From Talkingpointsmemo.com: a YouTube video clip of Senator Obama on Charlie Rose in 2004, explaining sentiments similar to those that recently got him called "elitist."
I think it is pretty clear here that, far from being elitist, Senator Obama is doing his best to explain the anxieties of working class people to the (largely privileged) media. For those of you "sick of the politics" of this campaign season, watch his thoughtful analysis here and then look me in the eye and tell me you've seen a politician who thinks and speaks like this in your lifetime.
You haven't. And you won't again. This is your chance America. Don't screw it up.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Another Good Column
By Garrison Keillor on Salon. He's been a bit hit-and-miss over there lately. This is a good one though.
The Pedagogy of Narcissistic Smarm
To involve my students in my lecture on Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" I asked them to provide some examples of contemporary youth subcultures, and how those subcultures might be engaging in the sort of semiotic rebellion that Hebdige suggests is the interesting potential of subculture. They named the emo, goth, and indy scenes as contemporary subcultures.
My favorite part: during the wrap-up I referred to the "emo-goth continuum" as being made up of "various distillates of crude punk." Clever, right?
Yep, that's what keeps me teaching, folks. The opportunity to say clever things in front of a captive audience.
My favorite part: during the wrap-up I referred to the "emo-goth continuum" as being made up of "various distillates of crude punk." Clever, right?
Yep, that's what keeps me teaching, folks. The opportunity to say clever things in front of a captive audience.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Anthony Famiglietti 1919-2008
One of my earliest childhood memories is of spending a warm spring day with my paternal grandfather. I was a fanciful child, I always wanted to play games based on "imagination." The influence of Sesame Street no doubt. My parents tired of these imaginary exercises, since a young boy's notion of what a submarine or spaceship might be like is not very entertaining to an adult. But my grandfather indulged me, as grandparents will. That afternoon we were playing "Time Machine." We set the imaginary dial, and off we went to the sixties, or the forties, or the thirties, and with each stop my Grandfather would tell me stories of his experience in that time, tell me what it had been like to live through the depression, through the war, through the boom-time afterward. I remember being astounded at the long thread of living memory he possessed, and the ease and joy with which he wove that thread into tales and anecdotes.
That thread is broken now.
Like any good post-modern child of the mediated age, I have recorded images of my grandfather. Squeezed some small portion of the man's vast memory into patterns of bits, in the latest iteration of what must be a human tradition dating back to when we first became able to speak, but the full richness of his experience, and the funny, vibrant, sometimes bawdy man who lived it - that's all gone now.
Goodbye, Grandpa
That thread is broken now.
Like any good post-modern child of the mediated age, I have recorded images of my grandfather. Squeezed some small portion of the man's vast memory into patterns of bits, in the latest iteration of what must be a human tradition dating back to when we first became able to speak, but the full richness of his experience, and the funny, vibrant, sometimes bawdy man who lived it - that's all gone now.
Goodbye, Grandpa
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Fafblog is Back
Fafblog, the death of which I blogged mournfully about a while ago, has returned to life! New posts here.
Ever since I put up the earlier post despairing of Fafblog's apparent demise, the blog here has been getting google hits from far and wide (so Google analytics tells me) based on some combination of the search terms "fafnir" "Chris Mastrangelo" "fafblog" etc. Each hit filled me with a sense of warmth, of community. Somewhere on the net, they told me, someone was searching for the same thing I had lost, someone was wishing on the same star.
And today, someone cruised by my blog to drop a comment and let me know fafblog was live again... how cool is that?
Ever since I put up the earlier post despairing of Fafblog's apparent demise, the blog here has been getting google hits from far and wide (so Google analytics tells me) based on some combination of the search terms "fafnir" "Chris Mastrangelo" "fafblog" etc. Each hit filled me with a sense of warmth, of community. Somewhere on the net, they told me, someone was searching for the same thing I had lost, someone was wishing on the same star.
And today, someone cruised by my blog to drop a comment and let me know fafblog was live again... how cool is that?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Race and US politics
Malcolm X may have famously said that "Racism is a Cadillac, they release a new model every year," but today Pat Buchanan demonstrated that it would be foolish of us to assume that every Cadillac on the road is the most recent model year.
Yes, I spend a fair amount of time in Ethnic Studies classes talking about "color-blind racism" and "subtle racism" and often have to explain to my students who Willie Horton was and what the Rodney King case was about. Sometimes the texts I use seem awfully out of touch with their attitudes, and the seemingly more complex and subtle racial etiquette of early 21st century America.
But in this post responding to Senator Obama's speech on Race and Racism in America, good old Pat Buchanan shows us that a whole boatload of good, old fashioned racism is still alive and well in our contemporary moment. To summarize, here are a few arguments that Mr. Buchanan makes here, that I really thought we had mostly left behind in our National discourse:
-That Black Americans should be grateful that their ancestors were made slaves and brought to the United States
-That white racism was in no way responsible for the Watts riots and other civil unrest in poor black neighborhoods
-That the Black America is solely responsible for poverty and lack of opportunity in poor Black communities
-That Black people are criminals who prefer to prey upon white victims
The last one really gets me. He trots out crime statistics that claim "black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse" Yeah Pat, because those stats couldn't possibly be influenced by who feels comfortable reporting crimes, who trusts the criminal justice system to take their reports seriously, or who has more property to steal. Nope. Black folks just like crime, and especially like committing crimes against white victims.
Meanwhile he makes the same old plea decrying affirmative action, writing "Let [Senator Obama] go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids." Gee, Pat, did you miss the part of the speech where Senator Obama (who Pat calls "Barack" all through his piece, cause, you know, he apparently gets to pick and choose which United States Senators deserve the honorific) specifically recognized the anger and frustration of poor whites "who don't feel particularly privileged by their race," and admitted that their concerns might be valid and deserved respect - even if the target of their anger might be misplaced? Did you miss the part where he called on America not to think of politics as a "zero sum game" and to try to work towards solutions that might be beneficial to Black and White Americans alike?
And yet this man is not a fringe commentator. He is a first string pundit, called on by all the major networks to give his opinion on matters of the day. So I guess this sort of "old model racism" has gone exactly nowhere and is still front and center in our politics.
To paraphrase a writer over at Daily Kos, thanks for clearing that up, Pat.
Yes, I spend a fair amount of time in Ethnic Studies classes talking about "color-blind racism" and "subtle racism" and often have to explain to my students who Willie Horton was and what the Rodney King case was about. Sometimes the texts I use seem awfully out of touch with their attitudes, and the seemingly more complex and subtle racial etiquette of early 21st century America.
But in this post responding to Senator Obama's speech on Race and Racism in America, good old Pat Buchanan shows us that a whole boatload of good, old fashioned racism is still alive and well in our contemporary moment. To summarize, here are a few arguments that Mr. Buchanan makes here, that I really thought we had mostly left behind in our National discourse:
-That Black Americans should be grateful that their ancestors were made slaves and brought to the United States
-That white racism was in no way responsible for the Watts riots and other civil unrest in poor black neighborhoods
-That the Black America is solely responsible for poverty and lack of opportunity in poor Black communities
-That Black people are criminals who prefer to prey upon white victims
The last one really gets me. He trots out crime statistics that claim "black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse" Yeah Pat, because those stats couldn't possibly be influenced by who feels comfortable reporting crimes, who trusts the criminal justice system to take their reports seriously, or who has more property to steal. Nope. Black folks just like crime, and especially like committing crimes against white victims.
Meanwhile he makes the same old plea decrying affirmative action, writing "Let [Senator Obama] go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids." Gee, Pat, did you miss the part of the speech where Senator Obama (who Pat calls "Barack" all through his piece, cause, you know, he apparently gets to pick and choose which United States Senators deserve the honorific) specifically recognized the anger and frustration of poor whites "who don't feel particularly privileged by their race," and admitted that their concerns might be valid and deserved respect - even if the target of their anger might be misplaced? Did you miss the part where he called on America not to think of politics as a "zero sum game" and to try to work towards solutions that might be beneficial to Black and White Americans alike?
And yet this man is not a fringe commentator. He is a first string pundit, called on by all the major networks to give his opinion on matters of the day. So I guess this sort of "old model racism" has gone exactly nowhere and is still front and center in our politics.
To paraphrase a writer over at Daily Kos, thanks for clearing that up, Pat.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Happy Easter!!
From YouTube's magnificent collection of sesame street videos.
Kudos to the Children's Television Workshop for not aggressively pursuing copyright enforcement on these. Fans have done a grand job of organizing these old clips and making them accessible.
Kudos to the Children's Television Workshop for not aggressively pursuing copyright enforcement on these. Fans have done a grand job of organizing these old clips and making them accessible.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Computer Countup
My headcount of laptop computers in the room at Larry Lessig's "Change Congress" press conference:
5 Macbooks
1 Macbook pro (Dr. Lessig's)
3 PCs
... I just found this a fun factoid. I'm sure the real journalists and bloggers with reader counts out of the single digits will do a better job writing up substantial facts than I will.
5 Macbooks
1 Macbook pro (Dr. Lessig's)
3 PCs
... I just found this a fun factoid. I'm sure the real journalists and bloggers with reader counts out of the single digits will do a better job writing up substantial facts than I will.
Blogging Right Now!
Pictured here, me chilling in a Washington D.C. bookstore on my way to a Press Conference being held by the great Larry Lessig. I might even get to say hello! Happy day!
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Its been awhile
Soooo I forgot to update my blog for a month. Sorry JS, MP, MD, and CW I realize this left you without a needed source of reading material. Here's what I've been up to:
-Spent about a week canvassing for Obama. I like to canvass, it gets you out in the world, teaches you about the place you live and who lives there. You learn who lives where, and a little bit about how they live. You meet guys who want to talk to you about Mike Huckabee on their way to wash their truck, and kids smoking weed and playing video games at 2 on a Monday afternoon. You learn the smell of different neighborhoods. You get to feel like a badass field commander as you run through housing developments and apartment buildings in the dark on high speed literature drop runs, barking out target addresses to your friends. Good times.
-Of course, then when your candidate loses, times are not so good. Especially when you spent the day running through the sleet trying to Get Out the Vote. Very depressing. I think perhaps I'm bad luck, since this always seems to happen to me. Maybe I should campaign for the Republicans.
-Meanwhile, I've been wrestling with the Human Subjects Review Board here to get my dissertation approved. I had to reassure them that I will not be administering electrical shocks to wikipedia users, presumably with some sort of shock over IP technology. I wish I had shock over IP technology, I would use it on the people who try to put spam comments on my blog advertising kiddie porn. Very nasty.
-Spent about a week canvassing for Obama. I like to canvass, it gets you out in the world, teaches you about the place you live and who lives there. You learn who lives where, and a little bit about how they live. You meet guys who want to talk to you about Mike Huckabee on their way to wash their truck, and kids smoking weed and playing video games at 2 on a Monday afternoon. You learn the smell of different neighborhoods. You get to feel like a badass field commander as you run through housing developments and apartment buildings in the dark on high speed literature drop runs, barking out target addresses to your friends. Good times.
-Of course, then when your candidate loses, times are not so good. Especially when you spent the day running through the sleet trying to Get Out the Vote. Very depressing. I think perhaps I'm bad luck, since this always seems to happen to me. Maybe I should campaign for the Republicans.
