Aspen Mag

Aspen must have been the Visionaire of its day, except er... it was intelligent, you know with actual writing (by actual hippies no less). But yeah, it was a magazine in a box, with all sorts of goodies inside. Ubuweb has archived all 10 issues of the magazine extensively, enjoy the wander.

[via thingsmagazine.net: daily links, photos and new writing about objects]

Link In

Jim Moore has some very kind things to say about us. Thank you Jim!!! And a big welcome to all visitors from his fabulous site.

While on his site make sure you read this post. Its about the role of internet organization in politics and the Wesley Clark campaign specifically. Good stuff. I was actually planning on addressing it when I had more time. For now a quick note:

Its not about top down vs. bottom up, its about top down and bottom up working together.

More soon.

Playing Political Games

go play this game, really. We need more like this. The power of video games to effect your world view has never been clearer.

newsgaming is the group, give them love.

[notes from somewhere bizzare]

Resistance?

Still trying to figure out what I make of this statement for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2004 conference.

In light of these uncertain and violent times, cultural studies scholars have a moral obligation to police this crisis, to speak to the death of people, culture and truth, and to undo the official pedagogies that circulate in the media. We must seek non-violent regimes of truth that honor culture, universal human rights, and the sacred. We must seek critical methodologies that protest, resist and help us represent and imagine radically free utopian spaces.

And so, too, must this Crossroads Conference—this international gathering of voices—seek a new politics of resistance and truth, a politics of opposition, a world-wide joining of hands in the "globalization of dissent" (Roy, 2001, p.33). "A new day has dawned, to be met by a humankind's refusal to allow men to any longer make and wage war in the name of vainglory, profit and corrupt political ideologies" (Sontag, 2003, p. 3).

It is up to the poets, writers, artists, and scholars in cultural studies to make sense of what is happening.

There is a lot I agree with, to an extent, in those words. I'm all for "non-violent regimes of truth that honor culture, universal human rights, and the sacred" of course? But there is an odd tension to it all and some dark philosophies seemingly underlying it all. "Speak to the death" what a strange phrase.

Refusal, opposition, dissent, there is a negativity pulsing through it, occasionally offset with bursts of visions of a better world. But where is the "how"? How does seeking "critical methodologies that protest (and) resist" "help us represent and imagine radically free utopian spaces". Could it be that two halfs of the same statement are actually in opposition to each other? Where along a path of resistance, protest and opposition, does the construction or emergence of something better begin?

The Brands of Russian Prisons

Russian Prison Tattoos

It is not known when tattooing first became a common practice in Russian prisons and Stalinist Gulags. Soviet researchers first discovered and studied this underground activity in the 1920s; photographs of prisoners from that period suggest an already elaborate and highly developed subculture. More than simple decoration, the images symbolically proclaim the wearer's background and rank within the complex social system of the jailed.

[via notes from somewhere bizzare]

Comparative Border Crossings

tobias c. van Veen clued me in to the ACLA 2004 Conference, with some pretty interesting looking panels:

• Global networks after de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Negri’s Empire
• Global Dandyism
• Geo-philosophy: Transversals and Passages via Deleuze and Guattari
• Global Terrorism and Cultural Representation
• Memory and the City

So that parts good. Then the scary bit. ACLA stands for the "American Comparative Literature Association". I don't know about you but that makes me think of frail academics engaging in a gradual process of forgetting that the world outside of the library actually exists... I didn't catch much reference to policy, economics or any sort of active attempt to alter conditions at all really in the proposals. Must be nice not to be a realist...

update: Anne Galloway brings notice of another potentially interesting conference, this one a bit more politicized, with something of a dark voice.

Un Animation Du TechnoHouse Musique

In July 1993 I took a Techno Sound-system to West Africa and made a documentary.

dammmmnnnnn! read the whole jammy, you hear?

The film is available too, although it seems to be served off some 56k line or something. Can't wait to peep.

[via GUTTERBREAKZ]

Visuals of Conflict - Posters from Beirut

- AUB Jafet Library - Political Posters

[via Social Design Notes: Posters in Beirut]

v-2 compassion

v-2 Organisation | interface usability | Compassion and the crafting of user experience

go read it.

a welcome break from a slew of articles on the world of politics where compassion is a talking point to be discarded at will...

Rest In Peace Edward Said

[sad news via stevenberlinjohnson.com: Remembering Edward Said]

WTC Redux x ?

Felix Salmoncontinues his excellent coverage of the WTC rebuilding. One point in particular is resonating with me. When the original WTC was built several city streets where wiped off the map, resulting in a serious disconnect between Tribeca, Battery Park City and the Financial District. I actually liked the old Towers, which I used to work in, but in terms of connecting the surrounding neighborhoods they were a tragedy. A huge wall faced Tribeca, while BPC was cut off by a highway. The new plan apparently restores the old streets to foot traffic, and covers over the highway. The result should be a real street level vitality and a real flow between previously isolated hoods.

Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity

Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity by Susanna Sloat

"This groundbreaking work is an intriguing read for anyone who's ever spun out on a dancefloor, or wanted to." - Village Voice, January 2003

plus its my mom's book and I've been lax in promoting it, get stepping and go buy it...

Here's the details:

Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk is an unprecedented overview of the dances from each of this region's major islands and the complex, fused, and layered cultures that have given birth to them. The authors in this collection, from distinguished cultural leaders to highly innovative choreographers, reveal how dance shapes personal, communal, and national identity. Their essays also show how Caribbean rhythms, dances, fragments of movements, and even attitudes toward movement reach beyond the islands and through the extensive West Indian diaspora communities in North America, Latin America, and Europe to be embraced by the world at large.

A range of approaches, from the anthropological to the literary and from the practical to the creative, allows for a thorough exploration of these dances in the distinct yet interrelated contexts of social history, tradition/ritual, and performance. Connections are made among a fascinating array of dances, both familiar and little known, from culturally based to newly created performance pieces. Particular emphasis is placed on the African contribution in making Caribbean dance distinctive. An extensive glossary of terms and more than 30 illustrations round out the book to make it the most complete resource on Caribbean dance to date.

Intensive Gene Theory

The Pinocchio Theory: What Genes Can't Do. An interesting book review that tossed a couple more onto my wish list. Ends with the following:

What I’d like to see is a way that these considerations might hook up with the thinking of process and becoming that one finds in Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze; in opposition both to scientific reductionism and New Age holism. But of course I have little idea of whether such a thing is actually possible.

Which makes me wonder whether Shaviro has read Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, which may or may not address the exactly what he's interested in...

Linkage: WTC, Ghosts vs Cell Phones, Schelling Focal Points

felixsalmon.com: The refined WTC site plan

^ an excellent look at the evolving WTC plan. Adam do you and Muschamp still hate this plan?

collision detection: Who ya gonna call?

^ are cell phones scaring away ghosts?

icon's blog: Schelling's Focal Point

^ focal points where people meet.

Timescrapers

Manhattan Timeformations

[via S/FJ]

An Africa Perspective

[via AfricaBlog: Just to put Africa in some perspective Archives]

Envy for a Playa Hatah

collision detection: "Confessions Of A Playah Hatah" -- the politics of envy is excellent, go read it. And yes I'm envious of the fact that that blog has more technorati referrals then mine...

[via Zenarchery.com: The New Envy]

Aggregate Traffic Animals

There is a secret zoo that runs encaged along the roads.

They are liquid, semi-visible goliaths that rage through the streams and chunks of ordinary traffic, with the effervescent tendrils of mile-long tails whipping behind them like Chinese dragons. Though composed of hundreds of pounds of steel, glass and plastic, they are able to pass through solid objects. They are bound by the laws of the highway, but not by any conventional notion of time or space.

They are Aggregate Traffic Animals: a menagerie of emergent beasts drawn from the interacting behaviours of many individual human beings driving many individual cars with many individual goals, their collective activity giving rise to something with greater presence, power and purpose than the sum of its constituents. They take on a host of different forms, each to serve a different end.

They are real, and they drive among us.

from CheeseburgerBrown's Traffic Zoology, highly recommended.

[via Hit & Run: A Member of the Beast]

Organizing a TAZ?

Trouble in Counterculture Utopia highlights the strange dynamic of Burning Man (LLC). A for profit corporation organized with the purpose of creating something close to a TAZ. A carefully maintain tension that some far has worked extremely well, but is in constant danger of shifting out of control...

Check the numbers for a second. $10 million pumped into the local economy, $40 million lawsuit, population 30,000 centered around a 77 foot statue. "Festival organizers say they are bringing their fire preparedness up to code, installing fire breaks around the property and keeping 40,000 gallons of water on hand. They also say they have removed 30 truckloads of debris and 20 abandoned cars... Mr. Roger gazed at his art car, a 1986 Chevy Sprint converted to resemble a giant carp and customized with 30-foot flame throwers."

But their is a deft transformation at the entrance of the festival, "This is a matter of perspective," he said. "What our opposition calls rubbish, I call art materials. What they call a salvage yard, I call a recycling center." Not to mention the fact that after giving Black Rock City LLC your $250 you enter into a space where money is prohibited...

"In the vicinity of the bifurcation the capacity to transmit information is maximized". - Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy.

[via City Comforts Blog: Burning Man's staging area in land-use dispute]

Noney

Noney is a new currency. Each Noney note is a hand drawn, hand printed and hand signed piece of art. Each note can also be traded for things. Like all money, Noney is for people to circulate. The result is a combination of public art, performance art and printmaking.

...

Each Noney note has the same denomination: zero. This doesn't mean each note has no value... just relative value. There's no fixed exchange rate or area of operation. Noney's worth as both art and currency is something to negotiate through each individual transaction - anywhere.

-Noney

[via Boing Boing who also point out the obvious precedent set by JSG Boggs]

Beyond Smooth?

Noted without comment for future exploration:

On the other hand, Delueze is perfectly aware of the existence of several nonmetric geometries and uses a single term ('smooth space') to refer to all of them: "It is the difference between a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated (metric) space..."

from the footnotes of DeLanda's Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy.

Healing Freeway Scars

Wow, this is good, I pretty much agree with
City Comforts gushing write up.

The skinny? The city of Columbus Ohio (which I have mad love for btw, hi Jen and Ed!) recently built a freeway overpass with stores on either side. Why is this important? Because having a freeway run straight through an urban area divides a city in
disparate sections, its an action segregation, striation and division. It blocks the flow of people from place the place, and discourages people from walking or interacting with their neighbors a few hundred feet across the freeway.

By making a freeway overpass just another urban street Columbus has gone a long way toward healing those divisions. It rejoins the neighborhoods on either side of the freeway, reenabling a healthy flow between the two sides. It's a model for urban spaces reclaiming space from the divisive culture and actuality of the freeway.

