It’s also aware to me she might (I don’t know because it’s a personal issue) be a femenist. Nothing really wrong with that. But sooner or later even femenist have to face judgement.
The Internet, where you can see Bangkok and Smallville without leaving the comfort of your own seat.
For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I wouldn’t have known except they mention it in every post, along with how impressed they are by the cinematic quality of John Cusack Presents Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack) and are intrigued by the idea of “time travel” I direct you to a blog, from the future.
Note the dates, note the prescient information that could only come from someone who actually came back from one week in the future. Or perhaps the blog has become quantum entangled with a stray waveform tabby, and it exists both now and later. Note that Dwarf Fortress Alpha is about to have a new iteration that includes the kinds of features I spent eight years looking for in Nethack (and all I ended up with was a rusty longsword, which is not, thank you very much, a metaphor).
You remember Space Quest, don't you?
Or, at least, that’s what I expect to hear soon enough, now that Apple is in the battery business.
It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean. You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.
To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of <3000 viewed Youtubedness:
What’s going on here? Is it an attempt to show how absurd dancing is, or to show how absurd arguments are? Or is it just playing a game with highly responsive digital tools (that’s about the only excuse I can imagine for the Brendan Frasier clapping meme) and the actual message isn’t a message at all, other than, “Look, I did something cool with Final Cut!” which is, ultimately, so idealistic as to be childlike, and hence the exact opposite of the ironic implication of much of these memes. I think there’s a serious schizophrenia in modern underculture media production, to the point where I’m no longer sure if anyone is reflecting at all about what they’re producing and how it’s communicated.
Rather than use some kind of creative title, with allusions to timeless pieces of art, I decided to go for the lowest-common denominator, because I think people need to spend a little less time talking about Wikipedia and a little more time creating subversive works based on the implications of its status as the first Internet-enabled global cult of disinformation.
You can’t leave anything alone on the Internet for more than three days without it crashing spectacularly. Still, it’s better than ZModem.
It’s more a tweet masquerading as a blog post, so I leave you with a link to the latest security patch to WordPress, and direct your attention to the pings. WordPress, like so much of the New Web, is so unprepossessingly international that it hardly seems fitting to draw attention to it.
Twitter was taken down by the last trick known to the “hacker” community. Oh sure, passwords still get stolen and personal information still gets used to humiliate the semi-public figures of the Internet, but it’s all done in a remarkably low-tech manner, using the digital equivalent of old-style private eyes. All that’s left for script kiddies is the poor distributed denial of service, used indiscriminately for destroying racist talk show hosts or random AT&T customers. Like a Sergio Leone villain, the Final Boss of the Internet has a few tricks but only one real weapon, and a taste for high-profile targets. So that’s my prediction, let’s see how it pans out.
Updated to add that I’m definitely not the first to theorize the connection, but I am the first to equate the Final Boss of the Internet with Indio.
A new data set on Wikipedia edits and new article creation is being breathlessly touted as a sign that Wikipedia has reached its peak and is pointed toward inevitable decline. I think the biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it draws out amateur criticism and analysis. First off, it’s not like Wikipedia statistics are hidden away in an archive in Tibet, written in a mysterious Fujian script–it’s all publically available. Which begs the question, why is the state of Wikipedia in 2006 somehow today’s news? Shouldn’t we have been bludgeoned by “Wikipedia is Peaking!!!” articles three years ago?
But more troubling is the almost childlike understanding of the nature of knowledge that Wikipedia lays bare to the world. In an interview with NPR back when Wikipedia was peaking, I pointed out that the reason why the George W. Bush page was constantly being changed on Wikipedia was because our conception of Dubya was still in flux and that Wikipedia was accurately representing that flux. That’s not a brilliant observation on my part, and any undergraduate studying philosophy should be able to provide that answer, just like they should be able to tell you that, naturally, the recording of knowledge-based content will not continue at a geometric pace when measured by article creation. There aren’t any more counties, cities and chemicals to describe. All the major buildings, wars and sports teams have their page already. If article growth on Wikipedia continued apace, and editing continued apace, it would mean that the actual creation (As opposed to the recording) of knowledge content was accelerating at Gaussian proportions or that Wikipedia had lost its focus on describing knowledge and fallen into accepting fluff content pages (Which, with all the Simpsons Episode pages will tell you, is always a danger) simply to maintain some arbitrary measurement of size.
Still, it’d be nice to see Brittanica win one. I always root for the underdog.
California, that teetering, bankrupt, furlough-doling entity that was once the swaggering bully of these United States…
I have it on good authority that the California Arts Council so badly wanted a hokey, hipster, digital art piece for their California Arts Day Poster competition, that they’ve decided to eschew traditional art as too stodgy and not have any poster at all. It’s hard to find the original call, but it had such warning signs as the use of the word “mash up”.
Modern censorship isn’t about stopping the flow of information, that would be impossible, it’s about making the barriers of access to it so high that users can’t easily find it. Censorship (High barriers, privilege-based production benefits) exists on a spectrum, opposite from peer collaboration (Low barriers, commons-based production benefits). It’s relationship to artistic and technological innovation is not clear (Metaphor dies without or with too much prudence and censorship) but the popular Western view is that it is one of the evils of the barbaric past. And then, as if we’re stuck in season 8 of an endless sitcom, the producers said, “Why don’t we do a censorship episode?”
It turns out Wikipedia took part in the coverup of journalist David Rohde’s capture by Talibani forces in Afghanistan. Conversely, China has agreed to delay implementation of Green Dam–software designed ostensibly to censor pornography but also used to censor political information deemed unacceptable by the Chinese government. And then, just when you think China and Wikipedia are enough to fill 44 minutes plus commercials, you find out that The Pirate Bay sold out. It’s an almost maddening, Bizzaro World of events. Wikipedia is supposed to be practically uncensorable, China is supposed to be the Final Boss of Censorship and The Pirate Bay wasn’t just a search engine for illegal movies, hacked software and who-knows-what-else, it was also a major proponent of radical intellectual property rights reform. If this keeps up, the Semantic Web will arrive by Friday.
What follows is the Ancient Greek interpreted version of this post, which will not display properly if you view this page from a system outside the Bizzaro Universe:
Bar bar bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar, bar bar bar–bar bar bar–bar. Bar, bar bar; bar bar bar bar bar bar bar. Bar. Bar bar bar! Bar bar bar, bar bar, bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar bar bar. Bar, bar bar bar bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar bar bar. Bar bar, bar bar bar, bar bar bar bar bar. Bar bar bar bar-bar-bar-bar, bar bar bar bar bar bar bar.
Bar bar bar: Bar bar.