2
via DT at Facebook—tnx! … Continue reading
Tag Archives: politics
zeph’s pop culture quiz #13 What are these gentlemen deciding? Just leave a comment with your educated guess—you can ask for additional hints, too. [Leaving a comment is easy; just click the ‘Leave a comment’ at the end of the post and fill in the form. If it’s the first time you post a comment, it will be held for moderation. But I am constantly checking, and once I’ve approved a comment, your next ones won’t be held, but published immediately by the system.] UPDATE 1 (02 February 2012): It seems to be a really tough one this … Continue reading
In Ireland they’ve got a saying which roughly goes like this: ‘Guy Fawkes was the only man ever who had honest intentions when he set foot into parliament.’ Well, members of the ↑Palikot’s Movement protested in a session of the Polish parliament against Poland signing ↑ACTA (a kind of international version of ↑SOPA and ↑PIPA) by holding paper Guy-Fawkes masks in front of their faces :o) See also ↵occupy guy, ↵moore on fawkes, and ↵guy headroom. … Continue reading
In ↵manchurian operations club among other things I mused about the detailled historical naturalism of ↑Kuma Reality Games‘ ‘Kuma\War’ [scroll down a bit]. Now those games seem to have generated a dramatic backlash into empirical reality. The ↑Day 6 Documentary: Propaganda Games by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: You don’t have to be a Middle East expert to recognize the relationship between Iran and its western foes has gotten just a wee bit tense. There’s been sabre rattling military exercises, threats to slow the flow of oil to a trickle, downed drones and uranium enrichment in a highly protected … Continue reading
Oh, how I do like this—first ↑The Pirate Bay was a website tracking torrents, then a ↑political party sprouted from it, now there’s a religion. In Sweden ‘Det Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet’ (‘↑Missionary Church of Kopimism‘) is officially recognized as a religion since late December 2011. Especially I do embrace the reference to ↑Aleister Crowley via the slogan ‘Copy and Paste what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ [all in all there are five chapters on Crowley [rhymes on holy] in my old book ‘↓Metatrickster‘ (2004)] At last year’s biannual conference (14-17 September in Vienna, Austria) of … Continue reading
In the sidebar of his blog ↑Dialogic blogger Thivai Abhor maintains a nice list of documentary films which are available online. After having skimmed through a bit, my personal interests were most matched by the three shortly described below. But Dialogic also points to ↑Top Documentary Films, a blog reviewing, commenting, and linking to 1800+ documentary films, all available online, and ↑sorted into categories. ‘↑All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace‘ (Curtis 2011) A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything … Continue reading
The first anthology of essays by ↑William Gibson is out: ‘↑Distrust that particular flavor.’ GIBSON, WILLIAM FORD. 2012. Distrust that particular flavor. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. via ↑entry at ↑boingboing … Continue reading
↓Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you are likely to read, Barefoot Into Cyberspace is the ultimate guided tour of the hopes and ideals that are increasingly shaping world events. Beginning at the Chaos Communications Congress of December 2009, where WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg first presented their world-changing plans to a select audience of the planet’s most skilful and motivated hackers, Barefoot Into … Continue reading
In ↑Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile’s economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende’s government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was … Continue reading
↑David Graeber‘s book ‘↑Debt: The First 5,000 years‘ (2011) just arrived on my desk. Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have the time to sit down and read it in peace. Nevertheless I skimmed through it, read a bit here and there, and then couldn’t help but beginning to read it from the front cover on. It won’t be long and Graeber will owe me hours :-) There are books with which I do maintain a love-hate relationship. While reading those I constantly do have the impression that there really is something more than worthwhile, original, … Continue reading