The Weblogsky blog is going on hiatus. I’m just too busy now to write pieces in any depth (unless it’s for money, natch).
I have a Tumblr where I’ll add shorter posts from time to time. I do expect to be posting here again at some point, and I’ll make noise about it when that happens.
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My first impression of Roger Ebert, many years ago when he was doing the Siskel/Ebert weekly dustup, was that he was a smart guy whose intelligence was undermined by platform – the half hour run-through of the week’s films was always rushed, his written work was better. Little did I know how amazing and strong he would prove to be as an e-patient, after losing his mouth, jaw, and ability to speak and eat to surgical complications connected with thyroid cancer. You have to respect a guy who’ll keep trucking after that kind of trauma, and with those constraints. He didn’t surrender, and continued to be one of the most knowledgeable and forceful film critics.
For some years Ebert was part of the University of Colorado’s Conference on World Affairs in Boulder. I saw him do his Cinema Interruptus thing there in 2001, when he made an in depth review of “Fight Club.” It blew me away, seeing how much I’d missed about that film, and how deep he’d gone into it, finding quirky subliminal cues planted by Fincher.
Cinema Interruptus involved going through a film one shot at a time, described by Ebert in this blog entry:
This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. “You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?” he asked me. “You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class.”
I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn’t the teacher and my students weren’t the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out “stop!” and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them. A couple of years later, when I started doing shot-by-shots at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference founder, Howard Higman, described this process as “democracy in the dark.” Later he gave it a name: Cinema Interruptus. Perhaps it sounds grueling, but in fact it can be exciting and almost hypnotic. At Boulder for more than 30 years, I made my way through a film for two hours every afternoon for a week, and the sessions had to be moved to an auditorium to accommodate attendance that approached a thousand.
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Via Londonist: “The Japanese word ‘Souzou’ has two meanings depending on the way in which it is written. Written one way, it means creation and written the other way, it means imagination.” Art for art’s sake…
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“’The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is.’ said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela.”
“… extensive testing has now proved that the Higgs-like particle also behaves like the elusive God particle, which is linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles.”
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Bruce Schneier at Technology Review:
Arms races are fueled by two things: ignorance and fear. We don’t know the capabilities of the other side, and we fear that they are more capable than we are. So we spend more, just in case. The other side, of course, does the same. That spending will result in more cyber weapons for attack and more cyber-surveillance for defense. It will result in move government control over the protocols of the Internet, and less free-market innovation over the same. At its worst, we might be about to enter an information-age Cold War: one with more than two “superpowers.” Aside from this being a bad future for the Internet, this is inherently destabilizing. It’s just too easy for this amount of antagonistic power and advanced weaponry to get used: for a mistaken attribution to be reacted to with a counterattack, for a misunderstanding to become a cause for offensive action, or for a minor skirmish to escalate into a full-fledged cyberwar.
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Artist/activist Patrick Lichty and I have a session at SXSW Interactive called “Art, Activism, and Augmented Reality.” Here’s the blurb from the SXSWi schedule:
One of the latest genres in New Media art is that of Augmented Reality, or the overlay of digital content onto physical reality through the use of smart phones and computer vision. Marshall McLuhan heralded artists as early adopters of new technology, and the emergence of AR as an art genre is no surprise. Numerous AR works have sought to explore the expressive and critical possibilities of the technology, and groups like Manifest.AR have used this medium as a means of creative dissent through their Occupy Wall Street AR intervention. With AR a burgeoning platform for New Media art investigation, we will discuss the potentials and limitations of the medium, the history and context of work being done today, and the tactical potentials of AR as political intervention.
Over the last two decades, thinking about technology and activism, I’ve followed the process of embedding the former in the latter, and the evolution of a straightforward kind of cyborg activism with standard functionality: using email and social media to rally the troops, using SMS for coordination on the ground, spreading grassroots memes through websites, etc. The impact of technology, and the automation of the activist, is clear enough; with lower costs of coordination, grassroots movements at least Have A Chance. However much of the deployment of technology has, as in other fields of endeavor, fallen into the funding groove – we’re using computer-mediated activist approaches to fill the coffers of various organizations, large and small, and truly disruptive uses are rare.
