Can Real Life Compete With an Instagram Playground?

This professionalized tier of Instagram has created its own industry complete with with models, beauty experts, designers, trendsetters, interior designers, and “it” humans that all traffic in similar aesthetics. And as the masses have become more discerning about their photos and where to take them, a specific “Instagram look” has developed. Critics have expressed concern over society’s navel-gazing, and the utter sameness that results in fashion, architecture, or art when it’s designed to be captured on someone’s Instagram feed. Social media “absolutely perpetuates one aesthetic,” a longtime makeup artist told The New York Times last year in an article titled “‘Instagram Face’: Is It the End of Good Makeup?” “It’s like looking at a bunch of clones. They’re Botoxed, filled and surgeried to look like Kim.”

Source: Can Real Life Compete With an Instagram Playground? – The Ringer

We’re in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism 

That video that is currently soaring across social media — maybe it’s a text-heavy explainer with dynamic motion graphics, or a video-driven news story with sharply concise captions — is less an evolution of video itself and more of an evolution of the hundreds and thousands of pieces of text-based journalism that are produced and consumed digitally. Audiences that spent time consuming only the first couple of paragraphs of a news story are now watching 45 seconds of a video that conveys the same information. And, yes, sometimes with words on the screen. I believe this will become more sophisticated and more prevalent, and before you tell me that it’s intellectually inferior, just believe me — it’s not in its final form. It’s on us to innovate so that it has the power and impact we want it to.

Source: We’re in the early stages of a visual revolution in journalism – Recode

Virtualitics: VR/AR Analytics Platform using AI & Machine Learning 

Virtualitics is a transformative start-up company that merges artificial intelligence (AI), big data and virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) to gain insights from big and complex data sets. Furthermore, Virtualitics leverages AI and easy-to-use machine learning tools so even non-expert users can uncover multidimensional relationships present in complex data sets with the click of a button.

Source: Virtualitics: Caltech & NASA Scientists Build VR/AR Analytics Platform using AI & Machine Learning – insideBIGDATA

The Revolution in Advertising: From Don Draper to Big Data 

Advertising in the digital age bears little resemblance to the Mad Men depiction—the Don Drapers of advertising have been replaced by big data and the people who work with it. Professor John Deighton, the author of the case “WPP: From Mad Men to Math Men (and Women),” and Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and group chief executive of WPP and the protagonist in the case, discuss how WPP has been successful in the new advertising world order, where algorithms and robots rule

Source: The Revolution in Advertising: From Don Draper to Big Data – HBS Working Knowledge – Harvard Business School

How CGI & AI will empower ‘fake news’ 

An image from a video suggesting that Julian Assange is dead and has been replaced by a CGI model.

Most people trust what they watch — but that won’t always be the case. Tech is being developed that will make it easy to create fake video footage of public figures or audio of their voice. The developments aren’t perfect yet, but they threaten to turbocharge “fake news” and boost hoaxes online. In years to come, people will need to be far more skeptical about the media they see.

Source: How CGI, AI will empower ‘fake news,’ make it harder to tell if videos are real – Business Insider

Why Marx is Essential


What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems. The election of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe and elsewhere can all be understood as indirect effects of shifts in the global division of labour — the relocation of key aspects of modern production away from Europe and the United States. That has been brought about by changes in what Marx identified as the capitalist enterprise’s incessant drive to expansion.

Source: In retrospect: Das Kapital : Nature : Nature Research