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Month

March 2012

16 posts

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) → wired.com
Mar 24, 2012
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But the social democratic welfare state has increasingly become a corporate-welfare state, in which the gains are privatised and the losses socialised. In other words, the state has become an extension of the corporation and is less and less a servant of the citizenry. We can see the progress of this model in how the so-called “troika” (consisting of the European Union, European Central Bank and the IMF) is now imposing slash-and-burn politics in Greece.

Occupy and open-source models illuminate a new possible reality, in which the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit:

- At the core of value creation are various commons, where innovations are open for all to share and to build upon;
-These commons are protected through non-profit civic associations, which empower that social production;
-Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy comprised of ethical companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, not to creating private profit.

Where these three circles intersect, citizens decide on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.

This model can exist as a submodel within capitalism, and to some extent already does so in the present system, as the open-source software business ecology. It could also become, with some necessary hacks, the core logic of a new civilisation. Occupy has not just shown us prefigurative politics, but prefigurative economics as well.

”
—Michel Bauwens - ‘Occupy’ as a business model: The emerging open-source civilisation
Mar 24, 2012
Mar 22, 20124 notes
Mar 22, 20123 notes

“And here you are in the craziest of places, inside of an airconditioned trailer staring at a screen for hours, staring at the fucking desert, and they could not have picked…I mean Indian Springs Nevada looks more like Baghdad than any other place in all of America. Now was this done on purpose? Maybe. I don’t know. And you’re right there, right outside of Las Vegas. The city where you’re seeing a Pyramid and a Sphynx one minute, the eiffel tower the next, the New York skyline the next, the canals of Venice next. In casino form that is. I mean talk about a hometown. Where the fuck am I? And whats the culture there? Inside the trailer its about, ‘hmm what are the chances that I stumble across a combination of things that turn out to be valuable, a suspicious man, a truck with a tarp over the back, a tube for a rocket, boom, bingo, blackjack, jackpot. Now outside the trailer, down the street, in the casinos. Is it any different? Hmm, a machine that displays random numbers and every once in a while they make a meaningful pattern and requires that diligent operators spend thousand of hours looking for those patterns, Las Vegas is full of them! What are the chances of finding and killing an insurgent? Well, just about the same as winning a game of blackjack. It’s in the deck, you just have to wait for it.”

Mar 21, 20121 note
Play
Mar 20, 2012
“What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelveyear-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?” —Werner Herzog - On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth
Mar 20, 20121 note
“I flew nearly 3,000 miles to climb into a stationary cockpit and fly an unmanned warplane 7,500 miles away to find some angry poor people and kill them. Then I caught a commercial air carrier to go 3,000 miles back home to have breakfast with my wife.” —Matt J. Martin - Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story
Mar 17, 20124 notes
“There is something extraordinary that you might care to notice when you are in VR, though nothing compels you to: you are no longer aware of your physical body. Your brain has accepted the avatar as your body. The only difference between your body and the rest of the reality you are experiencing is that you already know how to control your body, so it happens automatically and subconsciously.
But actually, because of homuncular flexibility, any part of reality might just as well be a part of your body if you happen to hook up the software elements so that your brain can control it easily. Maybe if you wiggle your toes, the clouds in the sky will wiggle too. Then the clouds would start to feel like part of your body. All the items of experience become more fungible than in the physical world. And this leads to the revelatory experience.
The body and the rest of reality no longer have a prescribed boundary. So what are you at this point? You’re floating in there, as a center of experience. You notice you exist, because what else could be going on? I think of VR as a consciousness - noticing machine.”
—Jaron Lanier - You Are Not A Gadget
Mar 16, 20121 note
Mar 15, 20122 notes
“In quiet and untroubled times, it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler administrator in his frail bark, holding it with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The moves independently with its own enormous motion. the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.” —Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Mar 15, 2012
Mar 15, 201211 notes
“

I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about Jeepaxle my work. The concept I planetarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical community lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a change to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in.

The outcome of a work is based icy ice on amount of intensity concentration and joy that is pursued roadcrossing the act of work. The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion to do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies with you real soon. U.S. postages stamps — sanitarily packaged — save a trip to post office shapes..files..cleans with key chain forget to bring it with you…to make something the need of which can only fishing 7 springs be determined after its existence and hat judgement subject to change at any moment. 15’18”. It is extremely important that art be unjustifiable.

”
—Robert Rauschenberg - “Note on Painting” - 1963
Mar 15, 2012
Mar 14, 20122 notes
“In practice, each town was given a number of pages from alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnames beginning with the same letter. In situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years, the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape: ‘For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the towns along the coast beyond Tabaco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island of Catanduanes’” —Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott
Mar 14, 2012
Mar 10, 20122 notes
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