Of course we'll need to be on the watchout for any potential draw backs. I'm a little concerned about the viability of a freeway overpass as a place of business. The fumes can not be good. Rents a presume will be lower, which might be a good thing. Perhaps these can be used as urban incubation spaces, where new business can experiment with low overhead? Overall this is a good thing I think, but it still needs study.

[via the excellent Beyond Brilliance: Healing Freeway Scars]

Dark Bays (current location = San Francisco)

Flew into the SF Bay Area last night. Jet Blue was a smooth as always, arrived at the airport 30 minutes before departure. Headed straight to the auto check in kiosk and had the boarding pass within minutes. Got marked S (for extra security scrutiny) as usual. At least I got to cut the line for being late. Got inspected more thoroughly then ever, although I've yet to find an inspector who hasn't missed at least one compartment... Arrived at the gate with 10 minutes to spare, should have gotten food. Somehow got an exit row seat to top it off, nice.

Shit, San Francisco is a really dark city, isn't it. Known it for a while, but I never really realized it until last night. Not dark as in ominous, but just plain dark as in not well lit. The BART trains are dimmer then any public transit I can remember. And the SF street lights are sparse and perhaps less powerful then I'm used to. Guess its part of being closer to nature and better for the environment. No wonder everything closes by 10pm.

Funny growing up in NYC has left me both semi nocturnal and extremely into brightness. I like working late at night, but preferably its under floodlights. Must be a 21st century condition..

Segregating Architecture

According to their site, Chicken & Egg Public Projects: "conceives and develops interpretive environments and interactive strategies that advance public understanding of cultural and social issues."

Check out their Architecture of Segregation project:

Architecture of Segregation explores how racial attitudes shaped urban, suburban, and rural landscapes that maintain divisions in American society. This multidisciplinary project examines the ways in which forces ranging from violent individuals to institutional practice to government policy embedded racial biases in everyday spaces, places, and structures during the second half of the twentieth century. Through collaboration with a network of scholars and institutions, Architecture of Segregation will comprise a major publication, national traveling exhibition, web site, and educational activities. These products, conceived to engage a broad audience, are intended as a stimulus for public discussion, continued scholarly research, and new directions in public policy.

...

Architecture of Segregation asks: How have racial attitudes shaped the built environment? What are the structures of a closed society? How do these keep races apart, even in the absence of prejudice? Architecture of Segregation will encourage the general public, scholars, policy makers, and the media to consider these questions as they reexamine the twentieth-century construction of the American home. By concentrating on familiar spaces and activities, it will encourage the public to understand the forces that shaped the landscape and to recognize how that landscape shapes their behavior and beliefs. With this understanding, they can consider rebuilding a divided United States.

A book and traveling exhibition are in the works. Keep an eye out.

[via Social Design Notes: Architecture of Segregation]

Beyond Design

Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity, is the best double barreled weblog I've seen. Thoughts on the best and worst of urban design, peep it.

[via No Sense Of Place]

A Blossoming

Its been a long time coming and its so close I smell it. Creative doldrums have dominated the past few years in music and style. These are dark economic times and creativity has been nursing a major hangover after partying like 1999 for most of a decade. But I see buds breaking, rhizomes reemerging above the ground. A new mutant aesthetic is on its rise. Imagine it as a building. It has history, 100 years back it was a tenement. 2 years ago it was crumbling husk of shattered brick wall. Weeds growing everywhere, graffiti covering all smooth surfaces. Today you enter through a side door, black painted steel covered in tags, stickers and stencil. You are in the back, you are in a garden. Bamboo shoots and white orchids. A small stream wanders through. The walls are covered with the original graf, throw-ups mixed with fantastic wild style pieces. You turn and head up the stairs, clear plastic meets plate glass, you are back in a dream of the future. Hi tech form and function. You reach the landing and pause, the wall is a shifting plastic, the latest of tech you presume. But the door is almost floating in it. The doorway has moldings, left over from a past life perhaps? Layers of paint are peeling of the door like a beach shack, the knob is dented copper.

You enter to a space of pure light, projections dance around you all walls, floors and ceiling, this is pure information transformed in pure beauty. Needless to say the sound system is slamming. Your eyes shift to the corner, an space between the walls you missed on the first scan, you head into it. Another staircase, heading up. The walls are covered with drawings, their are hundreds of stories on these walls, dozens of artists intertwined as they tell their tales. Perhaps you spend years deciphering them, but more likely you reach the landing and a door slides upon for you. Now the floors are hardwood. Large windows cut into exposed brick on three walls give you a view back into the street, you are still in your city. The back wall is bookshelves, the collection is of course flawless, there are comfortable chairs, you'll need to return to read. Display cases filled with scientific curiosities are scattered through the space, their is much to learn. But first you push forward rooms splattered with paint, rooms that make you think you are pac man, a fireplace someplace, a rec room, low ceilings for intimacy, high ceilings to uplift the soul. Intricate carvings contrasted with minimal simplicity. This is a meshwork, a space of cross breeding. At first perhaps you attempt to localize everything, give it a name, a place, a time. But this doesn't last long, the handcrafted weaves back and forth with the digital, the historical melds seamlessly with the hi tech.

Who created this space, a graf artist? media mogul? perhaps a woodworker, but then maybe it was a plastics designer. You look for the cracks separating the spaces, and they are not there. There must be a point where one craftsman transitions to another, but you can not put your finger on it. Could it be that this space was not created but grew instead? I suppose that means its still growing.

Black Ecstasy

Sort of sad that Simon Reynolds is talking about nadirs so much lately, cause its looking increasingly like the best music critic of the 90's is dangerously close to his own nadir. ? please Simon, how long before you realize that the British just can't make hip hop. Like all British hip hop the beats are solid. And like the best of the bunch the content of the lyrics is pretty intelligent. But fuck he could have wrote a book or something cause it ain't hip hop unless the shit flows. And Rascal's flow is about as forced as the case for the invasion of Iraq...

Now lets get to the irony. Not sure what's up with Mr. Reynolds, but he claims not know whether David Banner's Like a Pimp is hip hop's nadir or the start of something entirely new. Truth is its a manifestation of something Reynolds predicted a few years back in more astute times, black American ecstasy music. A song of pure E stabs, makes my skin tingle just listening to it. Who needs a groove when the beat keeps lifting that E higher and higher? Bone Crusher goes one better with an E rushing voice, who needs Mentasm when you can just use your lungs?

I'm beginning to think much of the British Rave Explosion E was laced with major amounts of speed. Would certainly explain the constantly escalating BPMs of the early 90's. Its not a property of the E at all, and the dirty south is showing just how effective the slowed down E sound can be. Finally, been waiting for this music for a while now. This is the sound of ecstasy plus soul, lets hear it multiply.

One last thought, could it be that Timbaland, in all his genius, might have actually slowed down this development? Don't think he actually eats the pills, but his excellent ear has been offering up audio close enough for the crowd. Fake black ecstasy for the club. And being on top of his game and commercial gold equals soundwave domination. But now the homegrown producers have found the space to emerge; the real black ecstasy sound is stepping forth. Tellingly their models seem to be DJ Screw and Manny Fresh, not Timbaland and Dre. This is music for the mixtape economy not the major label economy.

Downtown

don't forget to peep the scale version.

[via alphaChannel -fair and balanced]

"work" it

v-2 Organisation | news | Real value and the nature of work

Read it. Its probably my favorite thing that I've read from Adam, and he's a damn good writer. Hits a central question of the 21st century straight on. Hopefully I'll have some answers soon. And even more hopefully you will have some answers soon.

antics and gang rape

hallucinations & antics . tobias c. van Veen .. ./ /. . ./ .. /. /. /. . .. . ./ ./ . /. .. . .. / /. has been playing fast and loose with its text size and now has the best looking weblog around.

On a more serious note tobias also brings ill news: 'Polish artist DOROTA NIEZNALSKA was sentenced to 6 months of confinement in her community for "violence to religious feelings."'

Among the suggested punishments *GANG RAPE*. An ill world indeed. Damn.

Blackout

"Its time the Christian right meet the right Christians"

I'm purely agnostic myself, but you can't help loving that zing of Al Sharpton's "right Christian" quote. Good to see that meme percolate a bit. All Brill has started blogging on the theme and sent me this link to an extensive exploration of Lakoff's Moral Politics. And of course I just love reading from intelligent people with very different world views from mine.

The Right Christians: George Lakoff, Tucker Carlson, Danny Goldberg

Good stuff, breaks down Lakoff nicely. Have to say its pretty odd switching back towards this mode of thinking after being immersed in D+G's journeys of deterritorialization. Two very different world views, be interesting to bring them together. And yeah I'll get back to Lakoff soon enough. The utility of his ideas calls, even if I suspect they are somewhat inaccurate...

Six Million Degrees of Bull$&*t (choose one)

So I've already torn into the "proving" of the six degrees of separation. And then Clay Shirky drops this gem of a turd on the study.

The most important finding, though, was that while chains can be connected in a few hops, few are. Of over 60,000 volunteers, only 384 chains, around 3%, were actually connected.

Now Clay put it politely. I'm not going to. This means the study is a big steaming pile of horseshit. Its getting hyped as "proving" the six degrees theory when in fact it disproves it completely. Blows the fucking theory out the water with an RPG. Only 3% of the chains actually connected at all! That means we are completely disconnected from most people, not connected. Something has gone horribly wrong in the spreading of this story. Perhaps its the researcher trying to salvage their hypothesis from a study that proves them wrong, or maybe its the media hyping the wrong thing. Probably a bit of both.

Now in all fairness this study seems a bit flawed, I have a feeling it amplifies the distance between us somewhat. But 97% is a big number. The connections are not getting made. We are separated from most of the world by an infinite number of degrees. Out own larger social sphere is close knit. But outside that sphere there are vast oceans of separation, connected only tenuously by the few individuals that daringly cross cultural borders. Like it or not we still live in a world of disconnect and discrepancy. And my tollerance for those who sell us myths of connection to make us feel better about our concentration of power is getting dangerously thin.

The Technoarchy

Technoarchy: a form of oligarchy where society is controlled by those who use technology the best. Unlike traditional oligarchies technoarchies are generally emergent. For the most part they are not created deliberately, but rise out of the properties of the dominant technology of the time, ie the networked computers of the 21st century.

According to google it was used with a potentially similar meaning once before, in an essay I have yet to get my hands on. If anyone knows of any other prior uses, please let me know. Same goes for other words with a similar meaning.

Expect an essay in the near future.

Six Degrees of Bull$&*t

Ok its time to put it to rest. This six degrees of separation thing is getting distorted beyond belief. The basic story as its told is that everyone world is connected to each other by a chain of five friends, which is 6 degrees of separation. The initial source of all this was a study in the 60's by Stanley Milgram, but that study was too flaw to actually prove anything. But now a more rigorous study has been done.

