"End of Film." "End of Cinema."

4/30/07, 3pm

The film project is coming along nicely! I just hope we have all our equipment in order for tomorrow's presentation -- the last thing I'd want is a technical difficulty to sabotage our quasi-lecture on forms of cinematic sabotage.

I'm a bit miffed that mobiused won't be around to see the groups present, though the 10-min time limit for each presentation does mean I can now cut down on what was going to be a lengthy scattershot lecture about control (as theorized by Burroughs + Deleuze), forms of cinematic control (hollywood & classical commercial cinema), resistance to control (french new wave, dogm95, etc.) as a way of constructing a context and exigence for the project as a whole.

Right now, in light of Mobius' announcement, I'm trying to think of ways to introduce the project that are at once enlightening and engaging (a very hard thing to pull off in a classroom, as my peers in education will no doubt agree). I'll probably do a fast primer on reading film (Think "Film Studies 101"), then introduce the SOC Film Fest in relation to control discourses, and talk about some movies we want to showcase, as well as view clips from movies that I just borrowed today from the lib' that are excellent examples of Burrough's cut-up, only in movie terms. All this in under a few minutes. Hmm.

That said, I might send a mass email tonight via ANGEL for some reading material to prepare for tomorrow's preparation. Nothing major, just the basics so we're all on the same page, and so there's enough time to let everyone in the group talk about his/her interest and work in the festival.

Wiki Proposal for SOC Film Fest

4/16/07, 1am Sun/Mon

Howdy, psychonauts. I've completed a rough draft of the Film Fest proposal. I'm linking it from my Wiki page and not on the Film Fest Wiki page because I want to talk to the other group members about creating a collective proposal first.

Anyway, give it a look: Houdini's SOC Film Fest Wiki Proposal.

Remember it's in a preliminary stage. Leave feedback wherever, whenever.

Metaprogramming ALT Magazine

4/5/07, 20 min before class...

Last week mobius told me there's interest among fellow metaprogrammers to work on submitting an article to ALT magazine as a final project. For those unfamiliar, ALT magazine is an independent student-run magazine for PSU students. We cover a broad range of topics, both local and global. Previous articles have dealt with conspiracy theories, drug experiences (ex: last year's issue featured an article on Salvia), political activism, TV, almost anything of interest.

We try to give readers an "alternative" view of current events. For example, in our latest issue which should be published sometime mid-April, we address the piracy debate from more than one perspective. Later on in the week I'll post my "pro"-piracy article, "Confessions of a Music Pirate," so you can get a sense of what we're going for. Once I find the link for ALT's old site I'll put it on the wiki, too.

The final project could focus on metaprogramming (drug-induced or otherwise), societies of control, biometrics, copyright and piracy debates, the center for sustainability, tank floatation -- the sky's the limit. Since I'm a contributing writer I'd really like to get this project going. I'm still involved in the film festival project, but if anybody's interested in working on an article with me I'd be more than happy to collaborate.

I've spoken with the editor-in-chief of the magazine about it and he's receptive to the idea. Our article would probably get published on the ALT website which is currently undergoing re-design but should be completed within the month.

If anyone's interested in doing this, feel free to post on my wiki.

4/8/07: ARTICLE UPDATE

After spending my Easter Sunday in my room half-reading Morrison and Bourdieu while downloading music (new Stooges, Battles, Nick Cave) like the shameless jerk I am, I'm now happy to post the ALT articles on piracy that will be published in the print issue later this month: ALT on Piracy. The Wiki page has an anti-piracy article written by a contributor and a pro-piracy article by yours truly. Pics were added by me. Manipulate these texts at your own peril leisure. In related news, RIAA continue to be shitbags now lobbying for the right to lie to get personal info.

On the remix reviews: The grades on the Wiki seem fair and justified for the most part. I just hope people are reading the explanations as well as the remixes. (I know RoBoCop mentioned the explanation in loadstool's final grade.) Anyway I'll probably post grades throughout the week. Currently, I'm working on the exams in the sci-fi class for which I'm a grader.

Activism + Journalism = "ALT" Journalism

4/5/07

Can a journalist be an activist? What's the difference between the two? I've been pondering these questions after reading a recent article on controversial vid-blogger Josh Wolf's status as a journalist (Thanks, RoBoCop and Call Me Ishmael).

As a part-time amateur journalist, I personally believe that the distinction between those roles is very unstable. For one thing, everybody's perception is colored by bias, whether one claims to be objective or not. Sometimes journalists themselves fail to realize this fact because the philosophy and ethics of journalism espouse integrity as the utmost ideal.

This notion is important; one should always strive to show issues from multiple viewpoints without prejudice. But at the same time, I know too many journalists who have no association with politics, who never question the status quo. Maintaining integrity is vital, but not at the expense of opening up dialogue that may be seen as unpopular, "biased," whatever.

The other reason politics should and often does inflect journalism is because every news outlet has a political stance by definition. For the most part, reporters fall into one of two camps: Independent journalists or mainstream journalists. Independent journalism is political in that it breaks with the norm, offers perspectives outside the corporate structure of mainstream journalism, and usually acts as a watchdog for government conduct. Mainstream outlets may posture objectivity (See: Fox News' "Fair and balanced" motto) but they're also politically situated because they are often supported by big media conglomerations and rely on official sources within the government and so on.

So the notion that journalism can be totally free from politics is absurd. If you're working within a news organization, you're participating in a world driven by political, economic, and social interests. Saying otherwise is just dishonest.

