↑Jean Baudrillard (20 July 1929—06 March 2007)
initially via entry at ethno::log
comments offline
Once again I was forced to take the comments function offline. My countermeasures against spamming were still working and indeed prevented ‘sensible’ spam—spam that actually does advertise something or builds up a web of hyperlinks. Sometimes the filter overdid it and prevented real comments from being posted. That never was the filter’s fault, but mine, as I do the calibration. Anyway, during the last weeks again spam hit my blog, spam of strange proveniences. Some species seem to be mere tests, others I just can’t make neither heads nor tails of. For sure somewhere on the Internet information about this ‘new species’ is to be found, but currently I am occupied with other things and am not willing to dive into according research. As during the last two weeks I wasn’t able to clean up the mess on a daily basis, I decided to take the comments offline again. All comments posted till that time are perfectly save and stored. Except the spam, of course, it went *plonk* into oblivion. As soon as I have enough time at my hands I will search for new countermeasures, install them, and then will bring back the comments on air.
pulp surrealism
Pulp Surrealism is about the secret life of mass culture, specifically its surrealistic undercurrents. It establishes a low-brow, anti-establishment genealogy of the Parisian dada and surrealist movements in the popular realms of crime fiction and sensationalist journalism. Mass culture was not generally inspirational to the surrealists; the vast amount of it was rejected by them as commercialized and mind-numbing. As Aragon stated in Traité du style, “not any old smut is the equivalent of surrealist poetry.” However, the surrealists were connoisseurs of mass culture and they found great sympathies between subterranean impulses in mass culture and their own intellectual and political projects. Unearthing such insolent and popular origins of surrealism is, I think, particularly important today, as the dada and surrealist movements have been elevated to the status of “official culture” in state-sponsored museums and educational systems. (↑Robin Walz)
discoveries
Humankind made two fundamental discoveries which made the invention and development of the computer possible. Firstly the discovery that the empirically graspable world, at least partially, can be described by mathematical models. Secondly the discovery that calculations necessary for prophecies—for the anticipation of events to happen in the future—need not be done by human beings, but can be delegated to machines. Both discoveries have been ↵made in ancient times.
godboxes
The divine spark was the last to arrive. 700 Watts of it. During last week’s course god trickled in piecemeal—neatly packed into seven boxes of diverse sizes. Now I wonder if seven days will suffice for assembling and bringing ↵it to life.
the virtual and the game
Part of nearly every definition of game is, that there are no consequences of in-game actions and decisions to the realms outside of the game. Games have this trait in common with simulations. The decision a pilot makes when inside a flight-simulator only affect the simulation. For a professional airline-pilot, who is forced to regular simulator-sessions by his employer, the sum of his in-simulation actions and decisions of course have an effect on him outside the simulation: If he does badly in the simulation he may have to do more simulator-hours or may be banned from flying a non-simulated plane for a certain time, and so on. But these consequences are situated on another level, as the outcome of a simulation-session is taken into account. The in-simulation actions themselves only affect other elements of the simulation, they remain virtual.
With all kinds of communication online it’s a completely different thing. A flight-simulator ‘only’ pretends to be a flying airplane as it is known outside the simulation, but an IRC-session doesn’t pretend to be a conversation, it is conversation. Hence online-communication can’t be labeled to be virtual. In consequence communities which are formed by use of ICTs can’t be labeled ‘virtual communities’.
While musing about this issues I came to the conclusion that, if we accept the absence of trans-game consequences as a part of the definition of game, soccer is not a game. With the help of this we now can differentiate between games and sports. Soccer-players really run during the match, and get exhausted by it, they hurt each other and have to be treated by a doctor afterwards. Or take a boxing-match: The in-bout going-ons are no simulations as the boxers indeed smash their facial bones to dough, and they can’t leave those consequences inside the arena, but have to take them home. What happens inside the realm of a boxing-match is consequenceful for the participants, but not for the spectators—taken for granted, the live-spectators of a heavyweight championship bout lack a grant afterwards, but that consequence again is situated on a meta-level.