Study: It's a small world, to a degree | CNET News.com

Now what this study proves is that on average people seem to connected by about six degrees. But the general perception seems to be that it proves that everyone is connected by about six degrees. And that's bullshit. Check this quote:

People are more likely to try to find people whom they think will be easy to find, said Watts, who calls himself a mathematical sociologist. "We realized the demographics of our users--they were U.S.-based and heavily college-educated,'' he said. "People get the name of a professor and they say, 'This is easy, I could see how this would work,' and they do it; whereas if they get someone whose name they can't pronounce in a country they can't point to on a map, they say 'I don't know.'"

In other words people in similar demographics are tightly connected, but people in different demographics are not very connected at all. Odds are most people in the US and Slovenia are separated by far more then six degrees.

Two men, one in Croatia and one in Indonesia, proved the most elusive; a Cornell University professor got the most hits, Watts said in a telephone interview.

I can't tell for sure, but it looks like a lot of people might never have ever figured out a connection to those men. What this means is not the world is tightly connected by six degrees of separation, but that certain communities are densely connected, while others are not connected at all.

This draws the picture of a world of social clouds, where groups of thousands and hundreds of thousands are clustered in social groupings, with almost no connections to other social clouds. A lot of us are connected no doubt, but a lot of us aren't either and lets not forget that.

Open Source Philosophies: 3 Takes

tobias c. van Veen sent along:

The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism

Raises some interesting parallels between the open source movement and various forms of poststructuralist thought. And then it stops, just as the questions get interesting. I assume (hope) there is more to come.

Brought to mind Manuel DeLanda's Open-Source A Movement in Search of a Philosophy, which raises a couple sharp questions, but never digs for any answers.

And finally, because not all anarchism is poststructuralist, its worth pointing to Eben Moglen's Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright. As best as I can tell from his writings and some of his lectures I've sat in on Moglen subscribes to a hyperlogical view of anarchism, if the whole world thinks like programmers, we'd be in utopia. Super intelligent but quite strange all the same.

Bottom line, open source + philosophy = more exploration needed

Gross National Cool

Both TIME Magazine, and Foreign Policy are talking about what they call Japan's "gross national cool". No indication of how both publications ended up using the same term, wonder what the story is. In anycase this is as good an indicator as I've seen that Japan's cultural capital has peaked, watch out for the backlash. No guarentee's though, history tells us its usually a bad idea to underestimate Japan.

[via jeansnow.net and Joi Ito's Web]

Bateson

Gregory Bateson has managed to get his fingers into far too many pies... His name pops up everywhere it seems, he must be the only thinker who served as an inspiration for both the freaky ultra scientific psychology of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Delueze and Guattari, who took the concept of plateaus directly from Bateson. On top of that he was a well respected anthropologist and extremely influential in the development of cybernetics.

And yeah I haven't read nearly enough of his work, just a couple anthropological essays.

[via Interconnected]

Readage

Post A Thousand Plateaus I'm back to my usual read a lot of books at once style. Here is the state:

From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe

Wolfe slices through the bs of modernist architecture with his usual flare and wit. It came out in the early 80's which probably added a cocaine fueled bitchy edge to all. Quite enjoyable, even if the targets are damn easy ones. Read it course with a grain of salt of course, not all the modernists are as bad a Le Corb...

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

A good 2 hour scifi read to cleanse the palette. Ignore the fact the "deep philosophical questions" are a silly bore and its an entertaining read.

The Twenty-First-Century Firm : Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective by Paul DiMaggio (Editor)

Its a collection of essays by various authors so its a bit hard to judge the whole book at this point. The intro however is an excellent introduction to the current state of thinking on the organization of firms. The whole field is still too deeply interwoven with free market capitalist thinking, but its ripe for a divorce. And that's the exciting part. There is a new approach to political economy in the making and some the roots (rhizome?) are nicely traced in this book.

Street Powers (of Ten)

So MapQuest now gives you the option to see an aerial photo of maps you look up. That's where I grew up. Surprising just how green the area is. You can scale the photos just like a regular online map, which means you can roll your own little Powers of Ten too. Props to anyone who can name the landmarks on that photo above.

[via Kathryn Cramer: Habitats: Compare & Contrast]

plateau # finishing thoughts

A Thousand Plateaus is "finished". As in I read every page. Some more then once or twice. As for the actual words, I'm notoriously poor at actually reading all of them, always looking for the larger patterns, not the precise sequences. Anyways I'm assuming I'll need to return... Some random thoughts

Couldn't abstract machines more accurately be called algorithms?

While the authors seem to tie "the State" directly to striated space, its seems that many states are actually using striation in 3D space in order to move in the smooth space of time. To reach a plateau where the state always has existed and always will exist.

Continuing on one could say that striated and smooth space don't just interweave, but sometimes exist at exactly the same point. From angle a striation may actually be a path through smooth space.

Is Google "the State" of the web. Its constantly spidering, or deterritorializing, web sites, then indexing and reterritorializing them as search results and cached pages. However Google generally in not fully blocking the line of flight, its just pausing it, indexing it and presenting the user options back to the original territories.

Markets and Antimarkets

The best part about Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography was discovering that DeLanda actually wrote a whole series of "markets and antimarkets" essays. I had read one of them, but was unaware that there were more. Spent some time reading them all. My favorite of the bunch is Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy. It was written in 1996 but minus a few historical asides it could just as well have been written yesterday.

I'm going to pull some key quotes, but first let me make an important note that DeLanda has since stated that where he to do these essays again, we probably not rely on the simple "market" vs. "antimarket" dichotomy. There is a strong need for further nuance and articulation. But the core argument is still extremely pertinent.

These new ideas are all the more important when we move on to the social sciences, particularly economics. In this discipline, we tend to uncritically assume systematicity, as when one talks of the "capitalist system", instead of showing exactly how such systematic properties of the whole emerge from concrete historical processes. Worse yet, we then tend to reify such unaccounted-for systematicity, ascribing all kinds of causal powers to capitalism, to the extent that a clever writer can make it seem as if anything at all (from nonlinear dynamics itself to postmodernism or cyberculture) is the product of late capitalism. This basic mistake, which is, I believe, a major obstacle to a correct understanding of the nature of economic power, is partly the result of the purely top-down, analytical style that has dominated economic modeling from the eighteenth century. Both macroeconomics, which begins at the top with concepts like gross national product, as well as microeconomics, in which a system of preferences guides individual choice, are purely analytical in approach. Neither the properties of a national economy nor the ranked preferences of consumers are shown to emerge from historical dynamics. Marxism, is true, added to these models intermediate scale phenomena, like class struggle, and with it conflictive dynamics. But the specific way in which it introduced conflict, via the labor theory of value, has now been shown by Shraffa to be redundant, added from the top, so to speak, and not emerging from the bottom, from real struggles over wages, or the length of the working day, or for control over the production process.

...

Fernand Braudel has recently shown, with a wealth of historical data, that this picture is inherently wrong. Capitalism was, from its beginnings in the Italy of the thirteenth century, always monopolistic and oligopolistic. That is to say, the power of capitalism has always been associated with large enterprises, large that is, relative to the size of the markets where they operate.

...

First of all, if capitalism has always relied on non-competitive practices, if the prices for its commodities have never been objectively set by demand/supply dynamics, but imposed from above by powerful economic decision-makers, then capitalism and the market have always been different entities. To use a term introduced by Braudel, capitalism has always been an "antimarket". This, of course, would seem to go against the very meaning of the word "capitalism", regardless of whether the word is used by Karl Marx or Ronald Reagan. For both nineteenth century radicals and twentieth century conservatives, capitalism is identified with an economy driven by market forces, whether one finds this desirable or not. Today, for example, one speaks of the former Soviet Union's "transition to a market economy", even though what was really supposed to happen was a transition to an antimarket: to large scale enterprises, with several layers of managerial strata, in which prices are set not taken. This conceptual confusion is so entrenched that I believe the only solution is to abandon the term "capitalism" completely, and to begin speaking of markets and antimarkets and their dynamics.

Brightly Colored Food, Small Worlds and Social Clouds

Met up with Chad Thornton of brightly colored food yesterday. Chad emailed me a few days back noting that

1 - we went to the same school
2 - he read this site
3 - he once played in a band with a business partner of mine
4 - he knew two of my cousins.

and of course we shared a similar interest in interface design. and I quickly learned he used to be roommates with a good friend of mine.

But some how we'd never met.

These sorts of dense interconnections never seize to fascinate me. At the same time though, I come to expect them, they are so common. You can never predict the specifics, but they occur with regularity no matter where I am. Small world.

Except that its not, we live in a huge world. 6 billion people we are told. And as interesting as the interconnections are, I'm getting more and more interested in the lines of separation.

Things like friendster make it more and more clear that we exist in large scale social networks of hundreds of thousands of people. I call them social clouds at the moment. But beware I use the term cloud, not to represent what these networks resemble, but the emphasize the amorphousness of our knowledge of the dynamics of these networks. If they even exist, their existence is somewhat unproven, the evidence is anecdotal and peripheral at the moment.

Now some of these clouds and clusterings are pretty easy to guess at. Geography and religion are age old forces creating large scale social networks. Organizations like universities and governments generate their own large scale clusters. In the internet age, shared interests is a pretty efficient creator of such groupings as well.

I'd hypothesize that social networks also are divided by more arbitrary and random reasons. An exchange program between two schools creates a social flow. A chance meeting between two consummate networkers leads to a blending of their social clouds. A short love affair between a high school guidance counselor and college admissions officer leads to tight connection between the social networks of the two schools. The same admissions officer however hates the smell of another high school counselor's perfume, and rift grows between the two clouds.

Two people with similar backgrounds and education might live blocks apart, but drift through very different clouds. A meme might percolate through one cloud a year before the other, despite both clouds being in the same target market. Just as we find surprising connections between people I suspect we'll find the disconnects are just as surprising...

Plateau # breakdown of terms

A handy Glossary of some key concepts from A Thousand Plateaus. That's about as crisp and concise (oversimplified?) as it gets. Almost "finished' with the book btw. Finished as in read it all once (and parts many times), but not finished as in I'm likely to end up rereading major parts at some point.

Also I'll desperately need some "high quality" junk (read pulp) reading to cleanse the pallet and massage the brain. Freely send along any suggestions.

[via purse lip square jaw]

Manuel DeLanda Bibliography

Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography

(Short) Notes from an Artist Salon

Just lost a long post on an artist salon I attended over the weekend and the importance of organized labor to so browser carelessness. Going to just post the links then hopefully rewrite it all.

Environmental Art Museum

THIS IS THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

They Rule

The High Line

[via Social Design Notes: Redesigning the High Line]

Anita Roddick's Kind of Revolution

AlterNet: Q&A: Anita Roddick's Kind of Revolution

Always been inclined to look at Roddick as a bit of hero, although the truth is I really haven't researched her ideas and story enough. But its a good interview.