-Meanwhile, I've been wrestling with the Human Subjects Review Board here to get my dissertation approved. I had to reassure them that I will not be administering electrical shocks to wikipedia users, presumably with some sort of shock over IP technology. I wish I had shock over IP technology, I would use it on the people who try to put spam comments on my blog advertising kiddie porn. Very nasty.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Travelogue
I have always enjoyed highway travel. There is a feeling of freedom there, a feeling of independence that I think might (in part) come from being in-between well defined places - in the gap in the map that seems to belong to everyone and no one all at once. An illusion, of course, the omnipresent highway patrol cruisers tell you that, but a potent illusion all the same - one that seems all the more poignant in these days of peak oil (and now, perhaps, peak food) since it isn't really clear how much longer the asphalt and concrete rivers of our firefly American empire will continue to flow with traffic. How much longer the highway experience and its strange euphoria will still be available and affordable for folks like me. I had a bit of a trip today, a usual run down interstate 80, coming home from my girlfriend's place. I thought I would record some brief observations, just for my own enjoyment...
-I had wondered why I always shared 80 with great convoys of Fed-Ex trailers, some double or even triple trailers strung together, especially through central PA. This trip the obvious occurred to me. The eastward terminus of 80, only a few hours from my starting point this morning, is New York City. Those Fed-Ex convoys were loaded this morning in Hoboken, or some other Lagrange point of the socio-economic gravitational pull of Manhattan island, with freight from the bustling commercial center of the eastern seaboard megalopolis. Route 80 would be the most direct road west, toward the continental interior and, beyond that, the pacific.
-There is a strange feeling in the highway rest-stops of a toll-road expressway, as Route 80 is in central Ohio. The rest-stop is nowhere, a part of no political entity, it feels self-contained... like a sort of pocket universe. This feeling is particularly acute at the Angola rest-stop, on Route 90 west of Buffalo, which is in the space between the westward and eastward lanes of the highway - you access it through a glassed-in pedestrian bridge. I have been to most of the Ohio turnpike rest-stops east of Toledo at this point. None of them have quite the no-zone feeling of Angola, but they all still conjure the feeling of liminality. One wonders what will happen to these little enclaves when the oil runs out. What will our descendants make of them? How will they understand why we needed so many bathrooms, so far away from everyone?
-Heading east while I headed west, I spotted the most tangible sign I have seen yet of our imperial entanglements, perhaps of our eventual demise. Strapped to the back of a flat-bed truck, somewhere in western PA or eastern OH was an MRAP. It was squat, and beige and angry looking - like a Chevy Tahoe on steroids with military training and a bad attitude. I wondered if it was heading for its point of departure, for a ship heading for Iraq or Afghanistan. Of course, my oil-fueled reveries are, in part, what have conjured up our need for such monsters.
So I suppose, in the end, the highway will have to go. I will miss it, though, when it is gone.
-I had wondered why I always shared 80 with great convoys of Fed-Ex trailers, some double or even triple trailers strung together, especially through central PA. This trip the obvious occurred to me. The eastward terminus of 80, only a few hours from my starting point this morning, is New York City. Those Fed-Ex convoys were loaded this morning in Hoboken, or some other Lagrange point of the socio-economic gravitational pull of Manhattan island, with freight from the bustling commercial center of the eastern seaboard megalopolis. Route 80 would be the most direct road west, toward the continental interior and, beyond that, the pacific.
-There is a strange feeling in the highway rest-stops of a toll-road expressway, as Route 80 is in central Ohio. The rest-stop is nowhere, a part of no political entity, it feels self-contained... like a sort of pocket universe. This feeling is particularly acute at the Angola rest-stop, on Route 90 west of Buffalo, which is in the space between the westward and eastward lanes of the highway - you access it through a glassed-in pedestrian bridge. I have been to most of the Ohio turnpike rest-stops east of Toledo at this point. None of them have quite the no-zone feeling of Angola, but they all still conjure the feeling of liminality. One wonders what will happen to these little enclaves when the oil runs out. What will our descendants make of them? How will they understand why we needed so many bathrooms, so far away from everyone?
-Heading east while I headed west, I spotted the most tangible sign I have seen yet of our imperial entanglements, perhaps of our eventual demise. Strapped to the back of a flat-bed truck, somewhere in western PA or eastern OH was an MRAP. It was squat, and beige and angry looking - like a Chevy Tahoe on steroids with military training and a bad attitude. I wondered if it was heading for its point of departure, for a ship heading for Iraq or Afghanistan. Of course, my oil-fueled reveries are, in part, what have conjured up our need for such monsters.
So I suppose, in the end, the highway will have to go. I will miss it, though, when it is gone.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
A Cyberpunk Moment
I found this thing adhering to a gas pump at a station in Toledo, like some sort of technological barnacle. It was a tiny advertisement-bot, playing pre-recorded sound ads from some sort of chip while I pumped my gas. It seemed very cyberpunk-esque to me, an example of a sort of omni-present cheap technology bolted onto the older infrastructure of monopoly capitalism.
The Tag of the Semester
Someone is tagging up my campus with this little stencil. I don't mind, of course, street art is cool with me. I'm just curious as to what it might signify.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Three Words
Warren. Ellis. Webcomic.
You read that right, Warren Ellis, the mind that brought you Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants, is doing a free weekly webcomic.
This is the most awesome thing I have heard about in minutes... and that is a long time on the internet.
Intro poster is on Ellis's blog here
Comic will be up here starting Feb 15. Some funky teaser art up there now...
You read that right, Warren Ellis, the mind that brought you Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants, is doing a free weekly webcomic.
This is the most awesome thing I have heard about in minutes... and that is a long time on the internet.
Intro poster is on Ellis's blog here
Comic will be up here starting Feb 15. Some funky teaser art up there now...
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Oblivion
This last week has been taken up by a lot of playing with technology... rebuilding computers, installing software, working out bugs.
And games... I got onto a game kick for a day or two - Half-Life 2...
I don't know why I did it, why I spent my week the way I did. I didn't want to do anything more substantial. Maybe it was the spillover from last week's stuff. Maybe it was just the old habits of an addict. Maybe it was just procrastination before starting the large and scary project of my dissertation.
Video games are strange. A form of oblivion, really... you forget your senses besides vision and hearing, and those are degraded. Returning to your body... to the smell in your nose and the feel of the clothes against your skin, is a strange sensation.
So, I went seeking oblivion after a brush with it. A story common enough throughout human experience, I suspect. Strange though, how oblivion drives us into its own arms...
the death-urge, I suppose Freud would say
Anyway, some new stuff up on my flickr account, so check that out, and I've revamped copyvillain.org -if anyone is interested.
Copyvillain is running MediaWiki now, as a small part of my diss research... if anybody has any ideas on things to do with a wiki server, let me know.
And games... I got onto a game kick for a day or two - Half-Life 2...
I don't know why I did it, why I spent my week the way I did. I didn't want to do anything more substantial. Maybe it was the spillover from last week's stuff. Maybe it was just the old habits of an addict. Maybe it was just procrastination before starting the large and scary project of my dissertation.
Video games are strange. A form of oblivion, really... you forget your senses besides vision and hearing, and those are degraded. Returning to your body... to the smell in your nose and the feel of the clothes against your skin, is a strange sensation.
So, I went seeking oblivion after a brush with it. A story common enough throughout human experience, I suspect. Strange though, how oblivion drives us into its own arms...
the death-urge, I suppose Freud would say
Anyway, some new stuff up on my flickr account, so check that out, and I've revamped copyvillain.org -if anyone is interested.
Copyvillain is running MediaWiki now, as a small part of my diss research... if anybody has any ideas on things to do with a wiki server, let me know.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Life and Death
So, I've had a chance to calm down a bit after my previous outburst.
Nothing's really happening here, my Grandfather's illness hasn't really manifested itself yet...
Except for this persistent cough. Innocent sounding enough, you'd think he had a cold, if you didn't know about the tumor sleeping in his lungs.
When I first got here, he told me he was afraid. He asked me if there was anything I knew that could help him.
You know, me with all my advanced education that he never had. Seems logical enough to expect me to know something useful.
All I could come up with was, "well... you aren't alone."
And I'm thinking of Conrad noting that we live and dream alone. I'm thinking of Baudelaire rejecting the rotting flesh for gleaming metal. I'm thinking of the cyberpunk kids trying to crawl out of their doomed bodies through their modems.
I'm thinking, that none of that would probably make him feel much better. But then, I'm not trained to comfort people, I'm trained to upset them.
So all I can really do is be here, and only be here for a little while, before the needs of my own life call me back halfway across the country. It seems like too little...
Everything is coming out wrong tonight. Not like I want it to.
Let me just leave you with a verse from a Chris Pureka song I find fairly apt right now...
Nothing's really happening here, my Grandfather's illness hasn't really manifested itself yet...
Except for this persistent cough. Innocent sounding enough, you'd think he had a cold, if you didn't know about the tumor sleeping in his lungs.
When I first got here, he told me he was afraid. He asked me if there was anything I knew that could help him.
You know, me with all my advanced education that he never had. Seems logical enough to expect me to know something useful.
All I could come up with was, "well... you aren't alone."
And I'm thinking of Conrad noting that we live and dream alone. I'm thinking of Baudelaire rejecting the rotting flesh for gleaming metal. I'm thinking of the cyberpunk kids trying to crawl out of their doomed bodies through their modems.
I'm thinking, that none of that would probably make him feel much better. But then, I'm not trained to comfort people, I'm trained to upset them.
So all I can really do is be here, and only be here for a little while, before the needs of my own life call me back halfway across the country. It seems like too little...
Everything is coming out wrong tonight. Not like I want it to.
Let me just leave you with a verse from a Chris Pureka song I find fairly apt right now...
Take care of yourselves, everybody.
Life is cruel and it's clumsy
(but we never explain)
I wish I could say that it's better than that
(why we treasure our secrets)
but this is our time
(how we're in love with our sadness sometimes)
this is all that we have 'til we turn out the lights...
Saturday, January 26, 2008
This one is a bit personal
And I wanted to keep this blog from being too too personal. But fuck it. I need to write this. My google analytics numbers say this blog is only being read by like, 4 or 5 of my closest personal friends anyway. So fuck it. This one is a bit personal. So be it.
Where to start...
So I get this phone call, a week ago, from my father. He sounds weird. Not himself. I ask him what is up.
"I, um, guess it was a good thing you made it to see your grandfather over Christmas," he says.
My family, we seem like very blunt people at first. Get to know us, and it turns out we have a hard time saying certain things directly.
He finally manages to get out that my 88 year old Grandfather has been diagnosed with a cluster of quite lethal conditions. I won't spell it all out. Let's put it this way. The Cancer will kill him of one of the others doesn't get him first.
(Does this seem written in a manner too stylized? Does that seem cold? I feel strange about it, the prose. I'm sorry for the pretense of art or something like art here. It is selfish. But there's nothing I can do about this. All I can do is write. Writing is all I know how to do. It is so little.
It is all I have.)
Anyway, I spend this last week in a bit of a daze. Pack up after my class on Thursday. Drive back East to where my Grandfather lives... for at least a little bit longer.
And now I am here. In the condo on the Connecticut side of the sound where they moved after leaving the house on Long Island they raised my father in. The smell of my grandparents is thick here. Sweet, and somehow still faintly smoky though my Grandmother has been in a home since her stroke, and no longer sits in the kitchen smoking and making chicken cutlet. It is a family smell, somehow, my Father's home in Ithaca has taken on a hint of it. Some protein in our skin perhaps.
We are not to tell my grandmother her husband is sick. She can't speak since the stroke, her understanding is suspect. I think she's still smarter than all of us, though, I think she knows the score.
The strange thing is, how normal everything is. My grandfather has changed not at all in his outward appearance since I last saw him. He has declined any treatment. Hospice care visits the home once a day to check on him. He has been prescribed atavan for his anxiety.
The anxiety of, you know, dying.
