Wednesday 11 April 2018

Link 11/4/18

Politics: 

An interview with Chris Wylie, one of the founders of Cambridge Analytica who leaked about the firm's usage of Facebook data to target users in the 2016 US Presidential election. 
Another proxy for culture is fashion, right? Politics and fashion are both about identity. They are both highly cyclical. There are lots of different aesthetics in both politics and fashion. And more broadly, fashion and politics are both products of our culture.  You can think about political movements like a fashion trend – lots of people suddenly adopting a new idea or concept. And since how we engage fashion and politics are both influenced by who we are, our personality, for me they are just displays of ourselves in different contexts. What is it that we are yelling about in the public square, and on the flip side, what is it we’re adorning our bodies with?
[...] My research in fashion was on two things. First, what causes different people to like different aesthetics. And second, if we can understand that, (whether) we can use data to predict what someone will like to wear. I looked at personality traits because we often use the same kinds of words to describe our style as we would our personality, and I wanted to unpack that and see if there was anything to that. 
Dazed: The whistleblower: Chris Wylie on fashion, culture wars & the alt-right, March 29, 2018

Could this read any more like a William Gibson novel? 

Music: 

Two essays: Soleil Ho (her Racist Sandwich podcast is highly recommended) on "assimilation food", and Omar Sakr on surviving the marriage equality debate in Australia

Great music by Melbourne band MOD CON

The Thermals have split after 15 years and I remember watching one of their first videos on Fast Forward back in the day. 

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