Beginning to get troubled by the extreme overuse of "revolution" in these sorts of interviews. The more I think about it the more I think that concepts of "revolution" and "resistance" are more reactionary then anything. They take us back to the 19th century, not forward to a better world. There is a romance and seduction to it of course, and there is both value and danger in that. But more then anything "revolution" is a marketing phrase, and lately the language of resistance seems to be used as freely by banks and alcohol companies then by those truly trying to improve things.

De Landa - A New Political Economy

I believe that the main task for today's left is to create a new political economy (the resources are all there: Max Weber, T.B. Veblen and the old institutionalists, John Kenneth Galbraith, Fernand Braudel, some of the new institutionalists, like Douglass North; redefinitions of the market, like those of Herbert Simon etc) based as you acknowledged before, on a non-equilibrium view of the matter? But how can we do this if we continue to believe that Marxists got it right, that it is just a matter of tinkering with the basic ideas? At any rate, concepts like "mode of production" do not fit a flat ontology of individuals as far as I can tell.

- Manuel De Landa

That's about as clear as its gotten so far and I couldn't agree more. Well actually I'm not even sure I'd want to use the term "left", there is a huge need for a new political economy, in general. And Marxism has very little (no?) place in it. Left, right? Tired, of fading use, talk about an excessive use of the binary. We can craft something better. De Landa seems to be the only academic around who has really noticed. The left keeps keeps critiquing Capitalism with varied reiterations of Marx's core, and it just doesn't hold up to any real economic scrutiny.

The quote above is from an excellent and extensive Ctheory interview with De Landa. He has a new book out, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. It's next on my "serious" reading list. Those interested in his move towards a new political economy should check out his essay "Markets, Antimarkets and Network Economics", where he lays some ground work.

Back to the Ctheory interview:

CTHEORY (Protevi): Okay, but even if the shift from an exchangist to a productivist perspective doesn't work for you, does it at least seem to you a fruitful way of explaining Deleuze and Guattari's tenacious loyalty to (some suitably modified) form of Marxist analysis, as well as their insistence on a systematicity to capitalist production? Or do we have to change so much in Marx to reach what Deleuze and Guattari say in analyzing things that their insistence on calling what they do a form of Marxism simply the result of their social position in the "gauchiste" (non-Communist) left of France in their lifetimes? In other words, their Marxism is a way of thumbing their noses both at neo-liberals and at party loyalists?

De Landa: Well, frankly, I think Marxism is Deleuze and Guattari's little Oedipus, the small piece of territory they must keep to come back at night after a wild day of deterritorializing. Who could blame them for needing a resting place, a familiar place with all the reassurances of the Marxist tradition (and its powerful iconography of martyrs and revolutionaries)? The question is whether we need that same resting place (clearly we need one, but should it be the same? Shouldn't each of us have a different one so that collectively we can eliminate them?).

Yes, yes, I have to agree. Its like a weird little twitch throughout A Thousand Plateaus, and its keeping me from enjoying it quite as much as I'd like to. Actually been trying to write out something similar for a few days now. How nice of De Landa to do it for me. Think ATP is going to read a bit nicer now...

[via headmap and Anne Galloway]

Few more choice quotes:

CTHEORY (Jensen): A similar question could be raised in relation to your work on markets and anti-markets. In contrast to Empire by Hardt and Negri, which explicitly hopes to have a political impact, your position is much less straightforwardly normative. If, in a realist vein, you take your analysis to be descriptive, how then do you think people might act to reap the benefits of your description?

De Landa: No, not at all. Remember first of all that a realist never settles for a mere description. It is explanation that is the key and the latter involves thinking about real mechanisms which may not be directly observable (or describable). The disagreement with Empire is over the mechanisms one postulates and the details of their workings. I do not accept the Marxist version of these mechanisms (neither those through which markets are supposed to operate nor those for the State) and believe the Marxist version leads to practical dead ends regardless of how ready to be used in social interventions the analysis seems to be. (To be blunt, any idea for social intervention based on Marxism will be a failure). I do take normative positions in my books (such that decentralization is more desirable than centralization for many reasons) but I also realize than in an ethics of nourishing versus degrading assemblages real-life experimentation (not a priori theorization) is the key. To use an obvious example from environmental ethics: a little phosphorous feeds the soil; too much poisons it. Where exactly the threshold is varies with type of soil so it cannot be known a priori. But the normative statement "do not poison the soil" is there nevertheless. Similarly for society: too much centralization poisons (by concentrating power and privilege; by allowing corruption; by taking away skills from routinized command-followers etc) but exactly how much is to be decided by social experiments, how else?

....

CTHEORY (Protevi): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy accepts Deleuze's use of axiomatics to analyze major or Royal science. Yet you are critical of Deleuze and Guattari's use of axiomatics as a way to conceptualize capitalism (e.g., ATY 331n7), which you see as an example of a top-down positing of a whole. I certainly would agree with you that far too much Marxist work has been simplistic, historical determinist, reductive, totalizing, functionalist, top-down, etc., but I wonder if you aren't being too harsh with Deleuze and Guattari's attempts to define a theory of capitalism that avoids each of these dangers? They certainly adopt a notion of "machinic surplus value," moving beyond a simple labor theory of value (machines as "congealed muscular energy," as you put it at ATY 79). Don't they also consistently deny any historical determinism of stages of development by emphasizing the contingency of capitalist formations, as well as conduct a sustained polemic against reductive base-superstructure models of society? Don't their constant reminders that the line of flight is primary prevent any totalizing accounts? Isn't their use of axiomatics an attempt to see capitalism as an adaptive meshwork of economic, state and quasi-state (IMF, WTO, etc.) institutions, rather than as a homeostatic organismic whole, as in crude functionalist accounts? In other words, haven't they, at least in principle, given us the outlines of a bottom-up account of a complex, open-ended, adaptive world capitalist system?

De Landa: I agree that if I had to choose among all the Marxist accounts of economic history I would probably pick theirs. It does have all the advantages you mention. Yet, I believe they would have benefited greatly from a better reading of Braudel. They seemed to have read only volume one of his history of capitalism and not the other two volumes, which are really the most radical part. This is clear when in A Thousand Plateus in one page thet quote Braudel's stress on the role of cities and yet in the very next page Deleuze and Guattari go on to define capitalism as a "market economy", an idea which Braudel attacks as historically false. So I wonder what would have happened to their theory had they understood the last point: that there is no such thing as "the market" in general and no such thing as a "logic of exchange" in general (doesn't the idea of an capitalist axiomatic depend on the idea of a logic of exchange?). Once we separate oligopolies from the market (they are strategic not primarily exchangist entities) and identify capitalism with oligopolies (as Braudel does) we can still use some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas since markets have always caused "lines of flight" to pass among societies, particularly closed societies (it's in the marketplace that we meet outsiders; that foreign objects and ideas enter a city; that heterogeneity is injected etc).

Anthrax

I was on the case after some white powder was discovered in the Canal Street 1/9 Station. As everyone was standing around, two girls came up to me and asked what was going on. I told them it was a possible anthrax situation, and one of the girls turned to the other and said "Anthrax? That's soooo 2001."

- Bluejake: Blue Jake

Ok its pretty damn funny. But it'd be a lot more funny if they had actually discovered (publicly) who was actually behind the Anthrax of 2001... And yeah follow the link for on scene photos.

Suburban Geographics

Kathryn Cramer: A Town of Mini-Rockefellers

More on the planned geography of an old school suburb. Still can't imagine growing up anyplace other then NYC. What do kids do without both sidewalks and subways? Play video games and IM mainly, I think.

Cash, the Concrete and Political Abstractions: Towards a New Economy of Ideas

Harry Potter did $100 million in book sales just last weekend alone. A successful Hollywood movie does $100 million in a few weeks.

The reason that political giving does not reach these sorts of totals —in a nation of over 280 million people—is not that people don’t value the presidency—but that the conventional mechanisms for political donating don’t scale. George Bush’s money is raised through small networks of wealthy individuals who tap their friends, family, and business associates. While this network is effective up to a point, it cannot compare to the scalability of a nationwide system of theaters, retail stores, or the Internet.

- Jim Moore

That's from Moore's post linked previously. And he's entirely right. But there is another dynamic at work here as well, one that politicians and non-profits have never successfully addressed. These groups are in the business of selling abstract ideas. A politician is selling the idea that he can improve the nation, community or world. An non profit sells the idea that they can fix a particular range of problems. They are selling intangible products.

Corporations on the other hand sell tangibility. A soda you can drink, a service that effects you quickly. These are easy sells. People are willing to drop $100 million on Harry Potter because they walk of with a book in their hands, or at least in the mail.

What do you get when you give to a politician or non profit? Its hard to say, maybe a t-shirt or mug if you are lucky. And then if things work out you get the reward way down the road, when you read the paper and hear you're candidate or group is doing a good job.

Now there is a massive amount of support for political and social action in the abstract. But cash is concrete. Credit cards and the internet make it a bit less tangible, but we still feel the flow of money. Its finite and has concrete effects. The problem facing candidates is that they need to transform abstract support into cold hard cash. Right now they use a few techniques, the main being face time with the candidate (for the wealthy only). They also throw in those mugs, stickers and t-shirts. You know the ones no one really wants unless they are obsessive...

The internet solves some of the problem by making the flow of money less concrete. Its easier to part with money by clicking on a link then by handing over cash or writing a check. But it still takes motivation to click that link. And how often do you wake up and say I feel like giving some money away to a candidate?

What politicians and non profits need to do is provide a more concrete method for abstract supporters of the cause to transfer their money. Here's one potential way it could work.

Suppose you are thirsty and walking down the street. You walk into the nearest store and head to the bottled water section. The usual corporate brands are there, Crystal Geyser, Poland Spring, Arrowhead, etc. But there is also bottles of Howard Dean and George Bush water on the shelf. They are well branded and taste great. (And whoever says water has no taste is just wrong). You can give your money to some corporation or you can give your money to a political cause. What are you going to do? I'd say most people would support a cause they care for.

So someone buys a Howard Dean water, and the campaign makes 20¢. 5 million supporters buying one bottle a day equals a million dollars a day in campaign funds. $350 million a year. More then the whole presidential election is expected to cost, for all the candidates combined... And that wouldn't even put a dent in the multi-billion dollar US market for bottled water.

Now this raises a lot of issues I don't have time to get into at the moment, but the bottom line is that opening up new paths for people to express their political views could transform politics dramatically. For the better and for the worse, but more for the better. More soon.

Linkage; J01 2003

Kathryn Cramer: Why Sidewalks?

-excellent essay on sidewalks, suburbia and family values.