This, I think, is the ultimate expression of our consumer culture. We must make even comfort for the dying into a consumable good, into a pill. Into a commodity to be produced and circulated. All our needs must be fulfilled by capital.
The thing that really set me off was the box in the refrigerator. A box full of morphine - the drug of last resort, the thermonuclear weapon of pharmacology.
This box, mute testament to the imminent mortality of someone I love, carries - like everything else in 21st century America, a brand label.
It is a Hospice Care ComfortPak(tm).
ComfortPak
This sent me over the edge. Made me briefly channel Theodore Adorno. What fucking soulless marketing major threw that one out to the 8am meeting. ComfortPak. Missing a goddamn letter. You know. To make sure they can trademark it. Claim it as property. Commodify it. Properly seek return on their investment.
Oh, and by the way, shit on the dignity of the mortally ill by refusing to call the medicine that will ease the agony of their final hours by its proper fucking name. Or at least with real words. From a real language, spoken by an actual, living culture.
That, of course, might suggest that there are things that ought not to be commodified. That human beings are more than just consumers. That comfort for the dying is not a thing to be bought and sold, but a human right and a human responsibility. That caring for each other might be our human responsibility.
But what would I know about that?
All I can do - is write.
Where to start...
So I get this phone call, a week ago, from my father. He sounds weird. Not himself. I ask him what is up.
"I, um, guess it was a good thing you made it to see your grandfather over Christmas," he says.
My family, we seem like very blunt people at first. Get to know us, and it turns out we have a hard time saying certain things directly.
He finally manages to get out that my 88 year old Grandfather has been diagnosed with a cluster of quite lethal conditions. I won't spell it all out. Let's put it this way. The Cancer will kill him of one of the others doesn't get him first.
(Does this seem written in a manner too stylized? Does that seem cold? I feel strange about it, the prose. I'm sorry for the pretense of art or something like art here. It is selfish. But there's nothing I can do about this. All I can do is write. Writing is all I know how to do. It is so little.
It is all I have.)
Anyway, I spend this last week in a bit of a daze. Pack up after my class on Thursday. Drive back East to where my Grandfather lives... for at least a little bit longer.
And now I am here. In the condo on the Connecticut side of the sound where they moved after leaving the house on Long Island they raised my father in. The smell of my grandparents is thick here. Sweet, and somehow still faintly smoky though my Grandmother has been in a home since her stroke, and no longer sits in the kitchen smoking and making chicken cutlet. It is a family smell, somehow, my Father's home in Ithaca has taken on a hint of it. Some protein in our skin perhaps.
We are not to tell my grandmother her husband is sick. She can't speak since the stroke, her understanding is suspect. I think she's still smarter than all of us, though, I think she knows the score.
The strange thing is, how normal everything is. My grandfather has changed not at all in his outward appearance since I last saw him. He has declined any treatment. Hospice care visits the home once a day to check on him. He has been prescribed atavan for his anxiety.
The anxiety of, you know, dying.
This, I think, is the ultimate expression of our consumer culture. We must make even comfort for the dying into a consumable good, into a pill. Into a commodity to be produced and circulated. All our needs must be fulfilled by capital.
The thing that really set me off was the box in the refrigerator. A box full of morphine - the drug of last resort, the thermonuclear weapon of pharmacology.
This box, mute testament to the imminent mortality of someone I love, carries - like everything else in 21st century America, a brand label.
It is a Hospice Care ComfortPak(tm).
ComfortPak
This sent me over the edge. Made me briefly channel Theodore Adorno. What fucking soulless marketing major threw that one out to the 8am meeting. ComfortPak. Missing a goddamn letter. You know. To make sure they can trademark it. Claim it as property. Commodify it. Properly seek return on their investment.
Oh, and by the way, shit on the dignity of the mortally ill by refusing to call the medicine that will ease the agony of their final hours by its proper fucking name. Or at least with real words. From a real language, spoken by an actual, living culture.
That, of course, might suggest that there are things that ought not to be commodified. That human beings are more than just consumers. That comfort for the dying is not a thing to be bought and sold, but a human right and a human responsibility. That caring for each other might be our human responsibility.
But what would I know about that?
All I can do - is write.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Post Human Reverie
My right hip pocket holds a microwave transmitter smaller than my wallet. My left hip pocket holds 24 hours of music frozen in a solid-state logic with no moving parts and wrapped in clean, polished metal. My backpack holds: a Charged-Coupling Device based Digital Imager with a thousand image storage capacity, a multi-processor computer running a souped-up descendant of BSD Unix, and a moving map display screen that by listening to radio-frequency whispers from a dozen screamingly accurate atomic clocks in low earth orbit can fix my position on the surface of the earth to 3 meters accuracy. I just got off the phone with a nice man somewhere on the Indian subcontinent. He's sending me 5280 milliampers of electrical power stored in lithium metal with a solid polymer electrolyte.
It all sounds pretty bad-ass and cyberpunk if you write it up right. :P
It all sounds pretty bad-ass and cyberpunk if you write it up right. :P
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Fun with old technology
Pictured above, two distant cousins - my beloved Macbook, and an ancient Compaq Presario 1210. I snagged the compaq from a buddy of mine who was chucking it out, I decided to be geeky and put linux on it for the heck of it. The compaq will run Damn Small Linux, but just barely. However, it lacks network capability, and even USB ports (at least that I can see, Linux says it detects USB on boot, maybe an unused controller built into the mainboard somewhere?) so I'm scratching my head as to how to use it. Digital picture frame maybe... but the screen is only 800x600 and a bit grainy. I wish I could think of some sort of, shall we say, artistically interesting one-time use... but I'm drawing a blank.
Anyway, it felt like time travel to switch between the compaq and the macbook, so I thought I would take a snapshot of them side-by-side. With my motorola razor picture phone. Which also seemed a little anachronistic as the compaq brought me down the memory lane of boot-floppies and text-only displays.
Then, just to be fair, I had my macbook take a picture of my phone.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Happy New Year
I'm writing this from a hotel room overlooking downtown Ithaca, NY. Ithaca is an interesting town, it still has echoes in its architecture from its days of light industry - the long closed Ithaca gun works - but today, of course, the economy revolves around the tens of thousands of undergraduates receiving expensive private educations up on the south hill, at Cornell and Ithaca College. One of them has a building festively lit with the numbers "07" to commemorate the year's end. What will happen in the strange "post-industrial" economy of Ithaca and the United States in the coming 2008, the year after the housing bubble burst and the easy credit went away? Only time will tell.
For tonight all the best to you and yours.
Happy New Year.
For tonight all the best to you and yours.
Happy New Year.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Kite. Powered. Cargo. Ship.
Kite powered cargo ships are more steam-punk than you!
Sadly, the kite doesn't provide all of the ship's power, just a energy saving boost to the existing diesels... but still, this is pretty cool.
Coming soon to an ocean near you... the wind-powered supertanker :)
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Today I'm gonna get some work done...
Honest! But first one more post....
This article on Slate (the microsoft-owned news magazine site) discusses the failings of Yahoo's Answers service. Yahoo Answers allows users to post a question to the site, which is then answered by other users. The idea is that this will allow a user to get answers to questions that aren't easily parsed by a search engine. The site hopes to tap its users' collective intelligence (that oft alluded to, "wisdom of crowds") by generating large numbers of answers and then allowing users to select the best answer by voting.
Practically, the site works. It has attracted some 120 million users and if you pose it a question you receive an answer (many answers) fairly promptly. Users vote on answers. The technology works.
The Slate article argues that the community enabled by the technology doesn't work as well. As an example, they provide this odd - and both factually and ethically incorrect - list of answers to the question "What beliefs and customs did Native Americans hold in common."
I'm skeptical about Yahoo Answers, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. But I'm MORE skeptical about this example. The question is terrible! It misleads readers from outside the U.S. for whom "Native American" doesn't necessarily carry the same meaning as it does for U.S. residents. In the U.S. we take "Native American" to mean "A descendant of one of the groups of people living in the Americas before the European conquest" but the use of this phrase is fairly recent, and not globally consistent. In Canada, for example, the term used is "First Nations person." A reading of the answers - including the answer voted to be the best, "Apple Pie," and a variety of other answers that criticized "Native Americans" for being fat, rude, and watching too much TV - suggests quite strongly to me that many global readers took "Native American" to mean "Native born citizen of the United States." Slate points out that Yahoo answers draws its users from "all over the world" but doesn't seem aware that worldwide differences in understanding could be affecting the site. If you take "Native American" to mean "Native born U.S. citizen," the answer that "Apple Pie" is a "belief or custom held in common by Native Americans" actually makes a fair amount of sense. It isn't a great answer, (the best answer to this essentialist question would be "nothing") but it isn't as laughably bad and nonsensical as Slate makes it seem.
The question is also misspelled, and invites the worst sorts of bigotry, mythologizing, and prejudice. Plenty of that is evident in the list of responses. The fact that the relatively benign "Apple Pie" beat out the more hateful (and sentimental) stuff actually says something good about the folks on Yahoo answers.
Still, I'm skeptical about the quality of content this system can provide. Yahoo has basically implemented an information plebiscite, drawing on users to select the "correct" answer from a list. This process is fast - which is clearly what Yahoo wants, it wants a human powered search engine - but has little else to recommend it. User bigotry and ignorance might easily win the day.
Wikipedia, which Slate compares positively to Yahoo Answers, is a different beast. The difference is not, however, best explained by Slate's assertion that "Wikipedia users work harder." The difference is best explained by the fact that, in contrast with Yahoo Answer's plebiscite, Wikipedia has implemented democracy (maybe even anarchy) where users deliberate, debate, discuss, and collaborate to produce content - rather than just voting it "up or down."
I'd love to play with the Yahoo site and see what I could find, but my diss is on Wikipedia! I need to work on that now! Yikes!
This article on Slate (the microsoft-owned news magazine site) discusses the failings of Yahoo's Answers service. Yahoo Answers allows users to post a question to the site, which is then answered by other users. The idea is that this will allow a user to get answers to questions that aren't easily parsed by a search engine. The site hopes to tap its users' collective intelligence (that oft alluded to, "wisdom of crowds") by generating large numbers of answers and then allowing users to select the best answer by voting.
Practically, the site works. It has attracted some 120 million users and if you pose it a question you receive an answer (many answers) fairly promptly. Users vote on answers. The technology works.
The Slate article argues that the community enabled by the technology doesn't work as well. As an example, they provide this odd - and both factually and ethically incorrect - list of answers to the question "What beliefs and customs did Native Americans hold in common."
I'm skeptical about Yahoo Answers, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. But I'm MORE skeptical about this example. The question is terrible! It misleads readers from outside the U.S. for whom "Native American" doesn't necessarily carry the same meaning as it does for U.S. residents. In the U.S. we take "Native American" to mean "A descendant of one of the groups of people living in the Americas before the European conquest" but the use of this phrase is fairly recent, and not globally consistent. In Canada, for example, the term used is "First Nations person." A reading of the answers - including the answer voted to be the best, "Apple Pie," and a variety of other answers that criticized "Native Americans" for being fat, rude, and watching too much TV - suggests quite strongly to me that many global readers took "Native American" to mean "Native born citizen of the United States." Slate points out that Yahoo answers draws its users from "all over the world" but doesn't seem aware that worldwide differences in understanding could be affecting the site. If you take "Native American" to mean "Native born U.S. citizen," the answer that "Apple Pie" is a "belief or custom held in common by Native Americans" actually makes a fair amount of sense. It isn't a great answer, (the best answer to this essentialist question would be "nothing") but it isn't as laughably bad and nonsensical as Slate makes it seem.
