In which I pick sides between New and Old Media

I have some very, very serious reservations about the "social networking" site Facebook. Mostly, these revolve around the fact that Facebook (much like, um, blogger, which I am using now) is a commercial website that actively extracts information from its users for the benefit of advertisers. That makes it a fairly pernicious form of surveillance, leading to the very real possibility of the commodification of yet more of our existences, yet more opportunities for capital to take our lives away and sell them back to us.

Yet still, I have to admit, Facebook users have managed to build a fairly compelling social space within this sort of virtual shopping mall. That is what makes the danger of surveillance and commodification so dangerous. All that said, I thinl criticisms of the social habits of Facebookers like this one are badly off the mark.

This author sets out to criticize facebook's "25 Things" meme, which I had myself been annoyed with and had parodied a bit here. I had thought "25 Things" to be worth critique because it invited people to share facts about themselves in this environment of surveillance. And, I admit, sometimes I found people's facts a bit boring.

The author of the article I link to above, however, seems to take offense at the very notion that the proles might dare to write about themselves in this crass new medium made of tubes "the internets." First of all, it distracts them from their proper task of working their assigned jobs within the system! "Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list," she writes,"this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain." Oh noes! Its not like our society is currently undergoing a "crisis of demand" where we can't come up with consumers for all our precious productivity! No, no... back to work proles! We see you slacking on your facebooks! Your role in life is to toil, never to write.

Her other critique is that Average people Suck and should not be permitted to express themselves. You think I'm being too hard on her. Here is what she says in her own words: "Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a "friend" on Facebook might translate to someone you'd barely recognize in real life. I don't care that my college roommate's sister is anemic or that my stepcousin's boyfriend gets nervous around old people (apparently he's afraid they're going to die)." Hear that average people, you aren't funny or insightful! You must SHUT UP now and permit your duly appointed scribbling class the honor of expressing things for you. You couldn't possibly have anything to contribute.

You know, I'll admit it, I'm not always entertained by the things folks share on Facebook. Sometimes I'm even annoyed by what I see as clumsy language or cliched expressions. But listen, Time magazine writer person, shouldn't that make us wonder what is wrong with us, rather than them. People everywhere are clearly desperate to express themselves, to share something of their lives with a larger community, even through imperfect electronic means. There are important reasons to criticize the means, to try to make them better, but I don't think there is any reason to be so condescending to the people who are using them. Maybe, instead, we should take the time to listen, to get to know our fellow human beings, rather than insisting our knowledge of humanity come pre-packaged in pithy prose by writers who have been approved by the proper social elites and commercial enterprises.

One Thing

Just for the sake of updating the ol' blog. Wasn't tonight's Episode of "The Office" a pretty solid episode? I felt like the promo shot, with what's-her-face Jim's girlfriend from last season, heavily pregnant were meant to set us up a bit as viewers. Make us do the math in our heads. Make us wonder "will they really go there? I thought they were smarter than that?"

And ultimately, they were smarter than that. I like how they have steadfastly refused to break Pam and Jim up this season, and present us with a completely unbelievable "Ross and Rachel" style relationship-on-permanent-hold to somehow attempt to keep "tension" in the series. Instead they've tried to render two people trying to make things work, imperfectly but honestly, within the sit-com format. I think that has been a brave move, even if they have sometimes faltered in their execution (the whole "oh look they are having a crisis" resolved with a "wait no they aren't, they love each other EVEN MORE" bit is starting to wear a little thin).

So there, my opinion on the current season of The Office, for what it is worth, which is very little.

Oh and the new judge on Top Chef is a total ass. What a tool.

25 Things

So there's this 25 things thing going around Facebook (I know, Facebook... shudder). You're supposed to post "25 random things about yourself." Problem for me is, I'm such a narcissistic loudmouth, I've already told everyone in ear-shot everything they could ever want to know about me, and many things they never wanted to know. So, in lieu of 25 random things about myself, I'm going to post 25 things on a different topic.

