My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s collection of links is almost all about the Queen’s Jubilee — which is the best content update we’ve had so far (I’m really enjoying playing it). There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
August 9, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Greg Jennings trolls the Packers yet again
Greg Jennings was Minnesota’s big name signing over the offseason. He was brought in from the Green Bay Packers (who have a surplus of good receivers) to at least partially fill the hole in the roster from the departure of Percy Harvin. Since he arrived in Minnesota, Jennings has been a veritable cornucopia of media-worthy gems of casual abuse directed at his former team (and Aaron Rodgers in particular). Jim Souhan says this is a good thing:
It began as a strange and unnatural occurrence, like one of those unverified online photos of a chimp hanging out with a bird. Now it’s threatening to become a bizarre tradition, or, as the kids so eloquently put it, “a thing.”
Every four years or so, the Vikings should steal one of the Packers’ best offensive players, just to create the kind of sideshow that can make even training camp interesting.
In 2009, and 2010, and into 2011, Brett Favre turned the already fascinating Vikings-Packers rivalry into something it had never before been on any meaningful level: incestuous.
In 2013, Greg Jennings is one-upping Favre, not in terms of existential angst and passive aggressiveness, but with new-age, self-aware, YouTube-able, Twitter-ready, Facebook-enflaming, border-crossing Scud missiles designed to invoke an emotional response even if they miss the target.
Jennings, the new Viking and former Packer receiver, is, as the kids say, “trolling” his former team. If you’re too young to know what “trolling” is, just listen to Jennings a few times, and you’ll get the idea.
In July, in an interview with the Star Tribune’s Dan Wiederer, he poked holes in the flawless image of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, raising or confirming questions about Rodgers’ ego and leadership skills.
This week, Jennings told KFAN that the Packers had “brainwashed” him into believing that Green Bay was the land of milk and honey-flavored cheddar, that operations such as the Vikings were inherently flawed.
If true, that’s fascinating. If not, Jennings is fascinating.
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The cult of Apple
In Wired, Brett T. Robinson talks about the similarities of the “Apple cult” to religious beliefs:
Technology ads provide parables and proverbs for navigating the complexities of the new technological order. They instruct the consumer on how to live the “good life” in the technological age.
Like all advertising, Apple’s ads perform a vital educational function in consumer society. The advertisements are allegorical, rhetorical attempts to domesticate foreign and abstract concepts, making them accessible and attractive to everyday adherents.
In fact, they resemble medieval morality plays in their personification of good (Mac) and evil (PC). As such, the ads contain a moral — or, more explicitly, they propose a morality customized for the conditions of the age.
Media technology has acquired a moral status because it has become part of the natural order of things. Luddites, those who have sworn off new technologies, are the new heretics and illiterates. Technology is an absolute. There is no turning back or imagining a different social order. Challenge is acceptable as long as it remains within the confines of the technological order. Apple may challenge Microsoft. Samsung may challenge Apple. But the order must not be challenged.
The impact of digital culture, then, is epistemic; it insinuates a moral system based on its own internal logic.
[…]
In the Apple story, the brand cult began offline, with users meeting in real, physical locations to swap programs and ideas. Now, the Apple community is more diffuse, concentrated in online discussion groups and support forums. However, Apple product launches and conferences remain sacred pilgrimages where Apple fans can congregate, camp, and live together for days at a time to revel in the communal joy of witnessing the transcendent moment of the new product launch.
The reverence once reserved for holy relics and liturgy has reemerged in the technology subculture. The shared experience of living in a highly technological era provides a universal ground for a pluralistic society. There may be many different devices, but only one Internet.
Technology has become the new taken-for-granted order that requires our fidelity. Obedience to the new order is expressed in the communication rituals that take place every day in the use of computers, music players, and smartphones — devices that bind individuals together. From the farthest satellite to the nearest cellphone, the mystical body of electricity connects us all. Personal technology has become “the very atmosphere and medium” through which we mediate our daily lives.
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Locking the (electronic) barn door
The encrypted email service that was reportedly used by Edward Snowden just announced that it will be shutting down:
Today, Lavabit announced that it would shut down its encrypted email service rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” Lavabit did not say what it had been asked to do, only that it was legally prohibited from sharing the events leading to its decision.
Lavabit was an email provider, apparently used by Edward Snowden along with other privacy sensitive users, with an avowed mission to offer an “e-mail service that never sacrifices privacy for profits” and promised to “only release private information if legally compelled by the courts in accordance with the United States Constitution.” It backed up this claim by encrypting all emails on Lavabit servers such that Lavabit did not have the ability to access a user’s email (Lavabit’s white paper), at least without that user’s passphrase, which the email provider did not store.
Given the impressive powers of the government to obtain emails and records from service providers, both with and without legal authority, it is encouraging to see service providers take steps to limit their ability to access user data, as Lavabit had done.
[…]
Lavabit’s post indicates that there was a gag order, and that there is an ongoing appeal before the Fourth Circuit. We call on the government and the courts to unseal enough of the docket to allow, at a minimum, the public to know the legal authority asserted, both for the gag and the substance, and give Lavabit the breathing room to participate in the vibrant and critical public debates on the extent of email privacy in an age of warrantless bulk surveillance by the NSA.
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