The question is also misspelled, and invites the worst sorts of bigotry, mythologizing, and prejudice. Plenty of that is evident in the list of responses. The fact that the relatively benign "Apple Pie" beat out the more hateful (and sentimental) stuff actually says something good about the folks on Yahoo answers.
Still, I'm skeptical about the quality of content this system can provide. Yahoo has basically implemented an information plebiscite, drawing on users to select the "correct" answer from a list. This process is fast - which is clearly what Yahoo wants, it wants a human powered search engine - but has little else to recommend it. User bigotry and ignorance might easily win the day.
Wikipedia, which Slate compares positively to Yahoo Answers, is a different beast. The difference is not, however, best explained by Slate's assertion that "Wikipedia users work harder." The difference is best explained by the fact that, in contrast with Yahoo Answer's plebiscite, Wikipedia has implemented democracy (maybe even anarchy) where users deliberate, debate, discuss, and collaborate to produce content - rather than just voting it "up or down."
I'd love to play with the Yahoo site and see what I could find, but my diss is on Wikipedia! I need to work on that now! Yikes!
Monday, December 10, 2007
Bruce Sterling Posts an Interview with Arundahti Roy
Bruce Sterling has posted an Indian TV interview with author and activist Arundahti Roy to his blog, Beyond the Beyond. I'm a fan of both, though I wonder if Roy really means what Sterling (who can on occasion seem like a bit of a Western Chauvinist) thinks she means. Always good to hear from Arundahti Roy, though.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Today's Lesson: IRC
Well folks, I seem to have inadvertently started blogging a great deal. Probably because I have work to do, and have unplugged my TV to keep myself from getting distracted. So I distract myself with blogging instead.
I've noticed several of these posts could be loosely organized as "Information about features of Cyberspace I find interesting." Or perhaps a series titled "Andy teaches you N00bs about teh Internets."
Today's Lesson: IRC
IRC, or internet relay chat, is one of the great grand-daddy internet applications. Its the chat utility most favored by hard-core geeks and nerds, who often spend VERY significant amounts of time chatting with people they have never met IRL (In Real Life) there. Many chat rooms on IRC are open to all, and can be a useful resource for projects that need a publicly available space for synchronous that isn't bound to a particular proprietary piece of software or website. This includes the Wikipedia project, as well as some less wholesome projects, including pirate software groups that use IRC to distribute the location of (often hijacked) FTP servers offering software for download. IRC is a fairly wild, uncensored piece of the internet that hasn't been "tamed" by recent mainstream commercial interest in the 'net like the web has.
Of course, homeland security is probably monitoring everything that goes one there, they aren't dumb.
Anyway, IRC's uncensored culture can be both liberating and fun, and abusive and cruel. Several websites I've recently discovered via Stumbleupon post excerpts of transcripts of IRC chats containing jokes, funny typos, and various comical goings on from IRC. I think they do a pretty good job of capturing both the fun and more abusive side of the culture there. (WARNING - PAGE CONTAINS SOME FAIRLY UNPLEASANT TEXTUAL CONTENT)
Here are some excerpts for y'all. (note for readers: IRC conventions put the name of the user "speaking" in angle brackets, like this <+username> followed by the utterance made by that user. The following, for example, is an exchange between a user named "thumb" and a user named "lucent")
<+thumb>do you know of any major organizations that are similar the CDC?
<+lucent>who?
<+thumb>center for disease control
<+lucent>i said WHO
<+thumb>what? i'm asking you
<+lucent>World Health Organization
(Another, demonstrating the jargon of young nerdlings)
<+firefly>Time for my prayers:
<+firefly>Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck!
<+firefly>May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!
<+firefly>May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven.
<+firefly>Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.
<+firefly>And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just <+firefly>as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us.
<+firefly>Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the fbi off our backs, we'd appreciate it.
<+firefly>For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3s 4ever and ever, 4m3n.
(And another, demonstrating how speech and action are conflated in the space of IRC, and one clever user's application of this fact.)
<+mOrphz> damn it :/
<@Lego> damn it :/
<+mOrphz> stop that
<@Lego> stop that
<+mOrphz> :D
<@Lego> :D
<+mOrphz> Lego smells
<@Lego> Lego smells
<+mOrphz> /quit
quit: (Lego) (~leet@apex|Lego.user.gamesnet) (Quit)
(NOTE: I've had to add the "+" sign to usernames to keep blogger from thinking they are html tags and deleting them. Stupid blogger.)
I've noticed several of these posts could be loosely organized as "Information about features of Cyberspace I find interesting." Or perhaps a series titled "Andy teaches you N00bs about teh Internets."
Today's Lesson: IRC
IRC, or internet relay chat, is one of the great grand-daddy internet applications. Its the chat utility most favored by hard-core geeks and nerds, who often spend VERY significant amounts of time chatting with people they have never met IRL (In Real Life) there. Many chat rooms on IRC are open to all, and can be a useful resource for projects that need a publicly available space for synchronous that isn't bound to a particular proprietary piece of software or website. This includes the Wikipedia project, as well as some less wholesome projects, including pirate software groups that use IRC to distribute the location of (often hijacked) FTP servers offering software for download. IRC is a fairly wild, uncensored piece of the internet that hasn't been "tamed" by recent mainstream commercial interest in the 'net like the web has.
Of course, homeland security is probably monitoring everything that goes one there, they aren't dumb.
Anyway, IRC's uncensored culture can be both liberating and fun, and abusive and cruel. Several websites I've recently discovered via Stumbleupon post excerpts of transcripts of IRC chats containing jokes, funny typos, and various comical goings on from IRC. I think they do a pretty good job of capturing both the fun and more abusive side of the culture there. (WARNING - PAGE CONTAINS SOME FAIRLY UNPLEASANT TEXTUAL CONTENT)
Here are some excerpts for y'all. (note for readers: IRC conventions put the name of the user "speaking" in angle brackets, like this <+username>
<+thumb>do you know of any major organizations that are similar the CDC?
<+lucent>who?
<+thumb>center for disease control
<+lucent>i said WHO
<+thumb>what? i'm asking you
<+lucent>World Health Organization
(Another, demonstrating the jargon of young nerdlings)
(And another, demonstrating how speech and action are conflated in the space of IRC, and one clever user's application of this fact.)
<+mOrphz> damn it :/
<@Lego> damn it :/
<+mOrphz> stop that
<@Lego> stop that
<+mOrphz> :D
<@Lego> :D
<+mOrphz> Lego smells
<@Lego> Lego smells
<+mOrphz> /quit
quit: (Lego) (~leet@apex|Lego.user.gamesnet) (Quit)
(NOTE: I've had to add the "+" sign to usernames to keep blogger from thinking they are html tags and deleting them. Stupid blogger.)
Saturday, December 08, 2007
A Short Observation Attributed to Issac Asimov
I found via the magic of stumbleupon. I can't help but think it its connected, somewhat tangentially, to my previous discussion of the Writers' strike. It points out the way that value is socially constructed in a fairly elegant way.
The WGA Strike - A Post Long Delayed
Delayed because I suspect my views may upset even some of my friends. Thus when thmarn posted her entry praising Tina Fey for her participation in the strike I never posted anything here on the same subject, even though I really wanted to.
But yesterday I received an email from another friend on the subject of the WGA strike, and I decided I needed to write up my thoughts.
Let me begin by saying that, as a solution to a short-term problem, I support the Writers' strike. The profits being realized by distribution companies for online content, or the potential future profits on that content ought to be shared with the writers that helped to create that content.
In the long term, however, I'm conflicted. The Writers' demand makes sense in a world where the production of culture is professionalized. I'm just not sure such a world can ever be a just world.
My reasoning is simple: professional culture (this includes the music, publishing, and film/TV industries, as well as the educational industry that I myself work in) = exploitation. Everyone who gets to make a living writing, singing, teaching, researching, etc. is - in our current economy - fed and clothed with the surplus labor of others.
During the summer of my 17th year, I spent two weeks on the floor of a plastic factory in Elbridge, New York. I meant to spend the whole summer working there, save up for a vacation, but I just couldn't hack it. After two weeks I chickened out and quit. The factory was a windowless corrugated aluminum box. It reeked of molten plastic - a thick, strangely sweet stink. My tasks included counting and boxing parts, and removing parts from molds. The presses moved so fast you couldn't think while you worked on them, any half-formed thought was destroyed by the need to watch for the next part, perform your tiny task at the right moment. Time seemed to stand still. I worked second shift. I would get home at 11pm wired, unable to sleep. I would finally pass out around 2 or 3 am, wake up again at 11 or noon. Just in time to get ready, and drive myself in to report to work at 2:15. I spent two weeks only seeing the sun for an hour and a half a day. I couldn't do it. I had the luxury of being able to quit. So I did.
Some do not have that luxury. Some must stay. Those who stay, both there and in other places around the world, make all the things that take care of me. Their being trapped in a place like the one I fled frees me to spend my days writing, researching and teaching. Morally, I am indebted to them.
The only way I can think of to repay that debt is to work on scholarship and pedagogy that tries to imagine a world without these class stratifications, tries to imagine a world where some are not fated to toil while others are fated to sing.
Thus, when I read Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, write of how he hoped his work could lead towards a vision of a "post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard to make a living." I thought it was an interesting idea to investigate.
Stallman's language is naive, and he underestimates the difficult task he has imagined, but I think the goal remains a worthy one. Free Software Foundation was one of the earliest organizations to work on the GNU/Linux operating system. The GNU/Linux operating system was one of the first prominent and successful Free Software Projects. Free Software was one of the earliest examples of what is now being called, "user created content."
Do you see what I'm getting at here?
In my opinion the technologies that enable "user created content," wikipedia, youtube and the like. Can be developed in one of two ways, depending on the social, political, and economic choices we make as a culture.
In one scenario, they can be developed in such a way as to use users as the ultimate low-payed labor. To exploit them as free labor while the profits and control decisions remain in the hands of distributors. This scenario sees capital use the idea of user creation as an ideological tool. A mere cover for its continuing exploitation. The post-scarcity society would be assumed, rather than created.
In the other, user created content could be used as part of a larger movement to explode our society's contemporary caste system and open up the possibility of creativity to everyone. The larger, more democratic field of meaning making could help transform ideology and open up the social imagination to begin working out ways we could have a world in which "everyone's life could be a work of art." This scenario sees social movements and activists get on board with user-created content projects, pushing their boundaries and motivating users to become politically and socially active in helping to redefine the meaning of intellectual property and extending the reach of these projects beyond the elites they currently serve.
This entry is a mess of thoughts in the process of being worked out. I hope I've made at least some sense.
In short, I support the Writers' in the sense that I don't think that the distributors should be allowed to hog the profits they are making on distributing their intellectual property online. However, in the end I don't believe a system of cultural production based on profit and property can ever be just. We need to start imagining a new one. User-created content models could be a place to start, if we get involved and keep them from being used as an ideological cover for continued profiteering.
So, that's me. What do other folks think?
But yesterday I received an email from another friend on the subject of the WGA strike, and I decided I needed to write up my thoughts.
Let me begin by saying that, as a solution to a short-term problem, I support the Writers' strike. The profits being realized by distribution companies for online content, or the potential future profits on that content ought to be shared with the writers that helped to create that content.
In the long term, however, I'm conflicted. The Writers' demand makes sense in a world where the production of culture is professionalized. I'm just not sure such a world can ever be a just world.
My reasoning is simple: professional culture (this includes the music, publishing, and film/TV industries, as well as the educational industry that I myself work in) = exploitation. Everyone who gets to make a living writing, singing, teaching, researching, etc. is - in our current economy - fed and clothed with the surplus labor of others.
