This Tuesday, a new controversy came out of left-field, leaving critics and onlookers gobsmacked – the culprit, you ask? The unsuspecting Controversy Machine.
“This is crazy, and I am obligated to have an incredibly strong opinion about this”, said one critic.
Created by PhD Physics student Hun Gree-Fuvues for their Doctoral Thesis, the Controversy Machine uses the latest advances in hardware to generate the most disagreeable sentiment more concisely expressed than ever before, creating the most strife for the least amount of energy.
Sensei Shanoliz M., advisor to the project and Budo master said, “We managed to atomise the very nature of being annoying”, later adding, “This is 100% bang for your buck… pure crystallised indignation.”
Students of Durham University are currently polarised on the matter. Rallies have been held on Palace Green, blocking off access to the lecture theatres there and University college.
“No Justice No Peace”, read the placard of one protester.
The University has yet to take any action on the matter, asking students to sort it out amongst themselves, but did order “that at least three local students are smacked in the face”.
The Controversy Machine was modelled on a prototype that has been used by the Durham Union since at least 2015, to automate the writing of its Friday Debate Motions.
One analyst said about the matter, “The real technological advancement comes in the payload delivery, which is done entirely algorithmically through social media [..] research indicates that through targeted dissemination, controversy can be up to a whopping 1000% more rage-inducing.”
Another analyst analogised that wildfires start best when you target the dry grass.
Nue Z. Furnue-zesayk, a data analyst who helped work on the project, gave some graphs that said something about the topic:
As can be clearly seen from the data, shock is more or less equivalent to horror, and overall controversy ratings are quite high – in short – the line goes up.
Unsure of what to make of this, we asked Voka Shun, a Pro on the matter and Editor-In-Chief of the Gilesgate Press, who had this to say:
“There can be no end to the expansion of Media. Only the foolish claim that the Empire died – it will live on so long as there is still an inch of life to be grasped by Spectacle. Media, like bacteria, like profit, like cancer. When discursive power belongs to the Commodity, finitude can be written as infinitude, and expansion can be endless. The Commodity speaks through Images and it says this: Forget everything they ever said, I lay before you but one choice: Live so that you may serve me infinitely. There is no soul, but all husks belong to me.”
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