See, thing is, tonight the "Stimulus Bill" proposed by President Obama passed the house. That is the good news. The bad news is that the President and the House Democrats watered the bill down to try to make it palatable for the Republicans. They did things like take out funding for family planning, and add tax cuts. You know what they got for these compromises, made in the name of "bipartisanship" and unity? Nothing. No GOP representatives, exactly none, voted for this bill.

So I'm writing this note to say: To hell with bi-partisanship! Here are 25 things I want added to the Stimulus Bill in the Senate, just to piss off the Republicans.


1. Money to buy 14 billion condoms and 300 million doses of Plan B, and to drop said supplies out of low-flying C-130 cargo aircraft over every populated area in the United States.
2. Language declaring National Coming Out Day a National Holiday, and providing funds to celebrate it in the public schools.
3. Block grants for bloggers, with 10 million dollars specifically earmarked for the Daily Kos.
4. Funding to install organic rooftop gardens on all public housing projects
5. To raise funds, the bill should establish a program to forcibly re-posses Hummer SUVs and melt them down. Scrap to be used on public works projects. All Hummer owners to be issued pink Priuses as replacement vehicles.
6. Full funding for Bike trails in all urban and suburban areas. All bike trails to be marked with clearly legible signage reading "YOUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LOVES HIPPIES."
7. Oklahoma to be sold back to appropriate Native American Nations for a set of Rosary Beads and one of those "Magical Prayer Mats" you get in the mail unsolicited.
8. Charles Darwin and Issac Asmiov's birthday to be celebrated as joint holiday (like president's day) to be called "National Secular Humanism Day." Army of MFA metal sculptors hired to build giant abstract sculpture depicting Darwin and Asimov's love for humanity in the medium of their choice. Homoerotic overtones are to be encouraged, but not required.
9. Travel grants for same sex couples to go to states where full marriage equality is practiced and get married. Extra funding to be granted if couples need to avoid traveling through Congressional Districts with GOP congresspersons.
10. NEH funding increased 4000% At least half of the funding must be devoted to special projects on Pro-Feminist Pornography
11. Money to tear down border wall and replace it with "Borderlands! A Water-Fun Park Devoted to the Work of Gloria Anzaldua" Several Waterslides will cross the US-Mexico border.
12. UAW/SEIU/AFL-CIO get their own bailout grants. Money is specifically permitted to be used on government lobbying and lavish parties.
13. "The L-Word" to be named national treasure. Vast staff of Queer Theory scholars hired at lavish salaries to maintain archival material and perform fan ethnographies.
14. Funding for Peace Studies programs to be established at Annapolis, Quantico, and West Point.
15. Residents of East Hampton and Orange County to be evicted by armored units of the National Guard. Funding provided for homes to be converted to communal housing for musicians devoted to copyright-free music
16. Money to hire coders to re-write Linux kernel. They will be instructed to "Make it more communist."
17. Biologists hired to establish the species with the highest incidence of same-sex sex (other than human beings). This species to be named a special protected species. Homes of high profile GOP politicians to be seized in eminent domain for the purpose of creating parks for preserving this species. Homes will be preserved intact, signage to be posted reading clearly "Government Preserve for Gay Animals."
18. Massive farm subsidies for Arugula farmers. Tofu producers to be given similar subsidies.
19. Hire crew of painters to paint a giant Pot leaf on the Hoover Dam, while we're at it Hoover Dam to be renamed in honor of Ralph Nader
20. "Faith Based Charity Funding" provided for Nation of Islam community self-policing projects.
21. PBS and NPR funding to be massively increased. Specific earmarks for programming on "Why Kinky Hair is Good Hair," "Gay Communities in the Islamic World," "NASCAR is Stupid: An Expose," and "No, For Serious People, Global Warming is Very, Very Real."
22. Money to establish K-12 curricula on Critical Examination of White Privilege, Critical Race Theory, and Advanced Evolutionary Biology
23. Funding for Vegan school lunch programs.
24. Coors bottling plant to be seized, sold to Tsingao brewing company for write-down of Chinese held debt.
25. Money for changing signage etc such that, all gov't buildings, vessels, etc. named after Ronald Regan to be renamed after Harvey Milk, Al Gore, Bobby Kennedy, and Eugene V. Debs

There you go! 25 things! Who has more?

