Glitch News Network: glitched and mashed news in less than 2 seconds

The Glitch News Network is the latest twitterbot from Shardcore, a prolific purveyor of mad bots (previously).

The bot “scrapes various online news sources for images of the latest stories,” which are then “glitched and mashed into a video which lasts less than 2 seconds.”

Often action occurs even before conscious recognition. For example, if someone throws a brick at you, you ‘instinctively’ dodge (assuming it’s in your field of view). In this instant, a phenomenal number of computations are carried out – identifying the brick, calculating it’s trajectory, calculating an appropriate response and coordinating your muscles to move out of the way – in fact your conscious awareness of the situation often occurs after this whole sequence has happened.

If we objectively examine our behaviour, the vast majority of our actions are being carried out ‘subconsciously’, and hence they tend to remain ‘invisible’ to us, and therefore seemingly of no concern. Subliminal messages play on this disconnect between subconscious and conscious recognition. That’s how advertising works.

The Glitch News Network perhaps offers a glimpse of the future, where we further disengage from our conscious central executor and merely stream blipverts at our subconscious.

Glitch News Network
[Shardcore]