The Occupy movement brought a new crop of activists to the table with open minds and (often) open hearts, and a commitment to disrupt established political machinations that exploit rather than serve. Occupy worked, not as an activist project, but as a movement-building enterprise, and it worked partly by using art and design to burrow into the collective psyche. Some of the more fascinating approaches that emerged within Occupy leveraged augmented reality applications to make points that are better driven by art than by polemics. See the example on the right.
So Patrick, one of my colleagues at Reality Augmented Blog, and I will be talking how AR, activism and art can support social and political movements. If you’re at SXSW Interactive this year, try to drop by.
Image: “Pool Hopping” at the Island of the Bull, Mark Skwarek.
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Amanda Palmer on no-fixed-price, “how do we LET people pay [for music].” “I don’t see it as risk, I see it as trust.”
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Something useful, for a change…
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Jamais Cascio
Futurist Jamais Cascio is holding forth about scenarios, foresight, and climate change at Inkwell on the WELL. If you have comments or questions for the conversation, send to inkwell at well.com.
So here’s one of the nasty, generally unstated truths about climate disruption: by and large, the rich countries (the primary historical source of greenhouse gas emissions) will very likely weather climate disruptions much more readily than poor countries (historically *not* greenhouse powerhouses). This is in part due to geography — the equatorial region’s going to get hammered by global warming, and the closer-to-the-poles regions less so — but mostly due to money. The US, Europe, and Japan will be more able to afford to adapt than will China, India, or other up & coming developing nations. Australia is an exception on the geography side, and a test case in how well a rich nation can adapt.
At least in the near-medium term; left unchecked, climate disruption hoses everyone by the end of the century.
Your sense that the Pacific Northwest is one of the better places to go in the US is probably accurate. Not sure that Seattle itself is a good spot, simply due to how close it is to sea level. Portland’s a decent option, though.
Texas residents should pay close attention to what’s happening in Australia right now — that’s your likely (uncomfortably near) future.
As a general rule, you want to be further north and well above sea level. Storm systems in the western Atlantic seem to be getting charged by climate disruption more so than storms in the eastern Pacific, so you’ll probably want to be well away from the coastline in the US Northeast. Also, bear in mind that global warming means increased (a) energy in the atmosphere (driving storms) and (b) ability for the atmosphere to hold moisture, so winter storms will probably be bigger deals.
Europe’s problem is that most of the northern cities and regions aren’t accustomed to very hot summers, and don’t have the necessary infrastructure to withstand the heat (remember the heat wave that killed thousands in Europe a few years ago — they were by and large killed by the lack of air conditioning). That’s not impossible to fix. Power lines/stations that aren’t built for the heat may be a bigger issue.
To be clear, nobody gets a pass on the impacts of global warming. Water access, loss of farmland, internal population displacement*, novel pests & diseases will be big problems in the rich countries as well as the poor — it’s just that the US, etc., will have more resources to draw from to deal with these problems.
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Jesse Sublett is a rock and roll veteran as well as a novelist, i.e. a multimediast, and he’s blowing into full-bore convergent mode by creating an ebook rich with images, a book that can be performed, a book with its own theme song:
(Note the spook that whisks by at the end).
I really love this book, Grave Digger Blues, a detective noir bit of fiction set at the end of the world. It’s very rock and roll, with a side of blues. And it’s easy to get for your kindle or (not as much fun) as plain text. But the whole thing was conceived for the iPad, an innovative composition using the iBooks author app. It’s a true convergent media piece, incorporating music soundtracks, audio chapters with jazz musicians like Johnny Reno, sound effects, and video.