Economics of War

I don't agree with much of Classical economics, but I will agree with this: if you make a certain course of action cheap, people will tend to pursue it rather than alternatives.

If you make bombs cheap, for example, everything starts to look like a target. Take the current situation in Gaza, almost certainly helped along by the United States providing Israel with Two Billion Dollars of military aid annually (aid that must be spent for US-made weapons, making it essentially a giant welfare check for Lockheed, Boeing, and Raytheon). So the Israeli's attempt to solve the "Palestinian Question" by using multi-million dollar fighter planes to drop bombs on tenement buildings.

Oh, and shell the place with nice, cheap, readily available American made White Phosphorus shells.

Follow that link. It couldn't be clearer. That brightly burning stuff falling from the sky, trailing white smoke? That's White Phosphorus: a high temperature incendiary that keeps burning after it lands on you, and has the handy side-effect of being highly toxic. Whether the photograph shows an intentional strike or the side-effects of using WP as a light or smoke source over a built-up area hardly matters. You can see what this stuff does when used over one of the most densely populated places in the world.

Hey, I've got an idea, if we really want mid-east peace, why don't we stop giving all this crap to the Israelis? Why don't we make war expensive, and see if that generates some more creative thinking on how peace might be achieved?

That would be change I could believe in. Why do I feel like we're unlikely to get it.

So Late It Is Early

Trying to reset the old out of whack diurnal clock by brute force, seemed like a good idea two hours ago when I was nice and alert and able to read...

Now I'm watching the sky grow brighter and the temperature fall on my little weather station.

Morning like this, you step outside and can feel the cold of space against the skin, thin skein of the atmosphere is no protection... body heat just wicks up and out, into the long dark deepness between the stars.

Morning like this, it occurs to you that this moment now is, effectively, the moment you die, no rupture, no protection, just the all too brief present unfolding in its always accelerating way until it runs headlong into oblivion's grasp. Into the long dark deepness of the inanimate from which you sprang, to which you shall return.

A morning not so unlike this one, not so long ago, I sat in the window seat of a tiny turboprop, waiting to take off on the first leg of a transatlantic trip. Flying makes me nervous, the sheer number of moving parts involved in commercial air traffic overwhelms my ability to make sense of the system, forces me to take on faith the notion that one will safely be conveyed to the edge of space and back as one flies from here to there.

My imagination being what it is, I began it picture how things could go wrong. Imagined the blades of the prop outside my window coming apart violently. Imagined myself decapitated, my head surviving a few seconds as the urban legends say it will. If that were the last bit of the moment granted me, I thought, what will I wish I had done?

And I looked at the play of the raindrops being blown back across the plexiglass window by the propwash, their tiny convexities splitting dull gray morning light into subtle, leaden spectra. Watched them dance up, then down, as the engine throttled.

I thought, I would wish I could write that down.

And now I have.

It must suffice.

Lazy Food Blogging

IMG_3241
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I took some pics of my prep from the food I made to share with friends on New Year's eve. I meant to write up a "food blog" post, but I am too lazy. The pics are on my flickr with some basic descriptive captions, though... so click the picture to them out if you would like.

New Year's Day

We've made it to see another year friends.

Remember, whatever happens in 2009, so long as the Supervolcano under Yellowstone doesn't explode, taking two-thirds of the Continental US with it, I'd say we've done ok.

That kinda puts our human-level tragedies in perspective, don't it?

What the hell?

Just got this in my inbox, subject line "A biased ultra-positivist's thoughts." WTF? Weirdest spam evar?

Aren't you looking for someone who understands you? If not, there is no
need to read further as it shows that people who think just like you
already surround you.

You must aim to coerce others to adopt your views.
Or does it appeal to you more to nourish foolishness?