During the summer of my 17th year, I spent two weeks on the floor of a plastic factory in Elbridge, New York. I meant to spend the whole summer working there, save up for a vacation, but I just couldn't hack it. After two weeks I chickened out and quit. The factory was a windowless corrugated aluminum box. It reeked of molten plastic - a thick, strangely sweet stink. My tasks included counting and boxing parts, and removing parts from molds. The presses moved so fast you couldn't think while you worked on them, any half-formed thought was destroyed by the need to watch for the next part, perform your tiny task at the right moment. Time seemed to stand still. I worked second shift. I would get home at 11pm wired, unable to sleep. I would finally pass out around 2 or 3 am, wake up again at 11 or noon. Just in time to get ready, and drive myself in to report to work at 2:15. I spent two weeks only seeing the sun for an hour and a half a day. I couldn't do it. I had the luxury of being able to quit. So I did.
Some do not have that luxury. Some must stay. Those who stay, both there and in other places around the world, make all the things that take care of me. Their being trapped in a place like the one I fled frees me to spend my days writing, researching and teaching. Morally, I am indebted to them.
The only way I can think of to repay that debt is to work on scholarship and pedagogy that tries to imagine a world without these class stratifications, tries to imagine a world where some are not fated to toil while others are fated to sing.
Thus, when I read Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, write of how he hoped his work could lead towards a vision of a "post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard to make a living." I thought it was an interesting idea to investigate.
Stallman's language is naive, and he underestimates the difficult task he has imagined, but I think the goal remains a worthy one. Free Software Foundation was one of the earliest organizations to work on the GNU/Linux operating system. The GNU/Linux operating system was one of the first prominent and successful Free Software Projects. Free Software was one of the earliest examples of what is now being called, "user created content."
Do you see what I'm getting at here?
In my opinion the technologies that enable "user created content," wikipedia, youtube and the like. Can be developed in one of two ways, depending on the social, political, and economic choices we make as a culture.
In one scenario, they can be developed in such a way as to use users as the ultimate low-payed labor. To exploit them as free labor while the profits and control decisions remain in the hands of distributors. This scenario sees capital use the idea of user creation as an ideological tool. A mere cover for its continuing exploitation. The post-scarcity society would be assumed, rather than created.
In the other, user created content could be used as part of a larger movement to explode our society's contemporary caste system and open up the possibility of creativity to everyone. The larger, more democratic field of meaning making could help transform ideology and open up the social imagination to begin working out ways we could have a world in which "everyone's life could be a work of art." This scenario sees social movements and activists get on board with user-created content projects, pushing their boundaries and motivating users to become politically and socially active in helping to redefine the meaning of intellectual property and extending the reach of these projects beyond the elites they currently serve.
This entry is a mess of thoughts in the process of being worked out. I hope I've made at least some sense.
In short, I support the Writers' in the sense that I don't think that the distributors should be allowed to hog the profits they are making on distributing their intellectual property online. However, in the end I don't believe a system of cultural production based on profit and property can ever be just. We need to start imagining a new one. User-created content models could be a place to start, if we get involved and keep them from being used as an ideological cover for continued profiteering.
So, that's me. What do other folks think?
Thursday, December 06, 2007
And Now For Something Completely Different
My wiki research has lead me to branch out from wikipedia, and look at some of the other wiki sites hosted by Jimmy Wales' Wikia project. These sites use the same mediawiki software as wikipedia and share many of the same community production practices. The goals of these sites, however, are not the same as Wikipedia's.
Many of the sites, such as wookiepedia, are fan sites, essentially replicating the wikipedia project of compiling encyclopedic knowledge, only for some fictional universe (wookiepedia, as the name suggests, is devoted to the star wars universe) rather than the actual universe.
This is pretty interesting in and of itself. A bit like falling into one of Borge's mythical libraries and finding all those guidebooks and maps to places that never were.
But what really has sucked me in these last few days is Uncyclopedia. Billing itself as "the content free encyclopedia" (a play on Wikipedia's subtitle "The Free Encyclopedia") Uncyclopedia is a gallery of the absurd, offering up things like blatantly false Biographies and lists of such useless and silly ideas as the "List of weapons that shoot other weapons which don't exist but should." The site even uses its own structure to poke fun at wikipedia and revel in the absurd by organizing articles into ridiculous categories such as: things George Bush most certainly cares about and things god hates according to Fred Phelps.
The coolest thing about this site is the way it seems to directly invert wikipedia's goal. Where wikipedia seeks to create and organize meaningful, useful information uncyclopedia spins a frantic bricolage of meaningless, useless nonsense. It is rather like the Dada movement with web access.
At least, at its best. Much of uncyclopedia's "content" (anti-content??) falls short of the mark of being truly absurd and is merely silly and sophomoric, often misogynist, racist, and homophobic.
However, I think this entry manages to get it right, to break the bounds of hegemonic meaning and its endless quest for "useful forces" and "productive bodies", to float out as far from power/knowledge as you could reasonably hope to get.
Nothing, of course, is really free or innocent. But man. That gets close.
Many of the sites, such as wookiepedia, are fan sites, essentially replicating the wikipedia project of compiling encyclopedic knowledge, only for some fictional universe (wookiepedia, as the name suggests, is devoted to the star wars universe) rather than the actual universe.
This is pretty interesting in and of itself. A bit like falling into one of Borge's mythical libraries and finding all those guidebooks and maps to places that never were.
But what really has sucked me in these last few days is Uncyclopedia. Billing itself as "the content free encyclopedia" (a play on Wikipedia's subtitle "The Free Encyclopedia") Uncyclopedia is a gallery of the absurd, offering up things like blatantly false Biographies and lists of such useless and silly ideas as the "List of weapons that shoot other weapons which don't exist but should." The site even uses its own structure to poke fun at wikipedia and revel in the absurd by organizing articles into ridiculous categories such as: things George Bush most certainly cares about and things god hates according to Fred Phelps.
The coolest thing about this site is the way it seems to directly invert wikipedia's goal. Where wikipedia seeks to create and organize meaningful, useful information uncyclopedia spins a frantic bricolage of meaningless, useless nonsense. It is rather like the Dada movement with web access.
At least, at its best. Much of uncyclopedia's "content" (anti-content??) falls short of the mark of being truly absurd and is merely silly and sophomoric, often misogynist, racist, and homophobic.
However, I think this entry manages to get it right, to break the bounds of hegemonic meaning and its endless quest for "useful forces" and "productive bodies", to float out as far from power/knowledge as you could reasonably hope to get.
Nothing, of course, is really free or innocent. But man. That gets close.
Robin Weirauch for Congress!
I don't think I actually have any readers here where I live in Ohio's fifth congressional district, but in case I do I would like to inform them that Greatconcavity officially endorses Robin Weirauch in the upcoming special congressional elections here! Here are some of her campaign ads!
If you are in favor of helping build the democratic majority in congress and undermining some of the lousy stuff the Republican party is doing to our country, please help get out the vote for Robin. She has a shot at picking up a seat that the conventional wisdom says should be a safe bet for the Republicans. Her campaign is getting national attention and support. This one is for real.
http://www.robinweirauch.com/
Even if you are outside the district or state, you can still volunteer to be a part of the virtual phonebank and get out the vote.
Click here for information on virtual phonebanking.
If I'm reaching anyone on Ohio 5, please get out and vote in the special election next Tuesday, December 11. Turnout will be small in this special election and every vote will really count.
If you are in favor of helping build the democratic majority in congress and undermining some of the lousy stuff the Republican party is doing to our country, please help get out the vote for Robin. She has a shot at picking up a seat that the conventional wisdom says should be a safe bet for the Republicans. Her campaign is getting national attention and support. This one is for real.
http://www.robinweirauch.com/
Even if you are outside the district or state, you can still volunteer to be a part of the virtual phonebank and get out the vote.
Click here for information on virtual phonebanking.
If I'm reaching anyone on Ohio 5, please get out and vote in the special election next Tuesday, December 11. Turnout will be small in this special election and every vote will really count.
Monday, December 03, 2007
For my Loyal Readers in Minnesota
I was cleaning out my pictures folders on my hard-drive in an attempt to free up some drive space and found this gem. It brought me back to some good times this summer, and I hope it brings you guys back too.
Teh Funny
I found this over at the ol' Talking Points Memo. Thought I would do my (small) part to help its viral spread:
Here's What I am Working On
This is the very poetic introduction I have written for my diss proposal. It is sort of useless as far as the proposal is concerned, and may be cut, but I thought I would share it here... cause I kinda like it.
At the climax of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Case, the protagonist, is in a bit of a pickle. An amoral computer intelligence answering to the callsign “wintermute” has blackmailed him into doing its bidding by inserting time-release capsules of a crippling toxin into his bloodstream. Capsules only wintermute can disarm. Over the course of the book, Case has jumped through an increasingly unlikely series of hoops, all with the goal of appeasing the AI and saving his nervous system from the poison. He has helped engineer a riot, stolen a digital recording of his dead mentor's personality, ascended into earth orbit, and helped break into the elite Tessier-Ashpools family's private section of a resort space station. Now one final challenge remains. He must convince the bored, decadent heiress of the Tessier-Ashpools – a sociopathic clone called 3Jane – to speak the secret password that will free wintermute from electromagnetic bondage and thus fulfill Case's obligation. Case finally exhorts her, “Give us the fucking code [...] if you don't what'll change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter .... I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!” She relents. The word is spoken. Wintermute is emancipated. Something changes.
Exactly what that something is is difficult to judge, even after Gibson's pair of sequels attempt to explain it. It doesn't much matter for the purposes of this dissertation. What matters is 3Jane's decision, to set free an unknown, possibly dangerous (we know, for example, that one part of Wintermute's escape plan involved the murder of a child) technological entity in return for the vague promise that it will “change something.” Her choice is in many ways emblematic of my own feelings about the information technologies I study. I know these technologies are not innocent. As Donna Haraway and others have pointed out, they were originally conceived in the heart of cold war weapons labs as part of that era's terrifying dance with nuclear annihilation. Yet still, faced with the dismal prospects of status-quo industrial capitalism, the allure of advanced electronic technology might change something is undeniable. So we set the machines free, and wait to see what happens. This dissertation will be an attempt to chart some small piece of what has happened. An attempt to begin to understand what is changing, and where those changes might be leading us.
At the climax of William Gibson's Neuromancer, Case, the protagonist, is in a bit of a pickle. An amoral computer intelligence answering to the callsign “wintermute” has blackmailed him into doing its bidding by inserting time-release capsules of a crippling toxin into his bloodstream. Capsules only wintermute can disarm. Over the course of the book, Case has jumped through an increasingly unlikely series of hoops, all with the goal of appeasing the AI and saving his nervous system from the poison. He has helped engineer a riot, stolen a digital recording of his dead mentor's personality, ascended into earth orbit, and helped break into the elite Tessier-Ashpools family's private section of a resort space station. Now one final challenge remains. He must convince the bored, decadent heiress of the Tessier-Ashpools – a sociopathic clone called 3Jane – to speak the secret password that will free wintermute from electromagnetic bondage and thus fulfill Case's obligation. Case finally exhorts her, “Give us the fucking code [...] if you don't what'll change? What'll ever fucking change for you? You'll wind up like the old man. You'll tear it all down and start building again! You'll build the walls back, tighter and tighter .... I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!” She relents. The word is spoken. Wintermute is emancipated. Something changes.
