Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda

Most people follow a summary dismissal heuristic: given surface characteristics of a message, they quickly judge whether it is worth considering or dismiss with a “oh, that’s just silly!” I like to call it the silliness heuristic: we ignore “silly” things except being in a playful mood.What things are silly? One can divide silliness into epistemic silliness, practical silliness, social silliness and political silliness.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction.We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it.

Une superproduction européenne, un scénario haletant, des personnages touchants... La mission sur la comète Tchouri s'est révélée aussi passionnante qu'un long métrage. Analyse de la mise en récit de cet exploit cosmique.

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every fiction is already The writer’s task is to invent Ballard

Fiction and reality. Here is the twosome that Edward Snowden has perhaps the most sustainably shaken. Some alerts had already been raised with the revelation of the Echelon system at the end of the last century; the ever-growing number of terrorism laws, the progressively more oligopolistic Internet ecosystem during the 2000s… But, by revealing - that is materialising - the surveillance mechanisms that control every aspect of our lives, en masse and with no criteria, Edward Snowden has turned the anxiety of the future into a terror of the present.

RT @mathieumatiu: Predicting the present: Science Fiction as a lens for focusing on today (with

Writing the future: A timeline of science fiction literature

After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat — too radical even for Al Qaeda! — administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

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