I was trying to marry someone this year as there would have been tax advantages.
They told me they'd only consider marriage for love.
They had no enthusiasm for collaboration.

They think the most wonderful thing is to find what you love to do. They're lying to themselves.
A few per cent of today's employment level would be enough to live comfortably.

People ask how I survive as I work only from time to time.
I question why they compensate talented deluders by donating to the movie industry.
Why do they hunger after motorized transport and single family homes?
Is it not self-evident that they delight in traveling only as long as
it's well-respected by the masses?

They're assured that people can't change. Yet when young, they dreamt about
immortality, ideal relationships, and perfect worlds. We are still that immature.
We'll build a society based on rational thinking.

Don't reply to this message as we won't read it. Use the best internet search
engine to search these words.

arrogant teenage intelligence inexperienced students
light philosophy strategy ideology logic
pure general enclave design insecure
terrestrial solitary personality intolerant defiance
salutation social spiritual art traits
indoctrination Borg substantive monomania clandestine

For best results, search for 3 terms at a time. Hence, there are
a very large number of search possibilities, so only the determined will not give up.

Very strange. Some sort of Google adwords revenue scam? Get people to search those words, get cash from associated ads? Seems like it could be successful. Message is weird enough to not get pegged as typical spam, and it preys on some pretty basic human insecurities. Robots harvesting ad value from loneliness. Great. Welcome to century 21. Welcome to the Network Economy.

Sympathy For the Worthless

Freezer Logo
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

A picture of an old freezer I found rotting away behind my Father's house. I like to find beauty in Junk. Gives me hope.

Big Yellow Taxi

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till its gone?
-Joni Mitchell

The above two lines hold a large truth elegantly. In the text below, I belabor the same point. Needlessly, selfishly, and in a most narcissistic manner. But narcissism is the nature of the Internet Medium, I once heard, so I suppose it can't be helped.

Listen.

Human perception has a cruel flaw. It only sees clearly what is already receding from it. Youth, for example. Or, to name another totally hypothetical example, the kindness, grace, and basic decency of the human being whose door you are walking out of for the last time. When they were present the image was a muddle. Too near the sensor to be resolved, lost in the noise and reflection of everyday existence.

And then they are gone, and everything is thrown into stark relief, as if rimmed by the sharp-angled light of the dying evening sun.

Listen.

There are things in your life now. Things you aren't seeing. Things you won't see until, god forbid, you lose them.

Try to appreciate those things, ok? Do it for me. For Christmas.

Or be left like me, trying to soften the edges of the brittle comfort of the company of digital bits with a six-pack and a Richard Buckner CD.

And knowing that this is likely to be the basic state of my existence from here on out, until Oblivion finds me, tells me that all these moments I think I have stolen from her she has really just lent me, in her infinite kindness. And that now, of course, she must take them back.

And suddenly, as I lose them, I know what I have lost.

Winter Solstice

Well, we've made it to the heart of the dark time, friends. It only gets lighter from here.

Of course, it'll keep getting colder until February sometime.

Take care out there.

This Special Holiday Episode of Anti-Capitalist Sockpuppets

Has been brought to you by Toshiba



Happy Holidays comrades.

Chicken Blog!

Tonight I decided to try this recipe for roasted chicken from big shot chef Thomas Keller. It is a very simple recipe, just sprinkle some kosher salt on a chicken and roast at high heat.

I got a chicken:



I set my oven to 450 F, as called for in the recipe, and washed, salted and trussed my chicken.



And then I stuck the chicken into the hot, hot oven. Far too hot, it turns out. Clouds of smoke started to fill my apartment about 20 minutes into the cook time. I opened all the windows (chilly!) turned on the exhaust fan in my bathroom and over the stove, backed the heat down to 400 and continued on, fearful I was making charcoal.