Exactly what that something is is difficult to judge, even after Gibson's pair of sequels attempt to explain it. It doesn't much matter for the purposes of this dissertation. What matters is 3Jane's decision, to set free an unknown, possibly dangerous (we know, for example, that one part of Wintermute's escape plan involved the murder of a child) technological entity in return for the vague promise that it will “change something.” Her choice is in many ways emblematic of my own feelings about the information technologies I study. I know these technologies are not innocent. As Donna Haraway and others have pointed out, they were originally conceived in the heart of cold war weapons labs as part of that era's terrifying dance with nuclear annihilation. Yet still, faced with the dismal prospects of status-quo industrial capitalism, the allure of advanced electronic technology might change something is undeniable. So we set the machines free, and wait to see what happens. This dissertation will be an attempt to chart some small piece of what has happened. An attempt to begin to understand what is changing, and where those changes might be leading us.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Bottom-Up Video
For the class I'm currently teaching, I've assigned the students a project to give them some first-hand experience participating in "read-write" culture. One group produced this video and posted it up on YouTube. I think its interesting. Not scathing political commentary exactly, but it is interesting how the students respond to questions from "one of their own."
Webcams!
I've blogged about how you can find webcams with a google search before, but I'm thinking about a project involving them so I'm bringing it up again. Anyway, if you type the following into google :
inurl:/view.shtml
and do a search, google will spit out a list of online cameras made by a certain manufacturer. Click on the links and you can see their output. Some of the cameras are clearly meant to be public. Some aren't so clear. Anyway, I find clicking through the list discovering little windows on the world to be a fun little past-time. Here are some fun cameras I found today:
Somebody put their cube farm on the web!
A bar in Munich.
The front desk of an office on Long Island.
A place called "Friends Bar" - according to its IP address, it's in the Canary Islands.
Anyway, I'm trying to find fun webcams for a project, so I thought I would share how to find them with you and see what you find! Comment me if you find any fun ones!
inurl:/view.shtml
and do a search, google will spit out a list of online cameras made by a certain manufacturer. Click on the links and you can see their output. Some of the cameras are clearly meant to be public. Some aren't so clear. Anyway, I find clicking through the list discovering little windows on the world to be a fun little past-time. Here are some fun cameras I found today:
Somebody put their cube farm on the web!
A bar in Munich.
The front desk of an office on Long Island.
A place called "Friends Bar" - according to its IP address, it's in the Canary Islands.
Anyway, I'm trying to find fun webcams for a project, so I thought I would share how to find them with you and see what you find! Comment me if you find any fun ones!
Friday, November 16, 2007
Martha Henehan
My maternal grandmother, Martha Henehan, died on Sunday. She was a good woman, a loving mother and grandmother, and someone who remained close to the message of compassion at the core of her Christian faith in an age when many used that faith to advance an agenda of hatred, mistrust, and division. She will be missed by her children and grandchildren.
In September I visited my grandmother. I didn't know it then, but that visit proved to be the last time I would see her alive. She knew she didn't have long. She was at peace with that. She had been in pain for a long time, and her mobility was limited. She believed she would be reunited after her death with her departed husband, and she desired that dearly.
Still, she said to me, "there just isn't enough time."
Life is with us for just this brief moment. We will all wish for more time. None of us will get it.
Let's make the best of it.
In September I visited my grandmother. I didn't know it then, but that visit proved to be the last time I would see her alive. She knew she didn't have long. She was at peace with that. She had been in pain for a long time, and her mobility was limited. She believed she would be reunited after her death with her departed husband, and she desired that dearly.
Still, she said to me, "there just isn't enough time."
Life is with us for just this brief moment. We will all wish for more time. None of us will get it.
Let's make the best of it.
Friday, November 09, 2007
The Lights Are On
Across the street from me, there is a light industrial zone. The factory that casts those giant concrete tubular things I like to post pictures of on my flickr page. A row of storage spaces for rent. What smells to be a plastic factory of some kind.
Stuck in the middle of the parking lot/loading zone for all this, is a small beat-up white building that looks to be a one story house. Tonight, as I was having some tea on my steps, I noticed a light on. Is somebody home?
I snapped a picture just to show what it looks like. It seemed lonely, but also somehow romantic. That little building is nowhere I would want to live, but it is somewhere I would love to have lived in the past. What a story!
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
What is old is new again
Lately, I've been finding ways to fit Narrative Prose, short stories especially, back into my life. It has largely been absent since I stopped pursuing writing fiction myself, my recent academic work has been theory-based and left little room for reading stories to read. It was only when I started listening to the podcast of NPR's "Selected Shorts" program - in which actors and other performers read short stories to a studio audience. That I even remembered what I was missing.
Today, Salon.com published a series of excerpts from Red, an upcoming collection of short prose by teenage girls. I really like it. These girls have written some powerful, insightful, and original stuff. I don't know how much stock to put in the editor's assertion that social networking sites and other internet-facilitated communications are creating "a generation of writers." I'd like to believe it though, and certainly these examples suggest that for whatever reason, there are some talented young writers out there. Check it out.
I think if the editor's assertion is true, and we are looking at a whole generation learning to write online, the ramifications for those of us who are educators in the humanities will be very significant. A groundswell of unruly expression alarms some of us, I think, but we should see it as an opportunity. A potential mass movement of students interested in self-expression. The problem for us will be how to offer these students tools they need and want to use, challenge them to grow and explore, and avoid trying too hard to mold them into a "proper" format - without falling into the fallacy that they already have everything they might need to express themselves and any input on our part is somehow oppression.
Today, Salon.com published a series of excerpts from Red, an upcoming collection of short prose by teenage girls. I really like it. These girls have written some powerful, insightful, and original stuff. I don't know how much stock to put in the editor's assertion that social networking sites and other internet-facilitated communications are creating "a generation of writers." I'd like to believe it though, and certainly these examples suggest that for whatever reason, there are some talented young writers out there. Check it out.
I think if the editor's assertion is true, and we are looking at a whole generation learning to write online, the ramifications for those of us who are educators in the humanities will be very significant. A groundswell of unruly expression alarms some of us, I think, but we should see it as an opportunity. A potential mass movement of students interested in self-expression. The problem for us will be how to offer these students tools they need and want to use, challenge them to grow and explore, and avoid trying too hard to mold them into a "proper" format - without falling into the fallacy that they already have everything they might need to express themselves and any input on our part is somehow oppression.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Why Yes, I am a Mindless Sheep
Because a friend posted her Simpsons Avatar, I feel compelled to do the same. Baaaa.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Create a Venn Diagram
Make one category: "Things That Are Ironic."
Make the other category: "Things That Are a Pain in My Ass."
Here is what would currently be in the space where the two intersect
-Digital Culture researchers who can't figure out how to link properly
-The fact that the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) can't get their "digital library" to talk to my university's library search engine properly and consistently (when other journals can)
-The wide variety of documents on "Free Culture" and "Open Source Software" that are locked behind paywalls of various types (why yes, I will pay 80 dollars to read about how informations should be free...)
On the other hand, completely outside those two categories would be the many digital culture researchers who post up their work in weird hidden places in the internet where you can download them for free, and/or happily e-mail work to fellow researchers on request. Woot!
Make the other category: "Things That Are a Pain in My Ass."
Here is what would currently be in the space where the two intersect
-Digital Culture researchers who can't figure out how to link properly
-The fact that the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) can't get their "digital library" to talk to my university's library search engine properly and consistently (when other journals can)
-The wide variety of documents on "Free Culture" and "Open Source Software" that are locked behind paywalls of various types (why yes, I will pay 80 dollars to read about how informations should be free...)
On the other hand, completely outside those two categories would be the many digital culture researchers who post up their work in weird hidden places in the internet where you can download them for free, and/or happily e-mail work to fellow researchers on request. Woot!
Monday, October 22, 2007
Where have all the Fafnirs Gone?
Picture above is the last installment of the Fluble webcomic, circa 2001. It was posted on the author's leaving undergraduate school, and the anxieties it expresses were mine too. One reason I've been hiding in grad school. Fluble's author, Chris Mastrangelo, would go on to work on his blog, fafblog a truly surreal and hilarious website, and write some of the funniest, most cutting satire of the Bush administration and the 2004 Presidential race. Around mid-summer 2006, it was clear the site was in trouble however. He was posting repeated pleas for donations, and the site would often go without updates for weeks. The last post was put up on July 12, 2006. The site is still there, but has remained without a new update since.Every so often I cruise by the ol' fafblog, hoping that some new update may announce the re-birth of the blog, or direct me to some new work by the author. I always find the same old page.
Here's what, I think, says something about the power of internet culture - at least for me. I worry about Chris Mastrangelo. I worry that I can't find any evidence of a new artistic project attached to him. I worry that he may have passed away. I worry even more that the dismal prediction he made in the last Fluble may have come true, and he may be stuck in an office cube farm somewhere, slowly dying.
So, here's all the best to Fluble and Fafnir and Giblets and Clown. I hope some fraction of them still lives.
I, for one, miss them.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Airships and the Future That Wasn't
I obtained the picture above, of Moffet Field's Hangar One, from this boingboing post. The post seeks to drum up some publicity for the campaign to save the structure, which the Navy wants to tear down as it is contaminated with PCBs and thus useless. Boingboing makes the case that the structure should be saved as it is one of the few distinctive buildings in Silicon Valley, a region that, despite its economic power, is otherwise fairly void of interesting architecture.I read about this just a few hours after I had been teaching my "cyberculture" class and discussing the transition of the Silicon Valley area from being dominated by the aerospace industry to electronics industry and using that as a parallel for corresponding shift in American Popular culture from space travel as an emblem of the future - the future of the rocketship, if you will - to cyberspace as an emblem of the future - the future of the matrix. I wished I had read about Hanger One before my class, so I could have used it as an example.
Hanger One, you see, was a part of a yet older, and less remembered future. The future of the airship. Hanger One was, believe it or not, the hanger for America's flying aircraft carrier: the USS Macon.
For those who didn't already know, during the 1930s the United States built and briefly operated two huge airships, Macon and her sister ship Akron, each outfitted to carry five small biplane fighters. Both, sadly, were lost in bad weather. This ended the flying aircraft carrier project.
I am, as you've probably guessed by now, a sort of airship enthusiast. For me, the lost future of the airship is interesting and romantic, I think because it is in some ways a more human future than the one we live in now. The Akron and the Macon were intended to scout for enemy vessels using human eyes and brains and pilots. Their technology augmented the body, but still relied on human control and skill. Instead of the flying aircraft carrier, the technology that would become the eyes of the fleet in World War II was radar. Radar, married to the electronic digital computer, has evolved over the last 60 years to give us the "future" warship that is the Navy's present - the AEGIS destroyer. Instead of the swashbuckling crews of the Akron and Macon, launching their tiny fighters with their hair in the wind, we got the plugged in crews of the AEGIS ships, who monitor an automated combat system in a darkened room. The major choice the crew makes is to turn the system on, after that most functions are automatic, guided missiles fight guided missiles at speeds too fast for a human being to make a meaningful decision.
I am often a cyber-enthusiast. I am, after all, right now plugged in to a massive automated system, which will deliver my words to far away friends without further intervention on my part. Remembering the airship past, however, puts me in a more cyber-pessimistic mood. Internet socializing is not unlike the AEGIS ship, digital expressions flying around at light speed while bodies and their senses stay at home. Perhaps a packet with my words in it will be, in an unlikely circumstance, routed through one of the antenna arrays on the mast of the Empire State Building (originally, the mast was to be an airship mooring point) but I will not be there to see it, to feel it, to taste the wind.
The danger, I think, comes when we try to build a new world in our computers, as John Parry Barlow and others sometimes seem to advocate, and thus forget material circumstances in a rush of postmodern digital exuberance. If we keep material circumstances in mind however, we might build a new world with our computers and that might open some interesting possibilities.