SubIntSoc: The Situation Room

- lucid writing on subtly subversive politics and culture. Straight out of my referrer logs.

Jim Moore: Do the math: the first billion dollar presidential campaign

- Moore predicts we could see the first billion dollar presidential campaign. Could be true, especially if the metric is the spending of all candidates. He's perhaps a bit optimistic on how much people are willing to give though. But its an interesting prediction, I'll be watching for signs.

Plateau # Deleuze & Guattari Meet Lakoff in an Airport...

Definitely learning Deleuze & Guattari strange language, I can finally read them at speeds approaching my normal quickness. Yes this is intoxicating stuff. Is it a recreational or medical drug though? Or maybe just food?

Wonder if D&G ever crossed paths with Mr. George Lakoff. The would seem to turn in quite separate academic circles, but perhaps on the airport tarmac they might meet for a second. And yes there are traces of Lakoff's Moral Politics in A Thousand Plateaus:

They have special relation to families, because they link the family model to the State model at both ends and regard themselves as "great families"...

Of course D&G are so dense you could probably find traces of anything in their work. Its sort of like the bible, whatever you want is in there...

Digital Shoplifting: Cameraphones and Secret Social Rules

Japanese bookstores desperate to stop 'digital shoplifting' with cellphones [via die puny humans]

This is pretty fucking funny. People going into stores and taking pictures of magazines, and they call it stealing? I've been pretty surprised how fast these cameraphones have taken off. And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised how much they effect society. We are about to hit a point where almost every social interchange is going to be potentially recorded and broadcast. Stopping it will require big time effort on the part of government and corporations. I don't think they'll make the effort to stop it.

You are under surveillance, live with it. David Brin's The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? explores some of the potential effects. But its a bit bland, I still haven't finished it... It's hard to say exactly what will happen, but I am pretty sure some of the unspoken mores that govern our society will break.

Monogamous marriage for one is a prime candidate for shattering. Its already worn down with our divorce rates. And what happen's when you can tell where your spouse is at any given time? Cheating is supposed to be wrong, yet our society if rife with it. It falls into a shift gray zone, and is ignored in order to maintain a system of monogamy. What happens if technology makes it virtually impossible to cheat? Does monogamy break? Or do we change our codes of behavior? Society as a whole may be heading for some cognitive dissonance. Heads up y'all.

Plateau # rhizome

I've gotten further into A Thousand Plateaus then I was yesterday [Abstract Dynamics: A Few Plateaus]. Picked up speed actually, for the first time I think since first picked up a D&G a year and change ago. More comfortable with the rhizome, I think a lot of my resistance too it stems from the fact that I'm all too familiar with concept and have seen it articulated better then D&G do. But when the book was being written in the late 1970's it probably was pretty out there verging on revolutionary. That doesn't stop it from being a bit sloppy, but perhaps that is the authors intention?

A Few Plateaus

I'm a whole 8 pages into A Thousand Plateaus, which is actually quite a bit of reading... So far its a whole lot more enjoyable then Deleuze and Guattari's first installment on capitalism and schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus. Despite what the authors say about the book having no subject, the subject matter of A Thousand Plateaus is far more enjoyable. It took them a whole book to escape the spirits of Freud and Marx and the second book feels a lot more relaxed and free. Guess I'll find out how long that lasts.

8 pages is all it took for them to introduce two concepts that resonate loudly in today's environment. The abstract machine is a concept I'm pretty familiar with from reading De Landa its all good. The rhizome - the rat's nest, on the other hand I still treat with skepticism. I have doubts about its utility. But there are 500 more pages...

The Revolution Will Not Be Idealized

Damn, my friend Adam Greenfield is in a dystopian mood today. He writes from Seoul, South Korea:

Show me a case where e-mail or blogs or smart mobs really and unambiguously did bring down a tyrant. Show me a situation in which even one high-school bully was put in their place with the aid of this technology, let alone the pathetic tinhorn strongmen that still ru(i)n so much of this pretty sphere... I mean on the macro scale. Is the planet as a whole detectably better-off in the wake of a decade of decentralized, low-cost-of-entry information availability? Are we better informed, less superstitious, more open-minded, more curious, stronger, less afraid? Do we make better choices?

Christ Adam, take a deep breath. I almost bought the new PDA with the "end tyranny" button, but Howard dean outbid me... Seriously though, this is important; revolutions do not solve problems, they transform problems. The French didn't just wake up one morning in the late 1700's and say "we have no king, life is perfect". Gutenberg didn't print out his first bible and then kick back and watch the world fix itself while making love to Helen of Troy. We live in an imperfect world. Perfectly imperfect some would say.

Life is good, life is bad, times are good, times are bad. You still have the power to set your own pace. And no you aren't going to end poverty by building a website or chatting on IM. But a scream in Calcutta can now be heard in East New York and that means something. Think of baseball, think of averages, improving the world is not about instant ending of tyranny, its about subtly tipping the balance. Its about crafting systems that encourage positive behavior. Its about solving problems slightly faster then you create them. And make no mistake, humans are spectacular at problem solving, but they also are quite skilled at making new messes. That's reality for you.

But if we can solve 2 problems while only creating one, we are improving the world. The results might not be as instant as Viagra, but odds are they will be far more satisfying. One step, deep breath, the world is filled with inexplicable beauty set against the nastiest tragedy and mixed into a poetic swirl. There are moments of perfection and moments of despair. Enjoy them all, its more fun then giving up...

The Dark Lights of Los Vegas

part 1 and part 2 of Dr J Z Ellis' explorations of the tunnels beneath Los Vegas. Enjoy.

Dinner and Drinks with the Good Dr Ellis

Met up with Josh Ellis of Zenarchery fame for dinner, drinks and wandering. He's up in the Bay to meet with his new employer and is moving here for good soon. We talked a lot about the old SF of 7 years ago when he lived here. I think he's in for some surprises given the mass exodus of the past few years.*

Josh has been mysteriously hyping up his new gig on his blog for a while, and while I'm not liable to reveal many details there is tremendous potential. Lets just say this company claims to have found one of the internet idealists' holy grails. I'm somewhat skeptical, but I do believe this particular change does have the potential to be revolutionary. More likely though it will successful and useful, but not quite as earthshaking as some cloudy eyed proponents make it out to be. Regardless its great news and exciting stuff, congratulations Josh, the bay area needs some new troublemakers.

We talked a bunch about SF rent, its ridiculously easy to find a nice space in SF right now, which makes it a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to the city. Jump in while you can kids, things are going to change. I just hope enough of the freaks pushed out by the dot com era move back. And yeah I still won't be making this place home, fear not, I'll be gone before you know it, hopefully to Barcelona.

While on the subject of places to live Josh has some crazy stories about people living in the storm drains below Los Vegas. They're 10 years old and already have a vibrant community of living in them, and a legendary Gollum like figure who is rumored to stalk down and kill strangers that come into his dark private space. Josh has written a few articles on these communities, which I need to track down and read. Sounds like a great book to me, but apparently there isn't much interest yet.

Interestingly I just started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which is about a world of people living beneath the streets of London. So far its quite good, although Gaiman's prose doesn't have nearly poetry of his comics. Fortunately his ideas are just as imaginative and inventive as ever.

----

*on a somewhat related note though, its good to read danah boyd's enthusiastic posts on how much she loves SF. This city will return to its former glories at some point.

The Strange Story of the Bhutan and the TV

"Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television."

- The Guardian | Fast forward into trouble

The Black Bloc is the New Punk Rock

As the music industry slowly kills itself worrying about file sharing, they've lost their core strength, the ability to generate youth culture. Music is no longer rebellion, the Black Bloc is rebellion. And since it no longer controls the distribution system the music industry is going to have a hard time bottling up the Black Bloc as a marketable product. They'll find a way of course to do it, but they're doomed to a far smaller role then they've ever played in the last 50 years of youth culture. So say bye to the industry and viva the Black Bloc!

Jim Moore on Lakoff and Metaphors for Politics

Jim Moore has a couple excellent posts on Lakoff's Moral Politics and the need for the Democratic Party (in America) to find a new guiding metaphor. Plus he's got some kind words for this very weblog, thanks Jim!

Lakoff has been on my mind a lot lately. I haven't been able to really push his theories in my mind to the point where I can say I fully support them, but so far they resonate pretty strongly with me. His conception of the liberal moral model for government as a family gels very well with my own liberal upbringing. And until reading Moore's posts I was mainly focusing on finding better ways to communicate Lakoff conception of the liberal moral view to the world. Now I thinking more along the lines of Moore, that we need a new moral model to guide 21st century politics.

More soon.

Unbrand America (with another brand)

Ok, I have really mixed feelings about Adbusters. On one hand I think they are dealing with some very important issues in Western culture and are quite vigorous and creative in the way they push their ideals. On the other hand I think they are often just plain wrong in the way they look at the world and its economics. They are infected by a very serious case of blame the messenger and also suffer from a serious case of delusional hypocriticalness. But often I find myself supporting their individual causes.

Brands and advertising are not the problem. The problem is the way certain corporations use brands and advertising. A subtlety that seems to be completely lost in world of Adbusters and Naomi Klein. The Brand is a tool. Advertising is a tool. Both are extremely useful. And both are used far more effectively by corporations then by their opponents. Blaming brands and advertising for the ills wrought by the likes of Enron, Monsanto and Dow Chemical is like blaming steel for the fact that Hitler and Bush use it to build weapons.

Branding and advertising are powerful tools. And in the right hands they can be used for very positive effects. And while they might not admit it, Adbusters just launched a potentially powerful branding campaign, ironically entitled Unbrand America.

The brandmark is a black dot, simple, bold and effective. The goal is get people to put it everywhere, blacking out corporate logos by the ceo-load. Good stuff. I support it completely and hope it takes off. Its about time we reclaim the power of branding and symbols from the publicly traded corporations that have been using them against us for the past century.

So go ahead and savor the irony by Unbranding America, with another brand of course.

Friendster Futures

Friendster just keeps on growing. Every day seems to see another social segment jump on board. And its getting a lot closer to being useful to. Not as a dating service mind you (does anyone know of someone who actually got some do to Friendster?), but as a way to connect friends and visualize social networks.

Its the way they've changed the bulletin board that really shows the way to the future. A few weeks back the Friendster bulletin board was filled with often obscene posts from people far off on the fringe of you're extended social network. And it turned people off. But today that problem is gone, and the bulletin board is suddenly an extremely potent tool.

The change? The bulletin board now only shows posts from your first degree friends, the people you have confirmed your linkage too in the system. And with that change the board suddenly has become an excellent way to exchange a level of mundane but useful information with your friends.