But, when I took the chicken out of the oven it was a nice golden color:



I basted and let rest, as per instructions, now fearful that my reduced heat would have left the interior of the chicken raw. I started my carving by removing the wings and eating, as recommended by Keller. They were delicious! Crispy and salty and perfectly chicken flavored. I cut off a leg quarter and then one breast. The meat was fully cooked and dripping moist. Absolutely perfect. Here's my plate:



Not pretty I know, but hey it was just me. I was so hungry for more of this chicken that I basically skeletonized half the bird looking to find more meat without cutting into my dinner for tomorrow. I have a picture of that, but it is kind of gross.

All and all, I recommend this recipe, but I would suggest cleaning your oven and pans fully and turning on a fan before you get started. The chicken is worth the trouble though. This is one of those simple dishes that develops the flavor of a single ingredient perfectly. Very nice.

Take Three

Ok, its all that but it is also not that.

What Agrippa shows is the process of transition. The single electric light in the rural village, the car and the mule side by side. The automatic pistol, already decades old when discovered by a little boy in an attic in the middle of the 20th century, but of a design still in use as the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close.

Just like the Mid-Century public works project bridge in the middle of the 2008 Ohio cornfield, under the shadow of the stark-white blades of the Wind Turbine farm.

So often it seems, we forget transition. We imagine the past as having occurred in neat periods, like scenes in a movie. 1931 Depression! (Fade-to-Black) 1941 War! (Fade-to-Black) 1950 Conformity! (Fade-to-Black) 1969! Revolution (Fade-to-Black) etc...

Any good history or fiction will explode this view, remind us that we in fact live in an unending messy transition as technologies, social forms, aesthetic schools wax and wane - hybridize and bleed into each other. Agrippa just happens to remind me of that particularly well (and Gibson's Novels and short stories do a similar job for the future).

So the fact that the Floppy Disk Agrippa is now embedded in that transition in a whole new way - as a once cutting-edge piece of digital art now recovered and emulated by later technology is interesting

Or maybe its all interesting. Or maybe I should stop writing about this now.

Take Two

On my thoughts on the Agrippa web-site I just blogged about.

Agrippa, as a poem, is powerful to me for the same reason that much of Gibson's work is powerful to me, because it complicates the Past and the Future in interesting ways. When I was a boy, I had a notion of the past as Agrarian and static - and the future as dazzling and Aerospace themed. I don't know if I can wholly blame the pop-culture industry for this, but it does seem to me that the notion of what the Past and the Future were to look like got sort of stuck in the collective imagination of the Mass-Media for awhile there as well. Feeding us images of year 2000 flying cars well into the early 1990s. Or at least, so it seemed to my very young self at the time.

The past Gibson talks about in Agrippa is rural, but explicitly technological. Old cars and concrete feature prominently - as does an encounter, apparently drawn from Gibson's own childhood, between a young boy and a long forgotten Colt M1911 found among dusty old packages. The automatic pistol as ancient artifact, as the ancestral sword.

Reading Agrippa gives me the same feeling I had when, on one of my first long bicycle rides here in Northwest Ohio, I rode across a crumbling concrete bridge. On its side I saw stamped the diamond insignia with the letters WPA and the year: 1940. A low bridge, crossing nothing more than a drainage ditch, and at the same time a quiet testament to the Great Depression and the attempts to alleviate it. Suddenly, I was overcome with the awareness of the depth and complexity of the past and the many ways it is, as Faulkner said, not even past.

And now the self-destructing floppy disk version of Agrippa, has itself become a similar artifact. A strange reflection.

How am I just learning of this now

There is a whole site hosted by UC Santa Barbra devoted solely to William Gibson's poem Agrippa(A Book of the Dead).

For a Gibson-phile like me this is fascinating on two levels. First there is the role of a site like this in paying fan-boyish homage to Gibson, who seems himself to be a downright otaku in many ways. Second, there is the almost archeological work needed to resurrect the digital form of Gibson's work (which was packaged as a "self-destructing" file on a floppy disk as a comment on text and memory) from the distance past of 1992. The futuristic "hack" of the early 90s is now a museum piece.

