. It's the kind of thing the Patriot Act would have gobbled up gleefully. But as this article reminds us, U.S. citizens are not fans of Flock, nor its cameras – there's sprouted up a cottage industry of people destroying or defacing the cameras, supported by members of their own community who refuse to snitch. But that doesn't stop Flock founder Garrett Langley from touting out the War on Terror-style conviction that in order to reap the rewards of some vague notion of "safety," Flock can have some mass surveillance as a treat. Never mind that these cameras are instilling a guilty-before-proven-innocent precedent. Also, as an aside, Garret Langley; what a name for the leader of a mass surveillance company. I'm sure the CIA would approve.
THE VERGE: Why does AI food look so nasty?
I intentionally chose a different photo than the one used for this article because, honestly, it grossed me out too much. But as restaurants inexplicably continue to use AI imagery to promote their food – despite the actual food literally being right there for the picture-taking – there then emerges the need to explain why this fake food looks...like that. Stringy, seedy, with a million holes (trypophobia-havers, beware), layered and unnatural and truly, truly disgusting. Turns out, it's a great example of the many ways that AI fails to actually succeed at doing all the miraculous things the Sam Altman's of the world claim that it can do. As professor Roland Meyer explains in this piece, "AI image generation reproduces looks without proper knowledge about the world." May I be the first one to say....DUH! But this does explain quite plainly what's going on here. An AI model has no concept of food beyond its visual signifiers. So through this perspective, food is rendered in a way completely divorced from the concept of edibility – nay, without any context at all that would imply that, say, a hamburger should be something meant to elicit hunger. Gross!
Annnnnnnd that's all from me today. True fall weather has yet to grace my city, which means that I keep forgetting it's actually September and not August: part deux. But soon, very soon, it will be the best time of the year. Until then, smoochies!