Unconventional Brain Action—This Week On VICE: Members Only
· Vice
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Like all things, the virtues or drawbacks of AI depend entirely on whose hands it’s in. Scammers trying to extort the last of your nan’s savings by WhatsApping her deepfakes of you hog-tied in the boot of an Audi? Bad. Chipotle working with Palantir on food safety? Not ideal. Vibe coders playing around with a simulation of an adult male fruit fly’s brain like a kid with two Barbie dolls, forcing it to trade crypto, parallel park on a driving simulator, and be bisexual? Actually quite good tbf.
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Mapped out by scientists using AI, the reproduction of the fruit fly’s neural network was considered a major and potentially life-saving breakthrough in neuroscience. We thought it would be fun to make it do something even more important, and asked it to come up with a series of VICE headlines. Results included “hell mosquito erect chrome the latest film to the early days of memories about sex” and “bin juice ultimate djing.”
Interestingly, they were all in lowercase. Stay posted for the fruit fly’s forthcoming Substack essay on the new Phoebe Bridgers album.
In the meantime, behold our experiment below:
We Hijacked a Fruit Fly’s Brain and Made It Write VICE Headlines
While you were busy toying with digital insect innards on the internet, two lads were plastering each other’s blood across the concrete floor of a warehouse and hugging afterwards.
This week we launched Heavy Weekend, an Away Days limited series made in collaboration with VICE. The first episode looks into the rise of “no rules” fighting: an extreme form of combat that permits head stamping, choking, and eye-gouging. This isn’t a sport, it’s “organized ultraviolence,” and it’s on the rise. Getting to the heart of its growing popularity, Heavy Weekend spends some time with Urban Gladiators, one of the first “no rules” fight clubs in the UK, where skirmishes are arranged in hidden locations and aired on private PPV, as young men risk it all on the concrete.
Created by Jake Hanrahan and Jonny Pickup, Heavy Weekend brings you drive-by dispatches from the outskirts of society. In addition to underground fight clubs, the series will give you a glimpse of illegal street races, mysterious armed organizations, and other local countercultures that exist in total ignorance of over-managed, mass-surveilled modern life—or as a direct result of it. You can decide for yourself when you watch.
When asked by VICE to name the biggest misconception about someone who’s into “no rules” fighting, Hanrahan said:
“I think the most common is that somebody who’s interested in it is some kind of political extremist. You hear that quite a lot. The other one is they’re a nasty, violent, angry person. But generally I’ve found the opposite is true. The people who are most interested in organized violence or combat sports tend to be people who know themselves a little more than others. They tend to be more grounded. I don’t see them doing a lot of bitching or two-faced stuff, which in itself is a form of violence—a violence of the spirit, maybe, but it is a form of violence and one of the most detestable… I’d much prefer to hang out with somebody that’s more willing to fight it out than bitch and moan and deceive. People that are into combat sports and organized violence are no different from anybody else, they just understand the ‘human condition’ a little better.”
Watch episode one of Heavy Weekend at VICE: Members Only and the VICE YouTube channel now, and read our full interview with Jake below:
English Ultraviolence: Extreme ‘No Rules’ Fight Clubs Are On the Rise in the UK
Emma Garland
Deputy Editor, VICE Magazine
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
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