DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ FEB 20

1. Pretty much everything you need to know about the Drudge Report as a "news" source is the fact that he's published links to THREE "rebuttals" to the story of Bill O'Reilly's wartime lies, but NO LINK to THE ACTUAL STORY - which includes some pretty damning stuff, even by FOX News standards - itself. Go and read. It's freaking hilarious. O'Reilly comes across like a Third Reich Ron Burgundy. Perhaps the most galling aspect of this revelation is the fact that O'Reilly is ultimately going to get away with it because everyone understands FOX News reporters are a pack of propaganda-spewing liars, anyway, so who gives a fuck?

2. If you think we are currently living in a Golden Age of information sharing and (most especially) information retention... turns out you're laboring under a dangerously erroneous illusion. The Atlantic has recently published an article pulling together multiple stories and events to paint a picture of an imminent Information Dark Age. This link-rich story begins:

Two weeks ago, a seven-alarm blaze at a storage warehouse smogged up the Brooklyn ether (and confettied parts of the East River) with "decades’ worth of charred medical records, court transcripts, lawyers’ letters, sonograms, bank checks, and more." Huge swaths of Brooklyn's legal history literally fueled the fire, leaving one Clerk's Office representative to lament of the stacks of data lost: "They're priceless." 

If there's any solace to be had from such a disaster, aside from its lack of fatalities, is its seeming outdatedness. The move to digitize vital files as well as electronically store keepsakes, letters, and photos should, in theory, safeguard future generations from the agony of losing data to a fire or flood. But what happens when we outgrow our own technology? 

Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week, Google Vice President Vint Cerf warned of a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” that awaits us when "bit rot" takes hold and our digital material gets lapped by the new hardware and software racing around it. 

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole," he said to The Guardian. “We digitize things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artifacts that we digitized. If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

3. Hey! Finally, the [adult swim] dolts got around to uploading a brand spankin' new "Infomercial"... and boy howdy, it's a winner! An absurdist cavalcade of high concept and low comedy nonsense glazed in the kind of terrifyingly believable patina of insubstantial decadence that grows on Late Capitalist consumer ephemera like an alien moss... the latest Infomercia's got it all! Gaze upon the sheer, post-modernist perfection that is... Icelandic Ultrablue!