The Akron and the Macon were brought down by weather, after all. With weather radar and GPS to guide them, the new generation of airships being worked on by Zeppelin and others
might just have a fighting chance...
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
More Evidence of Global Warming... or Something
Besides the 90 degree October in Ohio I just saw a flock of geese flying... east
Fun on the Internets
Just some, um, research into internet-mediated pop culture... yeah, that's it
http://www.blimptv.net/academyofwar.html
http://www.blimptv.net/academyofwar.html
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Even Jesus Only Had To Suffer Three Days
The Next five days are my comprehensive exams. Ack.
Actually, they have been pretty do-able so far, I put one question behind me today. Four more to go!
In the meantime - web-ephemera for all you boys and girls
http://www.cerberoleso.it/media/sloth/sloth.mov
Actually, they have been pretty do-able so far, I put one question behind me today. Four more to go!
In the meantime - web-ephemera for all you boys and girls
http://www.cerberoleso.it/media/sloth/sloth.mov
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Apparently Guns Don't Kill People...
Black folks kill people, at least according to this cartoon:
Racism, alive and well in the United States...
Racism, alive and well in the United States...
Friday, September 28, 2007
Flowers Behind the Dustbin
I found this plant growing behind my complex dumpster. I liked it, and shot a few pictures of it and posted them to flickr.
They need cropping and contrast adjustment, but they are there for folks to see, if they are so inclined.
They need cropping and contrast adjustment, but they are there for folks to see, if they are so inclined.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
A Wiki Project
Hey all, I'm putting my money where my mouth is (a little) and starting a (small) collaborative on-line project. I'd like to invite you all to join. The project is called the "cheat sheet to history" and the idea is just to list events and their dates in chronological order, and build together a sort of very basic "map" of history. I think chronology can be interesting, and show some weird coincidences and possibilities. I also think it is an ideal collective project, since the process of adding a little to the list is easy, and the list taken together can start to be interesting fairly quickly.
Anyway, if you are interested, I'd really appreciate your participation. Try it out! Tell me what you think. There are other projects like this out there, but I'm still curious as to what we might get if we work on this one together.
Anyway, if you are interested, I'd really appreciate your participation. Try it out! Tell me what you think. There are other projects like this out there, but I'm still curious as to what we might get if we work on this one together.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Synchronicity
I finish reading bell hooks' "Eating the Other" and what do I find on the Internets but this:
Polish rappers appropriating Indian beats and instruments, and presenting their music in a video that gives a wildly exoticized (re)presentation of South Asian people. The youtube comments, at least the ones in English, gush about the creativity and originality of the music. I wonder what the ones in Polish say. I also wonder what extent the English praise is boosted by the doubly exotic position of the music from the point of view of an English-speaking audience.
Just short thoughts and sharing.
Polish rappers appropriating Indian beats and instruments, and presenting their music in a video that gives a wildly exoticized (re)presentation of South Asian people. The youtube comments, at least the ones in English, gush about the creativity and originality of the music. I wonder what the ones in Polish say. I also wonder what extent the English praise is boosted by the doubly exotic position of the music from the point of view of an English-speaking audience.
Just short thoughts and sharing.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Guess where this photo came from
Well? What do you think?
It wasn't the space shuttle or the space station.
Not a military spy satellite or plane.
Not a commercial satellite.
Not the concord.
Not Spaceship One.
This picture was taken by SABLE-3 (the Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment 3) a nikon coolpix digital camera lashed to a weather balloon by a bunch of Canadian amateur radio hobbyists. They reached an altitude of 120,000 feet, and took that picture - showing the curvature of the earth, the thin blue haze of the atmosphere, and the cold black of space - with over-the-counter and DIY built equipment, and what must have been a relatively modest budget. Certainly no more than many other middle-class folks plow into boats and sporting gear.
I think that's pretty cool.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
A True Name, A Name To Conjour With
There is a line from Neuromancer, I can't remember it exactly. Case is talking about names with one of the AIs, Neuromancer probably. At some point the idea comes up that if Case had the AI's name, he could wield some power over it.
An idea Gibson probably gleaned from watching early computer operators playing with command line interfaces on old time-share mainframes. The operator traces a thin green string of characters in an arcane language, maybe something like "ls -al|grep config," unreadable to those who have not been trained in the art, across a black screen, and in response to his utterance, his magic spell, the machine-demon jumps to life, does the bidding of its master. A magic language for postmodernity. Words made electrons made actions. A semiotic conundrum.
And nothing new. After all, in the beginning there was the Word...
Command lines are buried now, lost behind the flash of modern graphical operating systems. Windows, especially, has only the faintest traces of old DOS - its command line ancestor - left. My little MacBook, with its spiffy OSX, actually has a bit more command line there if one should want it, and it even responds to incantions in UNIX, the same ancient magical tongue (more or less) that the mainframe operators of yore summoned their creatures with. But I rarely invoke this feature. The graphical age does all I need it to. Sometimes I play with the command line, just for fun. Just for the feeling (an illusion, in my case) of having "bare metal" mastery over my machine.
But the age of Google has brought about a new form of the Digital True Name. The search string. Take for example, my search this evening for a long lost old friend. I tried to google his real name, but to no avail. Then several pseudonyms I knew him to write fiction under. Still, no dice. Finally, I entered the name of an old cable access television show he and another friend had produced, long ago.
And there he was, or at least, some aspect of him, conjured into being by my utterance of his name. One of his names. The right one. He had, as I suspected he would, succumbed to the temptation of dropping his old cable access show onto YouTube. He had also uploaded some more recent work.
So, despite the years and miles between us, despite our long ago falling out, despite my terrible suspicion that sending any message to him would just reveal there was nothing for us to say to each other anymore, I was able tonight to see the current face and hear the current voice of my old friend. Just by guessing the right name to call him by.
McLuhan said that communications technology would both "extend" our nervous systems and expose us to "auto-amputation" of senses and other capacities not carried by the media we relied on for this extension. I am reminded by this by my episode with my old friend tonight, and even more so by my experience lately with some more recent friends, who have just moved some distance away and thus retreated into the electronic ghost-hood that characterizes long-distance friendships in our electronic age.
I'm grateful for the "magic" technology that allows us to remain, at least in some tenuous way, linked to each other, but at the same time frustrated by the high-speed, instrumental, capitalist system that seems to insist that we must all remain in constant motion, always shedding our friends, never having the chance to build lasting communities, if we wish to "succeed."
What to do about it, though, is a question I can't find a search string to answer.
An idea Gibson probably gleaned from watching early computer operators playing with command line interfaces on old time-share mainframes. The operator traces a thin green string of characters in an arcane language, maybe something like "ls -al|grep config," unreadable to those who have not been trained in the art, across a black screen, and in response to his utterance, his magic spell, the machine-demon jumps to life, does the bidding of its master. A magic language for postmodernity. Words made electrons made actions. A semiotic conundrum.
And nothing new. After all, in the beginning there was the Word...
Command lines are buried now, lost behind the flash of modern graphical operating systems. Windows, especially, has only the faintest traces of old DOS - its command line ancestor - left. My little MacBook, with its spiffy OSX, actually has a bit more command line there if one should want it, and it even responds to incantions in UNIX, the same ancient magical tongue (more or less) that the mainframe operators of yore summoned their creatures with. But I rarely invoke this feature. The graphical age does all I need it to. Sometimes I play with the command line, just for fun. Just for the feeling (an illusion, in my case) of having "bare metal" mastery over my machine.
But the age of Google has brought about a new form of the Digital True Name. The search string. Take for example, my search this evening for a long lost old friend. I tried to google his real name, but to no avail. Then several pseudonyms I knew him to write fiction under. Still, no dice. Finally, I entered the name of an old cable access television show he and another friend had produced, long ago.
And there he was, or at least, some aspect of him, conjured into being by my utterance of his name. One of his names. The right one. He had, as I suspected he would, succumbed to the temptation of dropping his old cable access show onto YouTube. He had also uploaded some more recent work.
So, despite the years and miles between us, despite our long ago falling out, despite my terrible suspicion that sending any message to him would just reveal there was nothing for us to say to each other anymore, I was able tonight to see the current face and hear the current voice of my old friend. Just by guessing the right name to call him by.
McLuhan said that communications technology would both "extend" our nervous systems and expose us to "auto-amputation" of senses and other capacities not carried by the media we relied on for this extension. I am reminded by this by my episode with my old friend tonight, and even more so by my experience lately with some more recent friends, who have just moved some distance away and thus retreated into the electronic ghost-hood that characterizes long-distance friendships in our electronic age.
I'm grateful for the "magic" technology that allows us to remain, at least in some tenuous way, linked to each other, but at the same time frustrated by the high-speed, instrumental, capitalist system that seems to insist that we must all remain in constant motion, always shedding our friends, never having the chance to build lasting communities, if we wish to "succeed."
What to do about it, though, is a question I can't find a search string to answer.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Belated Video Blog
Its ain't real time, but here is the story of my trip across the southwest, as told in video clips!
Being Creative
On a regular basis is hard. Without fail, even those who are the best at it have bad days. When one of my favorites, like Garrison Keillor, has a string of bad days - or even just "less than perfect" days - it gets me down, because I worry that maybe that source of beauty that I loved, their creativity, may be in decline (because of old age perhaps) and maybe it will never come back.
With Keillor, however, my worry was clearly misplaced. His latest column for Salon.com
knocks it clear out of the park, a welcome change from his last few at bats, which had been a little lackluster IMHO.
The best part, his handy inversion of the usual logic of illegal immigration. I'd been looking for as tidy a way to do this for awhile now. He writes:
"[Karl Rove's] last big assignment was to get the immigration bill passed. It failed in large part because Congress is tired of Mr. Rove and his boy-genius high-handedness. Instead, Homeland Security announced a new crackdown on illegal immigrants, which aroused protests from farmers who said that 70 percent of farmworkers today are illegal -- a stunning fact, if true: Most of the people who pick our beans and tomatoes are men and women forced to sneak across the border, and why? Because they're a security threat? No. So that we can get them cheap, that's why."
Exactly. The usual rhetoric sneers at undocumented immigrants for wanting to "jump to the front of the line" of folks waiting to get into the United States. No one ever seems to ask why there is such a long and complicated line in the first place.
With Keillor, however, my worry was clearly misplaced. His latest column for Salon.com
knocks it clear out of the park, a welcome change from his last few at bats, which had been a little lackluster IMHO.
The best part, his handy inversion of the usual logic of illegal immigration. I'd been looking for as tidy a way to do this for awhile now. He writes:
"[Karl Rove's] last big assignment was to get the immigration bill passed. It failed in large part because Congress is tired of Mr. Rove and his boy-genius high-handedness. Instead, Homeland Security announced a new crackdown on illegal immigrants, which aroused protests from farmers who said that 70 percent of farmworkers today are illegal -- a stunning fact, if true: Most of the people who pick our beans and tomatoes are men and women forced to sneak across the border, and why? Because they're a security threat? No. So that we can get them cheap, that's why."
Exactly. The usual rhetoric sneers at undocumented immigrants for wanting to "jump to the front of the line" of folks waiting to get into the United States. No one ever seems to ask why there is such a long and complicated line in the first place.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Summer Wrap-Up
Classes start in 3 weeks. I have to work for those 3 weeks if I want to be ready, so vacation is basically over. But what a summer vacation! In the last 30 days I have:
Traveled almost 9,000 miles by road.