homer3
Time and again The-Simpsons-Halloween-Specials are to be seen on television. In one particular episode, “↑Homer 3“ (1996) ↑by Pacific Data Images, Homer tries to hide behind a cupboard as his wife Marge’s sisters are about to pay a visit to the Simpsons’ home. When Homer touches the wall he discovers that he can reach through it. As he is a TV-buff with an ample pop-culture-knowledge, it’s instantaneously clear to him, that through the wall he can reach another dimension, just like he had seen it in “↑The Twilight Zone“ or Tobe Hooper’s “↑Poltergeist“. When the dreaded sisters-in-law approach menacingly, Homer escapes right through the wall. And he indeed enters a new dimension, a world like, as he himself remarks, it is portrayed in the 1980s’ movie “↑Tron“. Homer isn’t anymore depicted as a flat cartoon-character, but rendered three-dimensionally. He stands on a rectangular grid—the ever-resurfacing archetypical symbol for computer-generated 3d-space—, neon-glowing mathematical equations and geometrical primitives float and drive around in space. In the end Homer unvoluntarily opens a fast growing black hole into which the whole space and its contents, including himself, vanishes … just to reappaear in, well, yet another world.
This reminded me of yet another episode, “↑The mysterious voyage of Homer“ (1997), wherein Homer eats quite a quantity of extremely spicy chilli-con-carne and in consequence has to live through a LSD-style trip. He enters another world (the techniques used by the artists change here, too), speaks to a turtle and a fox, climbs a meso-american pyramid and so on—an allusion to drug-induced experiences of separate realities described by famous cultural anthropologist, pop-culture hero, and godfather of the New Age, Carlos Castaneda.
In the early 1970s drugs were the metaphors for portals to other worlds, since “Neuromancer” and “Tron” it’s ICTs. And I am inclined to believe that the idea for the computer-rendered Homer was triggered by Homer-themed modifications of player characters for First-Person multiplayer-shooters.
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the economical relevance of cyberanthropology
Sooner or later the time may well come that I have to advertise me—read: sell myself ;-) If so, I’d advertise ‘cyberanthropology’ to the suits’n’ties like that:
A television show which is produced on virtually no budget at all, but has an audience of millions worldwide, neither gets public or commercial funding, nor is the industry interested in placing advertisement. A company tries to lure an audience of several hundred into buying music online by offering three songs for free, while said audience’s members are right in the act of exchanging terabytes of music for free. Without having any professional affiliation whatsoever with the manufacturing companies, globally dispersed collectives of unpaid individuals furnish countless man-hours to get commercial products succesfully on as many shop shelves as possible, and to keep them there as long as possible. “Wtf?” you ask? Well, …
wag the dog
In a 1994 television interview with ↑Alexander Kluge, ↑Niklas Luhmann warned: “Vorsicht vor zu raschem Verstehen!” [Attention if something is understood too quickly.] 70 years earlier, Hercule Poirot said: “If a thing is clear as daylight—eh bien, mistrust it! Someone has made it so.”—from Agatha Christie’s “The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim” (1924).
02/11
the day ↑DRM went down on its knees again
As far as I understand the matter, it now is possible to decrypt the contents of ↑HD DVD and ↑Blu-ray Discs, because for both the same root/master key is used. For all about the processing key and the technicalities, go to the ↑according thread at ↑Doom9. For German-only passers-by, ↑Heise has a story. The whole matter is not only a current one, work and discussion are still going on right now, but is very interesting as well. The contents of said thread, the interaction taking place there, already is a premium example for everybody trying to understand hacker culture. Also very enlightening is ↑SFAM’s well-balanced article at his site ↑cyberpunkreview.com—his entry actually pointed me to the whole thing, tnx (he in turn found it ↑via boingboing). Here is a quote from a ↑comment to his article:
But in the case of people cracking codes; it’s going to happen one way or another. We have been living in the Neuromancer world for decades, people want to break the ice, not just for personal gain but because they can. A bungee jumper doesn’t jump to get paid, but to prove they can, to beat the black ice of physics and become more than who they are. When the button says “do not open” who here has the self-control not to have a peek inside? [“Neuromancer” is a novel by ↑William Gibson (↵1984). In this novel “ice” means “intrusion counter electronics”, think ↑firewall—“black ice” means ice being lethal for the intruder or hacker.]
Everything falls into place with ↵the infancy of Internet television and ↵the taming of the boomslang.