Amazon’s overview:
Welcome to the USA in the near future, the last summer before the end of the world. A right wing Republican coup and terrorist strikes have decimated the social infrastructure. The digital world is 90 percent gone. Only a handful of elites have cell phones, and making a call on someone’s land line can cost plenty. The power grid is shot. Our guides to this blasted world are Hank Zzybnx, a damaged war vet, private eye and hit man, haunted by the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, and The Blues Cat, a jazz musician on an endless series of one-nighters, beloved by strange women, shadowed every step the muscle men of his nemesis, Big Clyde. Grizzly bears and alligators have invaded the cities. Weird epidemics ravage the land. Crime is rampant. Nightlife in bars like the Morgue, however, is booming. Envision Mad Max crossed with the Weimar Republic, to the tune of Mack the Knife played by Tom Waits. The Blues Cat, tired of roaming, yearns for the one thing he can never have–a quiet life and a loving wife. Hank searches for clues to his fragmented past. He rarely sleeps, and never dreams.
Check out Jesse’s blog, and don’t miss a chance to see him perform…
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Aaron Swartz
Update: Statement from Aaron’s family:
Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.
Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.
Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
Aaron’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Further details, including the specific time, will be posted at http://rememberaaronsw.com, along with announcements about memorial services to be held in other cities in coming weeks.
Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com
In 2003 during SXSW Interactive EFF-Austin and EFF threw a party in a club called Texture in downtown Austin. Cory Doctorow, Sandy Stone and I were instigators of the party. Cory showed up with Lisa Rein and a teenager who helped us make the wifi work. Cory told me that the teen was brilliant, but I could see that for myself. He seemed a little shell-shocked, too – an east coast kid in Texas for the first time with the whacky, diverse crowd that EFF-Austin attracted.
He was Aaron Swartz, and I crossed paths with him at other conferences and heard his name over and again as found ways to apply his genius, helping create the essential RSS protocol for online sharing and cofounding Reddit and Demand Progress. Those who noted his accomplisments saw him as a force to be reckoned with, and imagined that he would have a brilliant future. Unfortunately he had a brush with the law for downloading 4 million academic articles from JSTOR.
Aaron, who had battled depression, committed suicide yesterday. Read Cory’s obit. Read Larry Lessig’s reaction.
I don’t have anything to add – I didn’t know Aaron well enough, I don’t know the merits of the case, I’m conflicted over IP issues and would like to see the copyright wars end with a truce and some kind of reasonableness. I don’t know that Aaron’s death was brought on by his legal troubles, but I’m pretty clear he wasn’t a criminal, and I’m sure being treated as one didn’t help.
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My barista, while clovering a cup of Komodo, said he doesn’t want to get a flu vaccination because he thinks it’ll make him sick. I resisted getting the shot myself – I appear to be allergic to the preservative thimerosal (aka mercurochrome), but found a preservative-free option, so I went for it. Seeing the chart below, I’m glad I did…
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Bruce Sterling and I (with substantial contributions from others) conversed online for two weeks about the state of the world, as we do every year; that talk ended yesterday, but is archive for your perusal:
Here’s my concluding post, in response to a post by Gail Williams on war as metaphor and war as hard reality:
Gail, your post makes me think about the perception of (or,
trendier, optics for) war post WWII, sanitized by the many postwar
films and accounts. Those who knew better kept quiet. Meanwhile those
of us who grew up in the 50s were deluded; we played war games, it was
fun. Vietnam taught us better, or I should say, taught us bitter.
Bitter disillusionment.Drone war reduces risk but, arguably, increases the probability of
collateral damage. In fact, in war all damage could be characterized as
collateral damage, as powerful elders, safely away from the front,
send the young and innocent, true believers, into battle.Hopefully by now many more of us, a majority, understand that war is a
nightmare to be avoided. And the war metaphor doesn’t serve us all
that well.We won’t end rape by declaring war on it. We’ll end rape through
education, cultivation of sensitivity and empathy, rethinking the
meaning of gender difference.We won’t end poverty by declaring war on it, or by throwing money at
it. We’ll end poverty by caring about it.We won’t end drug problems by declaring war on drugs. We’ll end drug
problems by understanding why and how drugs become a problem, by
treating addiction as a very human issue, maybe a disease, not a crime.
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Jon L’s TumblrTracking digital culture, future culture, democratization of knowledge, augmented reality, cyborg anthropology, new aesthetics, cyber activism, and convergent media.
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