Click farms, web cleaners, underwater cables, human wickedness, the triumph of mediocrity, and so much more. All top quality, handpicked to boost your knowledge and intellectual capacity. Plus videos of puppies and accidents, which are also important.
Click farms, shelves full of switched-on phones where 'likes' are faked: "In Bangladesh, a man who works in government offices during the day, in the afternoons goes to a small building in the center of Dhaka, the capital. In his free time he harvests likes in a click farm with hundreds of mobile phones, most of them second-hand. On them he taps with his finger on the pages, the 'likes' or the posts that are to be uploaded that day. He earns no more than 120 dollars (105 euros) a year, but his work is sold at 15 dollars per 1,000 likes he makes."
The Cleaners, the 'digital cleaners' who decide what you see (and don't see) on the internet: "They are the 'cleaners' of the darkest corners of the web. They assess what stays and what is deleted from the web before you see it. Their job is to navigate through the most violent, disturbing, controversial and contentious online content. Sometimes it's videos of violent extremists. Other times it's political propaganda. There are also images of people self-harming and all kinds of child pornography. 'Without us, the internet would be chaos,' writes one of the 'cleaners' in an email from the Philippines."
People think data is in the cloud, but it's not: it's in the oceans: "Internet consists of small pieces of code moving around the world, traveling through hair-thin cables scattered across the ocean floor. Data thus travels from New York to Sydney and from Hong Kong to London in the same time it takes you to read this word. Almost 1.2 million cables connect the continents to satisfy our insatiable demand for communications and online entertainment. Companies usually pool their resources to collaborate on submarine cable projects, as if it were a highway that everyone must share." More information on submarine cables: how they look and how they are installed.
Why do mediocre people succeed?: "Mediocrity is an art. At least, that's what mediocre people think. An art whose only goal is survival. Whether it's work-related, emotional, or social. 'In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.' A phrase we've heard all our lives and that represents the maximum exponent of mediocrity. Because in this philosophy, success lies in the ability to get rid of people who might expose your shortcomings, surrounding yourself instead with those who cover them up."
Is the human being good or evil by nature?: "One of the great questions of philosophy is whether the human being is born good and then becomes bad, or whether some evil is born with us. And there are various, somewhat conflicting positions, but first we should ask ourselves what that thing called human nature is. Has anyone seen it? We know very little about it, or rather, nothing. Sometimes we hear that something is 'unnatural,' homosexuality, for example. But to know the true human nature we would have to find a human being in a state of nature, a pre-civilized being, and that is not possible because the human being is a social being."
Stupid or evil: "With the development of new technologies, it seems that almost all of us are becoming radicals. Social media algorithms continually offer us more and more of what we want to see. Robots read our ideology and give us more doses of what they think we're looking for. We become more and more addicted to being proven right. We click on websites that confirm what we know, click on ads that sell us something similar to what we already bought, and only follow people who think like us."
How did we get up before alarm clocks?: "Today we have mobile alarms, flying alarm clocks and even alarms that won't shut up until you solve a riddle, all to help us with the most unpleasant daily ritual, but how did people get up before the first alarm clock was invented in 1787? Human beings have always been creative and we have never lacked ideas."
The computational model or the end of adventure: "The informational substrate of the technoscientific organization of the social framework has come to stay, although perhaps it has come too quickly and without the adequate pedagogy that would allow us to prepare for it. Those who compare this transition with the one that occurred in the 20th century with the appearance of the first railroads, (…) are wrong, in my opinion, since this transformation is incomparably greater, it is the transformation of all transformations, despite what the Marxist critic Karl Polanyi said at the time."
Guido Tallei's flying saucers: "Guido imagined a future in which hybrid ships, halfway between the airship and the conventional airplane, would cross the skies. His discoidal designs, which never materialized into real models, found an echo in some publications from the early thirties. Here, for example, is the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine from September 1930, whose protagonist was one of Guido Tallei's designs."
Who were the Night Witches?: "The Night Witches was the term used to refer to an aerial squadron made up of women from the Red Army during World War II who instilled true terror and unease in Hitler's III Reich army. They did not have modern radars, nor powerful machine guns, nor even radio or parachutes; however, the Night Witches successfully completed nearly 30,000 bombings and dropped more than 23,000 tons of bombs against the advance of the German army over the course of four years during World War II."
How a painting saved Bill Murray's life: "Before becoming an international superstar of humor and the microgesture, Bill Murray was just another twenty-something trying to make a living as an actor at Second City, the legendary improvisational comedy troupe based in Chicago. Things were not going well for him. In fact, they were going so badly that he even thought about taking his own life, but then a painting crossed his path and everything changed forever."
Pocahontas: 'A stranger in your country': "How must the twenty-two-year-old indigenous woman have felt when she first set foot on European soil in June 1616? The different climate, the cramped streets of London, strange people. Curious glances lurked everywhere; people wanted to take a picture of the 'domesticated savages.' Pocahontas was a sensation, possibly against her will. Or did she enjoy the attention? In any case, she couldn't hide."
VIDEOS: The flashiest DOS viruses, the Bolas spider, the cannibal spider, the parasomnia demon, broken glass, a mouse that sorts tools, a koala in the car, absolute fails, "Eye of the Tiger" with toy instruments, if there were planets between Earth and the Moon, a rather unique knife, the struggle of indicators, 30,000 players on a single server, REDRUM cake, Ray Bradbury in a raisin commercial, the best moments of Elon Musk, inside the Chernobyl zone, the library of strange colors, cardboard airplane, coming back from a 10-year coma, the forbidden dance, video game addiction, the AI that turns sketches into realistic landscapes, four levels of Mario music, "My boyfriend is a zombie" and the short film Mr. Mailman.
GALERÍAS: 80s nerds, historic buildings at the time of their construction, animals and camouflage, cats with markings on their fur, noir art, transforming Google Maps photos into art, underwater restaurant, mushroom photos, wolf cats, albino animals, unique people, World of Warcraft sculptures, the loneliness of social media, the best of NatGeo 100, photos taken 40 years apart, sashimi artist, porn for engineers, banana advertisements, the photographer of the abyss, World Press Photo 2019, Jupiter, the Animated Dump and the Visual Dump of the Week. Don't miss anything!
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