Imagine trying to tell your entire social network you plan to hang out at Bar X tonight, or see movie Y at 7:00. Obviously you can call a few friends, old school style, but its not going to cover much of your network. You could send out a mass email as well, but after a couple of those you are going to transform into a spammer. Better save those bulk mailings for the bigger events you want to booster. You could post to a blog too, but how many of your friends really read it daily?

The Friendster bulletin board fills a previously unoccupied space. A way to casually announce mundane events to your entire social network without working too hard, or transforming yourself into a spam farmer. Of course there is plenty of room for improvement, Friendster doesn't account for many of the subtleties of social dynamics that allow society to keep functioning. But its power as a tool seems to grow daily. There is something here and I think its quite potent. More soon.

Matrix, Agitprop?

Are the Matrix directing Wachowski brothers the biggest subversives in America? Well, if they are getting any sort of percent on the box office receipts then they certainly are the richest subversives not named Soros or (for the brief moment) Buffet.

Forget the action and the sci-fi minutia and ignore all the player haters while your at it, the untold story about the Matrix franchise is that its the biggest piece of leftist agitprop to hit the western mediasphere in years. And so far only Salon seems to be getting it. And they only touch on the beginning it (not to mention their bizarre enjoyment of the worst sex scene to grace an A list movie in years). In a time when Bush and Co are trying their best to make American's believe in a one dimensional world of us vs evil, the Matrix is an elaborately crafted vehicle for undermining the conservative message. And countless Americans are eating it up. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the effects come the 2004 elections.

Hollywood is a left wing paradise with a big problem. Most of the major movie players lean heavily to the political left, but their bread and butter comes from pumping out Good vs Evil themed flicks that play directly into the Lakoffian moral politics of the right wing. Regardless of the explicit messages in a film, the very structure of a Hollywood Blockbuster leads to a reinforcement of a conservative world view.

The first Matrix had a pretty explicit leftist agenda: rise up and revolt against a rigid power structure, question reality, the wool is getting pulled over your eyes by those in control of the system. But that message was undercut by the reliance on the standard Good/Evil binary. For every person driven to question the hidden network of powers driving our world, there is someone who sees another example of the good guys beating the bad guys.

The Matrix Reloaded is out to shatter that trope and its far more effective at calling attention to the structures of power. Remember those hippie "Question Reality" bumper stickers? Well the Matrix is getting people to question reality on a scale that Timothy Leary couldn't even dream of when high off his premium LSD + bullshit blend. The left has been content to release memes into their own marginal subcultures for far to long. The Matrix unleashes memes into the heart of pop culture. "Choice is an illusion created by those with power to control those without", says the Merovingian and the Architect adds in: "nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level."

The way the Matrix Reloaded points out the multiple layers of control built into society is perhaps the most potent of the messages it carries. Its one thing to make people aware of the first layer of control. Its far more powerful to make them aware of the way that a built in "resistance" can be used to solidify the power structure.

These are powerful seeds for any campaign to make the American public aware of the way the Bush administration is using the rhetoric and the media to sell a system of control. The left has been pushing these ideas for decades now, and general public couldn't give a fuck. Thanks to the Wachowski the ideas are now seething through the subconscious of the suburbs. And its far to soon to guess at what the ramifications are.

Six months from now, when the Matrix Revolutions hits theaters, we'll have a much better sense of it all. Most exciting to me are the indications that the Wachowski's are ready toss the Good/Evil binary out the window in a big way. Neo is the hero of the series so far, but everything else is way less clear. (*Spoiler Alert*) Who are the bad guys though. The Agents are now apparently on their own, at least those without earpieces. Morpheus is now a deluded fool of a leader. And where the Oracle, Merovingian, Persephone, Locke and the Architect fit into it all is up in a cloud of mystery. Perhaps it all collapses back into a nice binary, ala classic Hollywood. But I have a feeling we are in for something more complex. Perhaps a Princess Mononoke style peace making is in the offering.

Regardless of the binary, the leftist agenda is pretty advanced already. The Berkeley wet dream make up of the Zion Council, the Baudrillard references, the Cornell West guest appearance, the unverified anti-Bush jab, the corporate blandness of the Agents, the pro revolution plot-lines, etc, etc. Six more months and we'll find out exactly how extensive the agitprop goes.

The Dark Side of the Social

Insiteful discussion, on Don Park's Blog, about the potential dark side of social software. Shades of the suburbanization of information?

Paths, Perl and God

peterme.com: Way more about paths at UC Berkeley than you'd ever want to read. The title says it all and maybe too much, its just about the right amount I wanted to read.

Larry Wall the creator of the Perl programming "glue" speaks of a more enlightened approach at another UC School:

I am told that when they built the University of California at Irvine, they did not put in any sidewalks the first year. Next year they came back and looked at where all the cow trails were in the grass and put the sidewalks there.

Perhaps its apocryphal, but its a damn good story. Its from a fascinating interview of Wall by the one and only Erik Davis. Makes me want to learn Perl really badly. Actually makes me do a 180 in my thoughts on the language, used to see it as messy in the wrong way, now its sounds like the best sort of mess around. And given how much hackers like the language it probably is messy in the right way.

I was trying to encourage what I call diagonal thinking. Traditionally computer languages try to be as orthogonal as possible, meaning their features are at all at right angles to each other, metaphorically speaking. The problem with that is that people don't solve problems that way. If I'm in one corner of a park and the restrooms are in the opposite corner of the park, I don't walk due east and then due north. I go northeast -- unless there's a pond in the way or something.

and

But that's merely a form of tribalism. What we also try to encourage are the kind of joiners who join many things. These people are like the intersection in a Venn diagram, who like to be at the intersection of two different tribes. In an actual tribal situation, these are the merchants, who go back and forth between tribes and actually produce an economy. In theological terms we call them peacemakers.

In terms of Perl language, these are the people who will not just sit there and write everything in Perl, but the people who will say: Perl is good for this part of the problem, and this other tool is good for that part of the problem, so let's hook 'em together. They see Perl both from the inside and from the outside, just like a missionary. That takes a kind of humility, not only on the part of the person, but on the language. Perl does not want to make more of itself than it is. It's willing to be the servant of other things.

Damn why aren't there more interviews like this?

Hope

Wow, this one brought tears of hope to my eyes. 16 years ago Oral Lee Brown, a real estate agent making $45,000 a year, told 24 first graders she would pay for their college if they graduated from high school. In a school district where 75% of high school freshmen dropout, 19 of those first graders went on to college, and the first has just graduated.

A rich as America maybe there are still areas of extreme poverty, areas where hope and encouragement are in short supply. And this shows just how much that hope and encouragement can make a difference. Lets never forget that.

Struggle, support, sheepskin / Oral Lee Brown's 1st-graders reach for finish line

[big thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for linking to this article]

The Obliquest Strategies in the Palm of Your Hand

Never been the biggest Brian Eno fan, although is production for the Talking Heads is top notch. His Oblique Strategies always caught my head when mentioned though. A touch pretentious, but underlying concept is sound. Force yourself to look at the problem with another perspective. Eno and Peter Schmidt just put little ideas and instructions on cards. Simple. Effective.

And now I have it sitting on my Treo. Nice.

Oblique Strategies for the Palm

Beyond Friendster: Openness and the Future of Social Networks

Posted this at marginwalker.org, reprinting it here for your info and my archives.

There has been a lot of talk of Friendster and its kin in the network lately. The sharpest of the observations so far comes from Marginwalker's co-founder Adam Greenfield. As usual Adam's observations are right on the mark. However his conclusion throws me off a bit:

Something tells me these services won't reach their maximum potential until they can incorporate our less salutary feelings about association: the latent but powerful distinctions we make, the dislikes and fears we, however subtly, import into our presentation of self. These are precisely the shadows we may have "gone online" to escape in the first place, but they are a part of what we've always meant by "social," they serve a function evolved over a very long span of time, and I believe we ignore them at some disservice to our ambitions.

Now Adam may very well be right, but I really hope he isn't. We have the ability to use services like Friendster and its descendent's to effect profound changes on the make up of society. Instead of giving into the base discrimination (or "shadows") we incorporate into our daily life I think we should be using technology to eliminate the subtle biases that underlie our culture and selves.

Openness is a potent tool. The public emergence of homosexual culture over the past 35 years provides a telling example. Before Stonewall gays and lesbians stayed hidden from society. And as a result homophobia was able to flourish. You can be certain a lot of homophobic conversations took place in front of closet homosexuals who were too afraid to speak out. Now in 2003 the stigma of homophobia, while still present, is rapidly fading. Major presidential candidates are making gay rights a campaign issue in America, and only the far right gives a damn. Its pretty damn hard to be homophobic when you become aware of the fact that a handful of your friends happen to be gay. And at least in urban America its pretty damn hard not have a handful of gay friends.

The very openness that Adam takes offense too in Friendster, to me is an engine of social change. It forces us to reevaluate some of our hidden prejudices and calls into question some of the forces that segregate society. Now its entirely possible, as Adam seems to imply, that when faces with this sort of info, people will just look upon their friends for the worse. But I personally believe that in the long run the results would be positive. There is a mess of small discriminations that drive many of our social interactions. And when placed into larger contexts they just look silly.

Sousveillance is a term, coined by Steve Mann, which has been gaining some buzz of late. Its roughly the opposite of surveillance. Instead of a power watching over the people, sousveillance is the people watching over a power, and as a corollary watching over themselves. The openness that the architecture of Friendster creates is an integral part of a sousveillance society. And we as a culture are going to have to either learn to embrace the openness or attempt to make it go away.

This is all part of a larger emerging conflict between transparency and privacy, and we are going to dealing with the ramifications for a long time. But for the moment what I'm really interested in is how do we build better social networking technology? Adam is probably right that Friendster, LinkedIn and company are just the beginning and I agree that the ideal solution is an open source one. An open social networking standard which permits people to choose and build their own interfaces. I think some standard will inevitably be emerging in the next few years, and hopefully its not a proprietary one.

The question I have is what do we want this network to do? Is it there to cement our social networks and further our interactions within them, or is the goal to open up our social boundaries and push us towards new cultural understandings? These are delicate lines to walk. And if we build the right structures I think there is a tremendous opportunity to change society for the better. But there is a constant threat of building the opposite, tools which reinforce existing inequalities. How do we ensure we do the right thing?

Flight Risk: the Blog as Future Fiction

"...she's a flight risk."

Intriguing. Visited a few times, never been able to dig deep enough into it. I like what I see though. May be real. Probably not.

I'm all for blogs a medium (or part of a medium!) for fiction. Wrote about it a bunch in an altsense thread a while back. Good discussion. My comments are under the name abe1x or a variant thereof.

Salam Pax Returns

Where is Raed ?

Only read a bit so far, loads of stuff written from Baghdad during and after the war. Extremely interesting so far. You just can't get this stuff anywhere else.

The Sky Is Fulling

A great animation showing the flight of all airplanes in the US over a day.

