In Medium, Matt Haughey puts his finger on the peculiar intimacy Trump conjures with his listeners — a skill he shares with that other performer-turned-pol, Ronald Reagan:

When you see Trump speaking at his stops, he’s clearly talking off the top of his head, and that can be refreshing when compared other political candidates that go off prepared remarks. Politics tackles big important problems that require research, so remarks are usually prepared well in advance. I came away from watching Trump realizing he’s the next phase of George W. Bush, who famously spoke in simple terms that when analyzed for grammar showed up as 8th grade level (most political speeches are at 11th-12th grade level). Everyone watching can understand every word and every sentence, even though what he says usually doesn’t have any specific steps or concrete information on how he’d combat problems.

In these venues Trump is clearly a guy talking off the top of his head, telling you what he really thinks, and it really did feel like he was “not like all the other guys” as he would describe it. People like that for the same reason they liked George W. Bush who I often heard described as “a guy you’d like to have a beer with.”

Trump talking at one of his events is like listening to a podcast, and people might like him for all the same reasons they’d like podcasts. There’s a combo of informality and intimacy that makes you feel like this one person is talking to just you, and telling you amazing things.

John C. Havens in Mashable:

In the near future, multiple devices equipped with facial, vocal and biometric sensors utilizing affective computing will be competing to analyze and influence our feelings… Soon you won’t need to prompt Siri, but simply respond when “she” says, “Your expression seems sad — should I download Trainwreck from iTunes?”

This Internet of Emotions has no ethical standards. While manufacturers’ intentions may be positive, how can people tell? And who decides what “positive” even means? Unless we control our identities other people will create the standards defining our emotional lives….

By definition the benefits of emotional intelligence don’t apply to autonomous devices since they don’t genuinely experience feelings. What they’re great at is recognizing our micro-expressions and then emulating empathy to generate a positive response from us.

Martin Weigert at MeshedSociety:

To some extend, Twitter, with its 140 character limit and its encouragement of instantness and impulsive comments, has turned its users into bot-like creatures, who keep tweeting the same lines, the same reactions, the same ideas, the same arguments. If you are a Twitter user and don’t believe this, just type “[often used word(s)] from:yourusername” into Twitter search. Looking at my own results was pretty uncomfortable.

Sure, there is more humor and irony on Twitter than what you can expect from the encounter with a customer service bot. But only among a subset of users. And only as long as the discussion doesn’t touch sensitive topics such as [enter random object of outrage]. If that happens, everyone sticks to their pre-fabricated text blocks and appears to follow a very narrow conversation protocol.

A quarter-century ago when I first wrote about VR, Jaron Lanier was talking about how we could all become lobsters. Today, porn-VR entrepreneurs are talking about how we can all become lizards. Plus ca change…

From “Behind the Scenes of Tori Black’s Virtual Reality Porn Debut,” by Sarah Ratchford in Vice:

[VR porn exec] Young says this is a good opportunity for people to gain more agency over their identity.

“I think there’s going to be almost like a renaissance. People are going to be able to explore their sexuality in a way that they’ve never been able to before.”

“It’s crazy too, because people may not choose to represent themselves the way that they are in the real world in a VR space,” he says. “You know, I might talk to you and you like lizards, and you’re a big lizard. And I’m an ice cream cone. But if that’s how I choose to represent myself as an avatar, then so be it. And we can still step into a space and have an exciting, interactive and intimate connection with each other.

“[You can] assume the body you like, assume the gender you like, the race you like, and be yourself and explore sexuality. It’s amazing; it’s what we’re on this planet to do.”

…I ask [actress Tori] Black what she thinks, whether she needs her real world boundaries to apply in virtual land.

“I don’t care what my avatar does,” she says, “because my avatar isn’t who I am. So yeah, all the things that you want me to do that I decline, go ahead and have my avatar do them and be like, ‘Hey, look! She finally did it!’ I’ll be like yeah, great. It didn’t cross any of my boundaries because it’s all in the computer… I’m completely disconnected.”

She says the virtual porn landscape is a place for exploration, and those who are uncomfortable with the idea of lack of consent just shouldn’t get involved with it.

Christine Rosen in Slate:

What happens when we know that someone is faking a feeling? We might sense implicitly that our overworked waiter isn’t actually happy to see us when we sit down at his table, but unspoken social conventions allow us to make as much of a pretense of believing his feelings as the waiter does of performing them. But when we interact with robots that we know have been programmed to give everyone the same friendly greeting regardless of anyone’s actual feelings, that unspoken compact disappears… The risk is not a world run by robots (although employers in Japan already use Smile-Scan machines to analyze the smiles of their service workers). The risk is that outsourcing emotional labor to robots and machines could lead to mass emotional deskilling on the part of people.