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Digital Culture

Year Zero

One of my favorite bands has taken an interesting route in publicity for their new album, Year Zero. The album is a concept album concerned with government takeover, corruption, the drugging of the populace, and the downfall of the US.

In promoting the album, they’ve set up a sort of Alternate Reality Game that people are in the middle of now. It began with a website address encoded in the letters on the back of the latest tour shirt, and has continued from there. Last night there was a USB key discovered in the rest room of their latest concert stop that had on it an apparent cut from the new album…and it was determined to be authentic because someone decided to analyze the spectrum of the song and discovered a hidden image in the spectrum, something you couldn’t get by simply encoding an MP3 in a normal fashion.

The best initial discussion of the mystery is taking place over at Echoing the Sound, but there is a wiki that should take over soon, and as always, wikipedia is up on things.

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

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