Halting State News Today

(1) LUKYANENKO NOT AT WORLDCON. There’s no sign of the Chengdu Worldcon’s Russian GoH Sergey Lukyanenko in social media coverage of the con. And the latest posts to his blog on his official website (devoted to anti-Israel remarks, and a report that his wife rescued a migrating woodcock in the backyard) suggest he’s at home.

Step into new dimensions! Explore the best virtual reality books, uncovering the fusion of technology, imagination, and future possibilities.

There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life. What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media...

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Cover art from Otaku (Tor Books, 2020) I love games. Always have, always will. Digital, tabletop, physical—doesn’t matter. My first career was playing one, but I think the biggest thing that’s drawn me to them is what games reveal about the person playing them. What lengths are you willing to go to win? How do you feel when you lose? Do you abide strictly by the rules, or are you willing to bend or break them entirely? At its core, a game is a wholly unnatural construct, something we col...

Here Comes The Robots Comments Off on Here Comes The Robots The aim of this article is to explore the effects of a particular form of technology on the state of society. It will examine the concepts of robotics and artificial intelligence; the concept of the technological singularity; what such an event would mean for the labour market; and, because of the central role of the labour market to capitalism, what this would mean for capitalist society as a whole. It will also take in the contradi...