Brutkey

Cory Doctorow
@pluralistic@mamot.fr
A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face. afcf2499a7ee79f7.jpg A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face. a2a64acec4110306.jpg the inside of a massive indigo printer be539460b872c447.jpg Incidentally, none of this is new. There have always been people who fall in love with fictional characters and inanimate objects. And the internet has only made it easier for these people to find each other and commiserate over the problems this creates. And as technology has made it easier for these people to “communicate” — or at least have some passing simulacrum of communication — with these characters, it has made those people even more dependent on corporations to continue supporting that tech. A few years ago, a Japanese man named Akihiko Kondo “married” a hologram of the vocaloid pop star Hatsune Miku. He told Japanese media that he was depressed and lonely and his “relationship” with Miku helped him recover. A story you’ll see over and over again in subreddits for people dating ChatGPT. And just like those users this weekend, Kondo lost the ability to interact with the hologram of his cartoon wife when the projector he was using to view her, run by a company called Gatebox, became obsolete. 80308582c45285db.png 63ca1fd89d182c69.jpg 6da35a6e08a37878.jpg 6da35a6e08a37878.jpg 298d515abb15db86.jpg A Roman ruin. In the foreground are two figures: a guerrilla fighter with a rifle and crossed bandoliers and a boxer in trunks and sash, fists raised. Both figures' heads have been replaced with tophatted caricatures of millionaires from Gilded Age editorial cartoons. 40de6ec886767892.jpg 87ffd5664d1b90ff.png