The Future of Film Criticism

A blog post over at the Institute for the Future of the Book raises some interesting ideas about film criticism and new technology. Basically it asks the question: "why don't we use video technology to do film criticism? Wouldn't this be superior to trying to talk about film in print, a totally different medium in which we have to somehow translate the moving images and sounds we are talking about into words before we begin to analyze them?"

I'm not a film critic, but some of my friends are, so I post this here for their consideration. It sounds like a good idea to me, but what the heck do I know?

Narrative and Simulation

I can't help but notice that, as I watch the little evolutionary simulation I just posted about, I seem to get invested in the success or failure of the little animated car the algorithm generates. I cheer for it as it makes it over the little bumps and ridges of its simulated environment, and feel disappointed when it flips over and the simulation ends in failure.

So, out of the simulation, I construct a sort of narrative. My colleague Dave suggested that this is a common feature of human interactions with simulation in a conversation we had a week or so ago. For Dave, if I understand his argument correctly, this suggests that authors who argue that the simulation has superseded the narrative as a form (N. Katherine Hayles, for example) aren't quite correct.

Here's the thing though, I may indeed build a narrative out of the interactions I observe between the simulated car and its 2d environment, but that narrative is completely without agency. The algorithm doesn't care what I think, it just evolves the best solution to the problem based on the results of its trial and error process. Granted, the simulations we see today are based on the assumptions embraced by their creators - on the implicit narratives in their heads. The designer of my example had a story of car and some terrain and a desired outcome (car travels across terrain) in mind when he/she wrote the simulation.

That's all true today, but the question is: will it be true tomorrow? Will we see simulations feeding simulations? Will the "man in the loop" (to use the term of the mid-century Strategic Air Command) be finally displaced?

I don't think it is possible to answer that question. Certainly there are some very smart people invested in "Strong AI" (there is pretty good evidence the folks at Google are heavily committed to this project) and all that entails. It is also true, however, that very smart folks have been working on this project for decades with little to show for their efforts.

It seems to me at least possible, however, that simulation may some day be firmly in command. That Tomorrow Google may count the fall of every sparrow, just as Yesterday God did. If that is the case, the very idea of human agency may prove to be a brief historical aberration, a few short centuries of what will surely seem to be madness by the beings inhabiting the later regime.

What will human beings do in such a world - if any should survive? The same as we have always done. Create narratives about the inexplicable world around us.

Around the Web

A few quick things I wanted to share with my friends and blog readers (and those categories are pretty much one and the same).

A great article by David Neiwert on his blog Orcincus (the best liberal blog you aren't reading) on George W. Bush, "Sundown Suburbs," White Privilege, and persistent racial inequality in the United States.

Wikipedia is not a kitten (a funny bit of vandalism to a wikipedia policy page - long since deleted)

Try independent, listener funded, internet radio site Soma FM for a wide variety of streaming music options. The Xmas in Frisco stream is good seasonal fun.

And finally, this little flash application uses genetic algorithms to solve a simple problem by repeated trial and error right before your eyes. Interesting and a little ominous. As the machines get faster, how much supposedly "uniquely human" creativity will they be able to replicate, simply by brute-forcing problems? Forget Foucault - that right there might be the "end of man."

Thanksgiving

Is, for all its ikky colonial heritage, one of my favorite holidays. I think this is because it is the most DIY holiday. Who would ever buy a pre-made thanksgiving dinner? It simply isn't done. While Christmas focuses on the commodity baubles available from consumer capitalism, on Thanksgiving the focus is firmly on the meal, prepared by the same community that will later consume it. (Issues of gender segregation in labor here can be solved at the local level. Get off yer butts and cook dudes!)

I've had several thanksgiving celebrations this year, my Girlfriend's family, my mother's house, my father's. I'm at my father's place now, where the celebration has moved on to the musical phase the gatherings of his friends tend to inevitably enter. Another DIY celebration, as semi-pro and amateur musicians gather to play some old standbys and folk songs - simple and beautiful.

I, of course, am no musician, so I will contribute by writing this blog post - sending out a burst transmission of my appreciation of their performance into the electronic post-human noosphere that is my home...

Happy Thanksgiving, hackers of the world.