Visited the following states:
Indiana
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Texas
New Mexico
Arizona
Colorado
Nebraska
Iowa
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
New York
Connecticut
New Jersey
Crossed or visited the following water bodies:
Mississippi River
Arkansas River
Pecos River
Red River
Rio Grande
San Antonio River
Missouri River
Seneca Lake
Hudson River
Susquehanna River
Atlantic Ocean
Long Island Sound
Reconnected with some old friends.
And, last but not least, I've started dating a remarkable young woman.
Now I just need to do all the work I was going to do during my "quiet summer."
Traveled almost 9,000 miles by road.
Visited the following states:
Indiana
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Texas
New Mexico
Arizona
Colorado
Nebraska
Iowa
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Delaware
New York
Connecticut
New Jersey
Crossed or visited the following water bodies:
Mississippi River
Arkansas River
Pecos River
Red River
Rio Grande
San Antonio River
Missouri River
Seneca Lake
Hudson River
Susquehanna River
Atlantic Ocean
Long Island Sound
Reconnected with some old friends.
And, last but not least, I've started dating a remarkable young woman.
Now I just need to do all the work I was going to do during my "quiet summer."
Friday, July 13, 2007
Last On The Trip Post : Gallup
I've had a great time these last two weeks. The last few days have been amazing. I can't post much now, I've gotta crash out here at the Gallup Super 8 (on historic route 66!) so we can start back for home eeeearly in the morning. I'll post more pics and other stuff soon, probably the week after next. I have some things to attend to this next week :) Good things.
Here's one picture from our time in Arizona to tide you over.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Update: Trip Cyber-connectedness
I went ahead and upgraded to a flickr pro account. Lots more pictures coming up. I also managed to massage youtube into accepting a video upload today, so I have a few videos to share. They are silly, but folks might like 'em.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
On the Trip Post 5: Las Cruces and New Mexico Adventures
The image above is about the best representation I was able to make of what I'm looking at right now, sunrise over the valley where Las Cruces, New Mexico is located. The picture is lousy, the actual view is insanely better. Waking up to this the last two mornings has been a real treat.The climate here is also a treat, after San Antonio's muggy oppression. The air here is dry, and feels comfortable well into the 90s. At night, things cool off dramatically, and there is a breeze off the valley. It's quite wonderful.
The drive out here was fun. East Texas was neat, but still looked somewhat familiar. The trees and foliage weren't the same, but there were plenty of trees and foliage. Once you cross the hills west of San Antonio and head into West Texas, however, things become more arid and the flora becomes the sort of scrubby desert plant life you expect from the stereotypical "west." We also saw our share of mountains and canyons. That drive is fairly well documented on the flickr page.
Yesterday we took a side roadtrip and went up to Roswell, New Mexico - site of the supposed 1947 alien saucer crash. They were having a convention to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the crash, and there were lots of brightly costumed folks about. We also stopped in White Sands to see the national monument and missile base there, and in Alamagordo so I could buy a T-shirt with the name of the first Atom Bomb test site on it. I posted a few pictures of that trip on Flickr, but I'm running out of bandwidth on my flickr account!
Today is Carlsbad Caverns and El Paso, Texas. El Paso is of interest because it is closely connected with its counterpart city immediately across the border, Juarez, Mexico - so it becomes a site to investigate US/Mexican relations and Chicana border culture. Carlsbad is mostly of interest because it is home to a species of massive, man-eating bats. I am unafraid, however, because I am extremely brave.
Friday, July 06, 2007
On the Trip Post 4: Finishing Up San Antonio
We leave San Antonio, Texas in the Morning to drive to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We've decided to take a smaller highway and stay off Interstate 10, the better to see some area towns and sights. Our new route bounces us off the US/Mexico Border several times, which is appropriate for a class devoted to the study of border culture. I'm looking forward to the trip. Some more pictures of San Antonio are up on my Flickr, mostly they show the Spanish Missions here. I'll be uploading more, sending pictures to Flickr through these KOA wireless connections is like sending them through a tin-can telephone. Some key moments here in San Antonio:
-Hanging out with Chicano artist Joe Lopez, checking out his studio and his work and hearing his stories about growing up here and becoming an artist. Then heading out with him and a friend to a local restaurant where they served about the greatest chicken-fried steak ever.
-The constant presence of flights of egrets, which always seem to arrange themselves in these staggered V formations, like a checkmark, in the sky especially at dusk.
-Watching a rock band composed of 3 anglo air-force master sergeants, in full dress uniform no less, play "867-5309" to a crowd of folks from the west-side Barrio here before the fireworks on the fourth of July.
Fun stuff. More as soon as I have connectivity again.
-Hanging out with Chicano artist Joe Lopez, checking out his studio and his work and hearing his stories about growing up here and becoming an artist. Then heading out with him and a friend to a local restaurant where they served about the greatest chicken-fried steak ever.
-The constant presence of flights of egrets, which always seem to arrange themselves in these staggered V formations, like a checkmark, in the sky especially at dusk.
-Watching a rock band composed of 3 anglo air-force master sergeants, in full dress uniform no less, play "867-5309" to a crowd of folks from the west-side Barrio here before the fireworks on the fourth of July.
Fun stuff. More as soon as I have connectivity again.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
On the Trip Post 3: A bit more from San Antonio
Check the flickr for a whole bunch more photos from here in San Antonio, Texas. Normally I try to do a bit of photoshop work before I upload and clean things up a bit. No time for that now. I just thought I would share.
Most of the photos in that set show the students checking out Say Si!, an after-school community art program here. It was a really interesting program and the man introducing the students to it, a former student of one of our faculty, was really great and friendly and informative. I also took some shots of an interesting looking factory that I think was producing sugar for the pioneer sugar company.
After that, we brought the guys to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, where we talked about resisting war and oppression with some of the folks there. Esperanza is a center for the queer community here, and that was a bit of a challenge for some of our kids who come from rural communities, but it was a great experience and really broadened their horizons.
After that we went by the San Antonio Riverwalk, which was crap, but I did see the worst lounge act ever at this silly "Irish Pub" there. Mike L., if you are reading this, he was like some bizarro world version of you playing the piano.
Most of the photos in that set show the students checking out Say Si!, an after-school community art program here. It was a really interesting program and the man introducing the students to it, a former student of one of our faculty, was really great and friendly and informative. I also took some shots of an interesting looking factory that I think was producing sugar for the pioneer sugar company.
After that, we brought the guys to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, where we talked about resisting war and oppression with some of the folks there. Esperanza is a center for the queer community here, and that was a bit of a challenge for some of our kids who come from rural communities, but it was a great experience and really broadened their horizons.
After that we went by the San Antonio Riverwalk, which was crap, but I did see the worst lounge act ever at this silly "Irish Pub" there. Mike L., if you are reading this, he was like some bizarro world version of you playing the piano.
Monday, July 02, 2007
On the Trip Post 1: Driving West
I took a lot of pictures from the car, but uploading files here at the San Antonio KOA rather taxes the limited wireless internet connection I have access to. Also, many of them are crap, as pictures taken from a moving vehicle so often are. Here is one kinda decent shot of the mighty Mississippi, as we crossed it near Cairo, Illinois.
Otherwise it has been an uneventful trip thus far. We covered parts of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas during our drive, which took up 20 of the last 48 hours. The interstate never changes. The strip-mall that effectively extends from Austin to San Antonio could easily have been mistaken for a strip mall anywhere else. I do find it kind of cool that the radio stations have gone from the "w" prefix to the "k" prefix, thus indicating we are officially in "the west." But mostly that just shows that I am a nerd.
Today is our first day checking stuff out in San Antonio. More updates to follow.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Pre-trip pics
We haven't left yet, but here's my first trip post. Here's some of our students, getting to know one another and exploring the still-under-construction home of one of the professors on the trip. More pictures on my flickr.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
And One More
I just want to post this one so I can find it for my own reference. Often, when I explain to my students that I expect their writing to tell me not just WHAT they think, but their reasoning in reaching those thoughts I will exclaim, in the voice of a seasame street cowboy "I wanna know why!" And then I'll end up explaining this sketch to them, and looking like a dork. At least now I know I remembered the sketch properly.
Not on the road yet
Just sitting at home, watchin' the youtubes. Here's a classic seasame street sketch.
I suppose the appropriation of reggae and the use of a faux-Carribean Black dialect "de" for "the" makes this part of America's long history of minstrelsy. Muppet-face, shall we call it? But, on the plus side, Ernie has the whole neighborhood in the bathtub with him! Pretty transgressive sexuality that.
I mean think about it. This was a mid 80s early 90s sketch if I remember correctly. Certainly part of the Sesame Street line up of my generation's youth. What was the fad of our college years?
Yeah, you guessed it, foam-dance parties... coincidence, I think not!
I suppose the appropriation of reggae and the use of a faux-Carribean Black dialect "de" for "the" makes this part of America's long history of minstrelsy. Muppet-face, shall we call it? But, on the plus side, Ernie has the whole neighborhood in the bathtub with him! Pretty transgressive sexuality that.
I mean think about it. This was a mid 80s early 90s sketch if I remember correctly. Certainly part of the Sesame Street line up of my generation's youth. What was the fad of our college years?
Yeah, you guessed it, foam-dance parties... coincidence, I think not!
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Watch This Space
I'll be on the road from June 30-July 15, driving a van for an undergraduate class taking a trip to the southwest. Stay tuned for pics and text (and maybe video) on my roadtrip.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Useful Exemplar
In my Ethnic Studies class, I teach my students that "Race is a social construct." That's basically all I try to teach them. It takes most of a semester to explain those five words. Mostly they mean that society tries to use biology to explain differences between people that are actually imposed on them by the social structure itself. Getting the student's to believe that and see how it happens is what takes the time. In a commencement speech this weekend, Gloria Steinem provided a useful example of the socially-constructed nature of the related concept of Gender. I think its a pretty good one.
"In my generation, we were asked by the Smith vocational office how many words we could type a minute, a question that was never asked of then all-male students at Harvard or Princeton. Female-only typing was rationalized by supposedly greater female verbal skills, attention to detail, smaller fingers, goodness knows what, but the public imagination just didn’t include male typists, certainly not Ivy League-educated ones.
Now computers have come along, and "typing" is "keyboarding." Suddenly, voila! --- men can type! Gives you faith in men’s ability to change, doesn’t it?"
---Gloria Steinem at Smith College:
I especially like her use of the term "public imagination" here. Shows how the way a group of people's shared means for imagining the world has a real impact on how that world happens.
Monday, June 11, 2007
The Problem With June
This was not, as they say, a productive weekend. That's the problem with June. Finding motivation. A month with fair weather is a month with contentment too close at hand, easy peace too readily available. I've spent the last four days reading easy, fun books of no academic use to me whatsoever (namely, Philip Pullman's excellent "His Dark Materials" series) listening to music (often Richard Buckner's "Dents and Shells"), riding my bike, and staring up at the sky. Quizzes have gone ungraded, research projects have stalled in their forward progress. Instead, I watched a turkey vulture and a pair of swallows circle into the sky on the updraft from the parking lot, and followed the story of a young girl's adventures with witches and armored bears. It felt good, but I know there's so much more I have to do if I want to make a difference, or even a living.
In any event, the upside is this, I am reminded again that anyone who needs more than a meal, a book, a sycamore tree and a decent sunset to feel happy is just stark nuts. Which is important to remember, as it suggests the world is currently being run by people who are absolutely batshit insane.
In any event, the upside is this, I am reminded again that anyone who needs more than a meal, a book, a sycamore tree and a decent sunset to feel happy is just stark nuts. Which is important to remember, as it suggests the world is currently being run by people who are absolutely batshit insane.
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