[via Edward Tufte's website]

The Structure of Media Bias

The Liberal Media, the Conservative Press, which one is it? I find it interesting and sometime amusing the way liberals and conservatives always seem to think that the media swings the other way. I once thought it was a nice indicator of a relative balance in the media. And the media is a bit more balanced then many give it credit. But there is something else, something structural, let me break it down.

There is a strange dynamic inside our most popular media of today, minus the internet and books. That means TV, movies, radio, newspapers and magazines. Those 5 media have a structural bent towards conservative messages. But counteracting that bent, is a tendency for the staff to lean a bit liberal.

The typical result? A liberal leaning reporter trying to act balanced, but producing a story that comes off with a bit of conservative edge to it. The dynamics are easiest to see in Hollywood. Politically the players in the movie industry on average are strongly to the left, and they contribute mainly to the Democrats. But somehow a fuck of a lot of patriotic movies with strong moral messages come out of system.

Why? Because the conservative approach of pushing strong simple moral messages is tailor made for movies. It makes a nice strong ending to the story. Same goes for TV spots, newspaper headlines, and magazine covers. Simple, basic and familiar but dramatic. Its the conservative way. The structure of these media encourages the right wing worldview to show through on the simplest level.

However, the traits that make good reporters, actors, directors, editors and the like are more in tune with a liberal world view. Creativity, rational thinking and detailed exploration of stories. The nurturing liberal worldview breeds these ideas and encourages liberal reporters. Hence the "liberal media". And in times of slow news, the questioning liberal worldview slowly takes over the tone of the news.

You could see it in GW2 when news was hot and running quick the tone was pro-war, celebrating the moral clarity of soldiers heading to battle. A couple days later as things settled in, the questioning and exploration of the darker sides would return. And then bam! more war motion and the bombastic conservative headlines were back. Slow down, more liberal, explode fast, more conservative. Cycle. Repeat.

I have a feeling this sort of dynamic has been around for a long time. What's different now is that the Bush administration has a great feel for the rhythms of media, and have been timing there actions remarkably well. Their over the top conservative rhetoric and action is pace perfectly for maximum US media exposure. They understand the structure better then the Dems and it shows. And the advantage is huge. The left just doesn't have the rhetoric to win in the game of overblown headlines. Their arguments are better suited for a slower more reasoned environ. Its no coincidence that the lefts biggest media victory of late, the downfall of Trent Lott, came during the slow news time around Xmas. The Left needs to throw off the Bush administrations rhythm and slow the pace down. Summer is dead when it comes to news, and they'll need to maximize that to their advantage. And come Fall its all about setting the pace, whoever does it going to control the media game.

Tyranny of Structurelessness

'The Tyranny of Structurelessness' by Jo Freeman is a 30+ year old feminist document, that Clay Shirky has lately been recommending as as a seminal document for the study of social group dynamics. Blogging it mainly so I can find it easier in the future, but its well worth reading.

New Yorker = Asshole, Scientifically (maybe)

Guess I can't live in denial anymore... This paper by one Robert Levine pretty much proves that us New Yorkers are the least friendly people in the US.

Actually the paper only studies how friendly people are on the street. Its got nothing to do with how people interact in any other situations so its pretty limited. Most interesting to me was the fact the main correlation they found between kindness to strangers and cities was population density. People in dense cities just can't afford to be kind to every strangers because they interact with far too many every day. Its got no relevance to how people behave in any sort of more intimate setting...

Today USA Wakes Up to the Power of Structure

Why don't Americans walk anywhere?

Old answer: They're lazy.

New answer: They can't.

There is no sidewalk outside the front door, school is 5 miles away, and there's a six-lane highway between home and the supermarket.

That's from USA Today! Ideas spread. Slowly. But they spread.

The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health.

[via blackbeltjones | matt jones | work & thoughts]

Michael Wolff on Al Jaz

"Al Jazeera, like so much else in the region, becomes part of an Americanization machine." Michael Wolff's latest column,
Al Jazeera's Edge digs into the breakout network of the GW2. Good stuff. His point is that Al Jaz is a business, a TV station. What grabs me more then that though, is that its making money by selling a political viewpoint. On a similar note is Mecca Cola, pitched as an alternative to Coca-Cola.

Both are examples of something, I've been thinking about a long time, the commercial viability of ideology. I call it Revolutionary Capitalism, and there will be more coming in the near future.

Cultural Migrations in New York City

The Migration of Hipsters Along the L Line: An Independent Study

[via Gawker]

Peace Americana

I'm an American, no doubt about it. I was born here and lived here for all but a year of my life. America represents a lot of things I'm proud of and some I'm not. I'm not a big fan of nationalism, but I still love this country, despite all that Bush and friends have done lately. Been pretty disturbing since S11 to see just how much the anti-war movement is willing to hand over the American Flag to the conservatives. Waving a flag is almost like being pro-war. And that's fucked up.

The American Peace Sign flag is my favorite response to the co-option of the flag by the right wing. It simultaneously promotes a support for America and support for peace. As my small contribution to spreading the meme, here is vector version of the peace flag. Its an Illustrator 10 .ai file so its really for designers only, but if anyone wants other versions just email me. And yeah feel free to do whatever you want with the file. If you improve it at all, be cool to get sent a copy, but there are no restrictions.

Does Protesting and Extremism Work?

Does protest and extremism work? CalPundit has some solid thoughts. Don't think he factors in culture enough though. The question I'm still trying to answer is how much do extremist movements shift cultural norms?

I think its pretty clear that at times extremist movements pave the way for the eventual acceptance of ideas into the mainstream. Slavery is a great example. But how often does this happen? And what factors make an extremist movement succeed?

Order vs Chaos in the Urban Advance

Adam Greenfield takes on an interesting real estate development in Tokyo in The arrogance of architects, and other lessons from SimCity. His critique of Roppongi Hills is spot on, as was his original one. How long before architects learn that Le Corbusier's ideas just don't translate to reality?

Architects and urban planners have long been infected with the idea that cities need more greenery. And don't get me wrong there is a need for some degree of open space and wild vegetation in any city. But the truth is that parks are highly overrated in city design. What makes urban centers so great is their density. The tighter you pack people into a city the more potential for serendipity. There are more chance encounters, more demand for unique niche stores, more opportunities for cultural mutation. Why are people willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money to live in tiny Manhattan apartment? Because its worth it, cities like New York offer social opportunities that just can't exist in a less dense space.

The 4 story max school of urban planners like Christopher Alexander and J.H. Crawford miss this point entirely, despite being completely on point and visionary in many other areas. Le Corbusier and, from what I've seen, Roppongi Hills designer Minoru Mori understand the need for density to a degree, but what they misunderstand the need for the proper balance of chaos and order to make the density work properly.

Chaos is essential to serendipity, people need to meet randomly, stumble upon new stores and thoughts and generally be stimulated by the people around them. They also need to get places quickly though. New York achieves this balance by placing its dense population on an orderly grid with an extensive underlying subway system. You can bounce around town pretty damn quickly, but at the same time you'll be interacting with massive amounts of people. Throw up a big park around a dense building Le Corb style and you shatter the density. People wind up in cars isolated from outside stimulation. They don't interact and the density is dispersed onto the highways.

What's interesting about Roppongi Hills is that their marketing rhetoric makes it seem like they understand this need for a chaordic urbanscape.

"Open-mind" is the will to actively absorb information and the power to accept new ways of thinking.

It is an open heart, a state of spirit that continues to change.

In a safe city that welcomes people from around the world, many people exchange conversations.

From the latest art and wonderful food to challenging issues of the day, the people who spend time at Roppongi Hills will touch upon diversity of thought and enjoy a variety of experiences.

Here you are given a chance to imagine and think.

And from there, dreams, hopes and ideas are born.

By creating open conversations with the world, Roppongi Hills will load the nation and the Asian region and from here, visions that will shape our future will emerge.

This is the kind of place we want to become.

Its enticing words, a subtle and different marketing approach that I find quite seductive. Plus they got Jonathan Barnbrook to do the logo and of course its great. But looking at pictures and reading Adam's review I just don't see the actual development living up to the dream. Its a couple big buildings settled into some greenery. I've never found huge buildings very amiable to serendipity. They are too well organized, the only place of good chaos is in the elevator ride, which is often too short for great ideas to bloom. Its on real streets with diverse building types that chaos really leads to chance encounters and new ideas.

Been interesting to see how this development turns out in the long run. It smells a lot like a good idea ruined by the reality of actually realizing the ideal. Clay Shirky has a new essay on what he calls the Permanet and Nearlynet, that might enlighten. He's looking at the telecom industry, but the essence is the same. Big compressive projects offer the promise of a better result then small ad hoc developments. But in the end run the small, cheap, ad hocs are the ones that succeed. In other words cities need to grow not be planned. But pure growth is chaos, so some order is needed two. In networking and telecommunications that order is an open standard. In cities its the grid, transit system and utility infrastructure that require planning. What gets placed on top of all that should be free to evolve in the way large developments rarely can.

Al Jazeera in English

Al Jazeera has an english language site now, should be an interesting perspective.

Car Free Cities

Don't think I emphasized how nice it was to be in a car free downtown enough in my reports on the antiwar protesters. Want to know who the real terrorists are? Take a look in the garage. Having to dodge 2000lb machines traveling at 30mph every time you leave your house is a serious stress, we've just internalized it. Being able to walk and bike down Market St with out worrying about cars was a real joy. Wish they'd shut it down permanently. Check out Carfree Cities for way more info on how to make those cities happen.

The Blogger as Independent War Reporter?

War looks more and more inevitable now. The last one in Iraq was a disaster in terms of independent journalism, although the Bush administration probably seems it the opposite. Arguably the fact that the Pentagon had almost perfect control over the presses access to info in the Gulf War 1 was a major factor in the fact that it was so easy for Bush and Co to manufacture the Gulf War 2. How different is this one going to be?

There are few online attempts to provide an alternative information source for the Gulf War 2. Hope they do a better job then the mainstream press did a decade ago.

http://www.back-to-iraq.com/ is a pretty much unknown journalist, Christopher Allbritton, going at it alone. This is a real attempt to be an independent journalist using an online blog as the outlet.

http://www.kevinsites.net/ is the blog of CNN reporter Kevin Sites. Given that he gets paid by a big cable network his ability to speak his mind is a bit more truncated. Still this blog appears like he might have a "what I do on my own time is my own business' attitude. Hope that its true and he can provide a really candid view of the war.

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/ is the blog of Salam Pax an Iraqi living in Bagdad. No pretenses of being journalism here, but its never the less far more informative about what's actually happening in Iraq then anything I've ever read in the papers. Good stuff, hope it can stay up and Salam can get through this evermore inevitable seeming nightmare untouched.

