Capt. Wardrobe - December 2021
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Collect token & Unlock to proceed
The Collectables market has been steadily growing for last 40 years, but the concept of children collecting toys as sets goes back as far as hunting for butterflies & looking for & trading stories of fairies in the woods.
The old hobbyist endevours of stamp collecting & train spotting, seen by many as nerdy & obsessive, was capitalised into a marketing gimmick of collecting Baseball cards, Panini football trading stickers of the 80's
You had to fill a book of teams up with stickers, and i remember it well back in the day the card packets were easy to buy but every book was hard to fill - and like a minor gambling scam - a lot of average players were included in every packet (i think i had 14 Paul Mariners at one stage!) and, conversely, scarcity of top players was induced into the mechanism - this ensured sometimes not so ethical competitive trading in the school yard. It is still a huge business.
Indeed I can remember my then step-daughter aged 7, had more than a passion & fascination with the Littlest pet shop collectables.
One day, while she was at school, myself & her mum found she had been trading her most loved with a very unscrupulous young madam, who was swapping all her 'doubles' off to our poor unsuspecting young lady, telling her, it was cool to make gangs of the same character...!
Eventually we had the inevitable parents meeting & agreed to reswap all the toys back to the right kid, and in their original positions!
Playground rules
Jocks V Nerds
The nerdification of culture - introduction of Nerdy archetypal characters who love STEM, sci fi and gaming into mainstram media may at first appear to be a backlash against HOMO-JOCKO bullying tendencies seen in school playgrounds & College frat hazing...Could it be also seen as a cultic steering device to popularise both obsessive collection / & bullying tactics in the 'grab it first' economy as a controlled paradigm of learned behaviours?
NekroTronic; PLOT:
Evil Gets Rebooted:
A man who discovers that he is part of a secret sect of magical beings who hunt down and destroy demons on the internet. The Internet has been invaded by an evil force-
boxes placed around the city, look like wifi tech - but are far far more evil & insipid, they contain the heads of Demon slayers & are used to collect the souls of unwitting smartphone users playing a game app...
The Movie nekrotronic (see above) also highlights another element of smart phone gaming - the collecting and unlocking (in this case ghosts) as also seen in Pokemon Go! which by no co-incidence evolved from a card collectable Top Trumps type battle game.
Is this entire scam being made into a virtual version of this as Non fungible Tokens? in one word. YES!
Pr Newswire Trading Card market
Sports card collecting boom explained
Like crypto, NFTs live on a digital shared-ledger, or blockchain, platforms that embrace transparent, crowd-verified system for record keeping and work to make tracking, validating & transferring certain kinds of assets fast, seamless and outside the control of any single entity.
There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one. And by the time we all thought we sort of knew what the deal was, the founder of Twitter put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT. Now, months after we first published this explainer, we’re still seeing headlines about people paying house-money for clip art of rocks — and my mom still doesn’t really understand what an NFT is.
"Non-fungible" more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.
Non Fungible Tokens explained
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The Internet - Google - Facebook - Pokemon
All NSA / CIA / Military R&D
Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA. Seriously
By Jim Edwards
Updated on: July 11, 2011 / 8:12 AM / MoneyWatch
You don't need to wear a tinfoil hat to believe that the CIA is using Facebook, Twitter, Google (GOOG) and other social media to spy on people. That's because the CIA publishes a helpful list of press releases on all the social media ventures it sponsors, via its technology investment arm In-Q-Tel.
The companies that take In-Q-Tel's money aren't shy about publicizing what they're up to, either. Most recently, GeoSemble announced an update to its GeoXray product, which monitors social media chatter based on location:
This capability benefits business users who may be monitoring competition, supply chain activity or business opportunities in a county, neighborhood or border region.
For governments at the city, local and Federal levels it brings the ability to visualize activity in a given area filtered by topic, time and location.
... we can deliver whatever information is available about that place from websites, blogs, tweets and other social media automatically and accurately ...
The world's largest database on individuals
One of the main threats to privacy comes from advertisers, who want to track everything consumers do on the web and scrape their online accounts for personal information. It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, to learn that the CIA and the worlds largest ad agency network, WPP (WPPGY), have been in bed together on a social media data-mining venture since at least January 2009. WPP currently claims to own the world's largest database of unique individual profiles -- including demographic, financial, purchase and geographic histories. WPP's Visible Technologies unit took an investment from In-Q-Tel in fall of 2009. Visible Technologies develops tools that can scan social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
WPP also funded Omniture, a marketing ROI agency, with $25 million in January 2009. Omniture's Visual Sciences unit has also taken In-Q-Tel money. The CIA re-upped with Visible Technologies as part of another $6 million funding round in March 2011.
Other companies that mine web data and have taken In-Q-Tel investments include:
Fetch Technologues: "Fetch's customized software agents navigate websites to instantly deliver meaningful, useful and reliable data, and easily integrate with a company's existing data management system for immediate analysis."
Google and CIA: old friends
Are you seeing a trend yet? Google (GOOG) has been a partner with the CIA since 2004 when the company bought Keyhole, a mapping technology business that eventually became Google Earth. In 2010, Google and In-Q-Tel made a joint investment on a company called Recorded Future, which has the Minority Report-style goal of creating a "temporal analytics engine" that scours the web and creates curves that predict where events may head.
Google is already helping the government write, and rewrite, history. Here, from its transparency report, are some stats on the amount of information it has either given to the government or wiped from the web based on requests by U.S. agencies:
4,601 requests from U.S. government agencies for "user data"
Cleversafe: A cloud-based storage company that, as Wired notes, is "'ideal for storing mission critical data by addressing the core principles of data confidentiality, integrity and availability.' (Incidentally, those principles also spell out CIA)."
Cloudera: provides data storage software that makes it easy for governments to process and analyze vast amounts of information.
Google complied with government requests for user data 94% of the time.
1,421 requests for "content removal"
Google complied with content removal requests 87% of the time.
15 requests were from "executive, police etc."
1 was a national security request.
Google
Is Facebook funded by the CIA?
Pokemon GO is CIA
More CIA funded companies here:
