…Exploring the role of the prankster as artist, activist and social observer and the significance of the prank in society.
Behold humankind’s most primitive man. h/t Naomi.
Skull of humankind’s oldest-known ancestor unearthed
Associated Press
August 29, 2019
NEW YORK — A fossil from Ethiopia is letting scientists look millions of years into our evolutionary history — and they see a face peering back.
The find, from 3.8 million years ago, reveals the face for a presumed ancestor of the species famously represented by Lucy, the celebrated Ethiopian partial skeleton found in 1974.
There are an eery number of showbiz coincidences foreshadowing the political rise of Donald Trump. This 1958 TV Western, “Trackdown: The End of the World”, anticipates some pretty specific details, including the need for a wall to save the people from annihilation. Fact or fiction?
“A 1950s TV show had a fear-mongering conman named Trump who wanted to build a wall”
by Clara Sinclair
Boing Boing
January 10, 2019
On May 8, 1958, art imitated life in 2018. In an episode of a TV show called Trackdown, there was a conman named Trump, who tried to scare the bejeezus out of a town by preaching, “at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead.” The only way he could save them is by building a wall.
One sane man tries to talk some sense into the sheriff, with Trump in their presence. “How long are you going to put up with this?” he asks. But the brainwashed sheriff replies with a dumb, “What do you mean?”
How long are you going to let this conman walk around town?” the man persists.
Then Trump speaks his signature line: “Be careful son, I can sue you.” Read more and watch the entire episode here.
Laura Loomer is a far-right media provocateur known for shambolic publicity stunts. Her toxic racial rhetoric has resulted in her removal from a number of social media platforms, and she hasn’t taken it well. Anxious to stay in the public eye, she was recently tricked into a bizarre caper that oddly also sucked in the Wall Street Journal. This comedy of errors encapsulates much of what is so ridiculous about the current media landscape. See if you can keep up.
“Did the Wall Street Journal Fall for a Prank Directed at Laura Loomer?”
by Jared Holt
Right Wing Watch
January 15, 2019
EXCERPT FROM THE FULL ARTICLE: “She didn’t verify who I am once. Never did she make an attempt,” Gillen said. “Everything I gave her as ‘info,’ she took as gospel. She hasn’t batted an eye or questioned anything that I said, ever.”
In a recorded phone call Bernard shared with us, Loomer expressed her willingness to leverage all means possible to retaliate against Twitter.
“I’m down with anything, honestly. So if whistle-blowers like yourself just want to come to me—I mean, I’m looking to escalate this as much as I can. I don’t even care. The gloves are off right now. [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] is banning people simply because they’re conservative. … He is taking money from all these Muslims and implementing Sharia law,” Loomer told Gillen during a phone call.
Bernard told Right Wing Watch that the goal of their stunt was to see if Loomer would go on-air at Alex Jones’ Infowars and repeat what they had told her, after which they planned to reveal the details of their joke in order to make a point about what they said were Loomer’s and Infowars’ non-existent journalistic standards and confirmation bias.
But something else happened.
“Don’t worry it will be big,” Loomer wrote to the pranksters in a December text message. “I have a big network of journalists I know.”
Tired of waiting for the latest indictment? With this toy special prosecutor, you can lay down the law in the comfort of your own living room.
“Robert Mueller is getting his own action figure”
by Emily Jacobs
The New York Post
January 15, 2019
Robert Mueller has a new action figure, and its as tight lipped as the real-life special counsel.
The six-inch figurine was produced by FCTRY, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer that also sells action figures of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The company also has a Donald Trump doll they refer to as “Evil Trump Action Figure.”
FCTRY’s description of the figurine says that it includes a “fixed gaze, because he knows you know he knows,” an “extended finger” which “pokes holes in flimsy alibis,” an open right hand that is “ready for the smoking gun,” “sturdy pockets” to “hold his strong moral compass” and “impermeable shoes in case of tweetstorms.”
As for the company’s reasoning behind them making the Mueller figure, the product description states: “We’re not trying to be melodramatic here but the Special Counsel sure seems to be the last thing standing between us and utter chaos. In fact, it’s almost impossible to dream up a more perfect foil to Donald Trump.” Read more.
On the topic of our tenuous collective relationship with the concept formerly known as “truth,” this examination of “deep fakes,” high-tech simulated video recordings of people you recognize doing things they’ve never actually done, may be the most frightening and portentous emerging story of 2018. And that’s saying a mouthful.
“You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die”
by Oscar Schwartz
November 12, 2018
The Guardian
Fake videos can now be created using a machine learning technique called a “generative adversarial network”, or a GAN. A graduate student, Ian Goodfellow, invented GANs in 2014 as a way to algorithmically generate new types of data out of existing data sets. For instance, a GAN can look at thousands of photos of Barack Obama, and then produce a new photo that approximates those photos without being an exact copy of any one of them, as if it has come up with an entirely new portrait of the former president not yet taken. GANs might also be used to generate new audio from existing audio, or new text from existing text – it is a multi-use technology.
The use of this machine learning technique was mostly limited to the AI research community until late 2017, when a Reddit user who went by the moniker “Deepfakes” – a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” – started posting digitally altered pornographic videos. He was building GANs using TensorFlow, Google’s free open source machine learning software, to superimpose celebrities’ faces on the bodies of women in pornographic movies.
A number of media outlets reported on the porn videos, which became known as “deep fakes”. In response, Reddit banned them for violating the site’s content policy against involuntary pornography. By this stage, however, the creator of the videos had released FakeApp, an easy-to-use platform for making forged media. The free software effectively democratized the power of GANs. Suddenly, anyone with access to the internet and pictures of a person’s face could generate their own deep fake. Read more.