Drinking Green Art (and Politics)

Had drinks with Sam Bower director of the excellent Green Museum last night. Talked about the way that art movements don't take off unless there is a portion of the establishment that finds the philosophy of the art useful. Modernism for instance was a tool for the US government to push American ideals onto the world after World War II. A artistic complement to the Marshall Plan. The book to read apparently is How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Its now on the top of my wish list.

Interesting to see how our new school imperialists in the Bush administration just don't get it. They push with raw power, without understanding that the war can't be won without a cultural victory. Of course winning a cultural war is just as distasteful to me as winning a military one. A cultural marriage on the other hand is quite intriguing. What happens when Islamic and Western culture mix? Could such a cross breed (if allowed to exist) lead us closer to a political movement of unity and peace?

Karass in the Network

Steven Johnson keeps on rolling. This time its a column on Kurt Vonnegut's "karass" and "granfalloon" concept.

A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done."

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

Good stuff already, but there is more. Orgnet is a company making an intriguing social network software. I want it. Includes some great examples. My favorite tracks Amazon purchasing patterns for political books. People who buy right wing books don't buy left wing books. Only one book connects the buying networks. The right forms a tighter knit buying network, less books more closely joined. The left reads more, but spreads its reading out. A reflection (or cause) of the lack of focus of the American left?

Back Back Y'all

Saw Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn do a talk with DJ Shadow last night. The occasion, promoting his new book Yes Yes Y'all over at the Punch Gallery (which just happens to also be my office when in SF). An interesting dive into the history of Hip-Hop from an unlikely first hand observer. The show of photos is up at Punch for a while well worth checking out.

The most interesting aspect of the talk was the real sense of the flow of history. Charlie got to see and document hip hop go from an obscure ghetto party style to an international phenomena. Almost more interesting was the way the old school was shoved aside and ignored before the culture matured enough to respect its history. A bit of a dark ages for the originators in the late 80's as the young thoughts claimed their territory.

What really opened my eyes up though was a conversation I had with him the day before where he described the scene in 1973 when he moved to New York City. The world he entered was of long haired tail end hippies, shooting dope while carrying on an anti society stance. A diametrical opposite of the world of hip hop. And no one could have possibly predicted the rise hip hop culture. When Wild Style first played in Germany they thought it was science fiction. A strong reminder of just how quickly the world can change. Wonder where the next hip hop is coming from, can't wait.

The Inverse Network Effect

The always insightful Clay Shirky has just released Social Software and the Politics of Groups. The underlying core: we have no antecedents for how nonlocal groups, and the technology that supports them should function. In other words there is almost no precedent for the way a group of people across the world can interact in a mailing list or chat room. And its equally difficult to design software for those interactions, as there is no precedent for thinking about the problems.

What sprang to mind immediately was Metcalfe's Law which basically states that the usefulness of a network increase exponentially with the number of users. Perhaps there is a reverse law as well. That the larger the network the difficulty in designing new software increase exponentially. How do you test software designed to let 1000 people communicate at once? Its hard enough deal with the tech issues, working with the interface and social use models is a whole other story.

The classic example being that 1 person with a telephone is useless as they have no one to call. 2 people with telephones is useful assuming they want to talk to each other. The more people

Bring Back the Ecstasy

Standing in the back of SF's Arrow bar listening to the electroclash/sub 80's retro trash, all I could hope for was the early 90's revival. How much nicer is it to be in a big warehouse with people on E instead of a dark cramped club filled with cokeheads? tobias c. van Veen captures it better with warehouse . space : rave culture, selling-out, and sonic revolution.

And on a related tip, I've always wondered what fashion subgenre will magnified into a 90's revival? Candy raver brightness, grunge grime, Prada minimalism? The funniest I think would have to be guido take on the minimal, what a fitting way to piss on modernism...

Deep in the Legal Code

Should the 17th Amendment be repealed? Do you even know what the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution says? I sure didn't. It implemented to the direct election of US Senators. Previously they had been appointed by the various state legislators. The article is a bit of a historical/legal exploration of what happened when this change happened. The short version? Decreased power to the states, and more importantly a major increase in the ability of special interest groups to control Senators. A fascinating look into the legal codes that structure our society. [via unmedia]

The Suburbanization of Information (second life)

Just took a half an hour to get a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop (which in Manhattan means Starbucks 98% of the time). Actually sat down and read the physical newspaper for once. Forgot what a pleasure it is to sit down with the paper literally spread in front of you.

What struck me the most was the way I ended up reading articles I never would have come close to online. It felt like riding the New York subways after spending an extend period of time in segregated California towns like San Francisco and LA.

Los Angeles in particular has infrastructure of segregation brilliantly analysized by Mike Davis in _City of Quartz_ and _Ecology of Fear_. Leave your suburban castle, protected from the neighbors by a moat of grass. Jump in your air conditioned car, and if your extra paranoid you'll have an extra gate around the whole community to pass through. Jump on the freeway and move at warp speed over all that great American diversity. No need to look at it at all, be hard to if you tried. You're in a climate controlled environment sealed off from realities of poverty and diversity. Sure you might tip the valet, as you slip into your office, and say high to the Baja Fresh counterperson, but that's the limit to your exposure to people from other cultural groups.

The New York subway on the other hand is a great equalizer. On one side of you is a young millionaire stockbroker, on the other a hard working deliveryman fresh from Guatemala. Across the way a middle aged black PR impresario. Selling batteries and small toys is a man from the Fujian Provence in China. A Dominican couple snuggles together in the loveseats found at the end of each car. Every New York commute is a reminder that America is the land of diversity, the place where people struggle to chase their dreams.

Physical newspapers play a similar mixing role, especially those that strive towards mass market audience. The more people they try to attract, the broader the mix of news stories. Turning the pages and sorting the sections is a constant reinforcement of the diversity of information in the world. We may ignore large chunks of it, but somewhere inside we know that other people actually do care about the sports section, science section, international affairs or the local stories.

As more and more people go online for news, we are losing site of the mix. News aggregators, blogs, email alerts and customizable websites give us a tremendous ability to focus our information. We surround ourselves with the news that we want to hear/see/feel. We can zip around in snug little information cocoons, isolated from the harsh reality of different ways of thinking. Those nasty conflicting viewpoints are relegated to trashbin of somebody else's RSS feed.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm and information junkie and the internet is my main source of info, and will remain so for a while. The ability to focus and amplify our preferred data is a tremendous boost to our ability to learn. But there is a dark side to every advance, one that we need to anticipate and deal with. Lets remember that there is an information world outside our internet bookmarks and Amazon wish lists. And its healthy to get out and stroll through it from time to time.

Divergent Emergence

We are not ants! on Stephen Johnson's site is probably the best starting point for the whole "Emergent Democracy" online conversation that Joi Ito launched. I've avoided commenting on it so far because of the ironic fact that this conversation on emergence was divergent to the point that it feels impossible to keep track of where its going. The dialogue is splattered across the web and conference call "happenings" like it was created by an epileptic toddler with a paintball gun.

This interview with Eric Bonabeau cut through the abstraction beautifully. Suddenly it became clear that this sort of divergent behavior is an integral part of the process of emergence. The discussion Ito launched has proceed into all sorts of conversational tangents, paths, whirlpools and eddies. Most won't lead far, but one or two will develop into a strong idea path. The resulting concepts will have no clear author, but there is a good chance the ideas will be strong. The parallels to ants finding the closest food source are strong.

Of course as some people have hollered, humans are not ants. But its equally obvious that we are capable of emergent behavior. Whether you can call the results "intelligent" is another question entirely. The other big unknown is what happens when humans become self aware of our emergent behavior. Do we have the ability to realize our emergent paths and redirect them? It strikes as similar to Asimov's psychohistory and quite frankly I don't think we have the tools to answer the questions yet. That doesn't make it any less fascinating of course. We'll see where it all leads.

Underground Distortion

The Real Underground is an excellent interactive map that compares the official London Underground map with the geographic reality. Skip the intro. [ via v-2 ]

Nothing Like a Clean Brain...

Brainwashing America

Small Bets, Big Future?

Interesting essay about the advantages of small bets vs big bets. A little light on the detail, but perhaps the start of an interesting analysis.

Jane Jacobs Reflects

Steven Johnson links to a great interview with Jane Jacobs. Ideas are aging slowly, but she's still relevant. Maybe a touch pessimistic, but relevant.

The Suburbanization of Information

Just took a half an hour to get a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop (which in Manhattan means Starbucks 98% of the time). Actually sat down and read the physical newspaper for once. Forgot what a pleasure it is to sit down with the paper literally spread in front of you.

What struck me the most was the way I ended up reading articles I never would have come close to online. It felt like riding the New York subways after spending an extend period of time in segregated California towns like San Francisco and LA.

Los Angeles in particular has infrastructure of segregation brilliantly analyzed by Mike Davis in _City of Quartz_ and _Ecology of Fear_. Leave your suburban castle, protected from the neighbors by a moat of grass. Jump in your air conditioned car, and if your extra paranoid you'll have an extra gate around the whole community to pass through. Jump on the freeway and move at warp speed over all that great American diversity. No need to look at it at all, be hard to if you tried. You're in a climate controlled environment sealed off from realities of poverty and diversity. Sure you might tip the valet, as you slip into your office, and say high to the Baja Fresh counterperson, but that's the limit to your exposure to people from other cultural groups.

The New York subway on the other hand is a great equalizer. On one side of you is a young millionaire stockbroker, on the other a hard working deliveryman fresh from Guatemala. Across the way a middle aged black PR impresario. Selling batteries and small toys is a man from the Fujian Provence in China. A Dominican couple snuggles together in the loveseats found at the end of each car. Every New York commute is a reminder that America is the land of diversity, the place where people struggle to chase their dreams.

Physical newspapers play a similar mixing role, especially those that strive towards mass market audience. The more people they try to attract, the broader the mix of news stories. Turning the pages and sorting the sections is a constant reinforcement of the diversity of information in the world. We may ignore large chunks of it, but somewhere inside we know that other people actually do care about the sports section, science section, international affairs or the local stories.

As more and more people go online for news, we are losing site of the mix. News aggregators, blogs, email alerts and customizable websites give us a tremendous ability to focus our information. We surround ourselves with the news that we want to hear/see/feel. We can zip around in snug little information cocoons, isolated from the harsh reality of different ways of thinking. Those nasty conflicting viewpoints are relegated to trashbin of somebody else's RSS feed.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm and information junkie and the internet is my main source of info, and will remain so for a while. The ability to focus and amplify our our preferred data is a tremendous boost to our ability to learn. But there is a dark side to every advance, one that we need to anticipate and deal with. Lets remember that there is an information world outside our internet bookmarks and Amazon wish lists. And its healthy to get out and stroll through it from time to time.