Then there's the issue of activism. True, politics exist in journalism to some extent, in terms of distribution, production, audience, etc. But there's a difference between that and, say, actively advocating an agenda. I'd still say that separating the two is not altogether possible or even desirable.

All news media has the job to inform, but it's also important to "activate" readers. That is, to stir them to action, to get them to do something about the world. Basically, right now I'm explaining (in abbrev. form) the philosophy of alternative journalism, of Penn State's ALT magazine to which I contribute.

What's the point of informing readers unless there's also a motivation to activity? Knowledge is power but not without some direction and perspective. Activism and journalism can go hand in hand. The interviewer who questions Josh Wolf for taking sides is blind to that fact.

There will always be a place for "politically disinterested" journalism. But there should also be a space where other opinions on issues can be heard, challenged, and acted upon, even in the name of activism.

Operation Mindfuck: Ubik Remix + Explanation

3/26/07, 2am/10:20am

(Paging Dr. Mobius...paging Dr. Mobius...)

Whew. I just finished my Ubik remix. Download ubikremixp2.doc and let me know what you think.

A list of "appropriated" works that I use in my remix: ubikremixworkscited.doc.

My essay on it, "'Operation Mindfuck': Repurposing Ubik as a Manifesto Against Societies of Control," can be downloaded here: ubikremixexplanation.doc.

Sweet dreams.

Manifesting Aesthetics of the Society of Control

3/22/07, 6pmish/9pm

In the spirit of today's mini-lecture on the importance of sharing, piracy, and the collective commons, I've decided to share with you all a project I made with other students in a class I took last year called "Manifestos." True to its name, this class was about the emergence and "decline" of the manifesto, starting from its inception in the 17th century England all the way to Jenny Holzer's truly awesome artistic manifestos of the 90s. For our final project we were assigned to create a manifesto to present for the class. An interesting narrative leading to the creation of our project follows; otherwise, if you just want to see the fruits of our labor, click here. (Beware, the pics are big to preserve quality. Knock y'self out.)

"Lights of Liberty 2"

My group was in a dry spell in terms of ideas up until the last minute, literally. Other groups had decided to do neat but relatively straightforward manifestos, including an anti-Clear Channel manifesto (which I might post, too, if I receive permission from the group, as it pertains to "control"), an anti-small talk manifesto, a pro-library manifesto, an open letter to Bill O'Reilly, and finally one that opposed the rigid rules for writing in the humanities.

We thought these ideas were solid, but stylistically and temperamentally outdated. What I mean is, the manifesto itself is a Modernist literary form. As such, it takes itself extremely seriously, with few exceptions (dada comes to mind). The form is closed, the tone is typically apocalpytic, and the purpose most of the time is to forcibly create a community, or public, which take then foment some kind of revolution, an overturning of tradition. The other groups did a great job participating in that tradition.

That's all well and good, and Modernist style is downright incredible in my book, but we've got to face the facts: Today, we're living in a post-modern world. That is to say, the dominant aesthetic is one of irony, play, and free-form. In other words, it's the aesthetic of the Wiki. Artists nowadays throw multiple genres together. The name of the game is citation. As Echan tellingly pointed out in class today, everything seems to be getting recycled. Not just yesterday's trash, but entire works of art, historical periods, and archaic mediums. In this ever-expanding, ever-recycling ecosystem, the manifesto must therefore adapt in order to survive and continue to be relevant to people.

As with most moments of genius, my idea for the manifesto came to me while I was on the Internet. An article, whose origin eludes memory, caught my eye: A hugely popular artist, known for his immense media empire, constructed a gated community in California based on the artwork in his inspirational portraits. The artist was none other than Thomas Kinkade.

By no small coincidence, his community bore the name "Village," which calls up M. Night Shyamalan's quasi Orwellian snooze-fest, The Village. The writer of this article clearly had a grudge against the man. Curious, I googled the name "Kinkade" and found tons of fan sites as well as Kinkade-bashing sites. Apparently, along with having a legion of frothing fans, Kinkade drew the ire of a particularly aggressive chorus of naysayers.

The backlash finally made sense when I browsed Kinkade's online galleries: Each portrait seemed like the epitome of bad taste. Seriously, if you had the power to depict kitsch in a single image, the result would probably owe a lot to Kinkade. The problem is not so much his subjects, though admittedly they are bad in themselves (he is fond of portraying the White House in inexplicably weird spaces and times, for example, the White House During Christmas-Time at the Sea). Rather, it's that his aesthetic simply screams ugly. His works are known for their "Kinkade Glow," the excessively bright coloring of houses and adjacent objects in the scenery, and the laughably dramatic light compositions in the sky, reminiscient of the romanticized shots of sunny clouds in Hitler's propaganda films.

More disturbing than the nausea-inducing artwork, though, is Kinkade's personal philosophy. Take the mindset of Warhol, add in equal parts Donald Trump, sprinkle some Billy Graham on top, and viola! You have "America's Most Collected Living Artist (TM)." Kinkade's artistic method is akin to the Ford Model T assembly line: Kinkade constructs a prototype (ex: cityscape + holiday + light), his "skilled craftmen" apply effects, and then said print gets reproduced to be sold either through sponsored retailers or at a local Kinkade Gallery "near you!" Lest the costumer misunderstand the meaning behind such prints, they often come with mini-narratives penned by the adept man himself. Eat your heart out, Willy Shakes.

Sometime after the intial shock subsided, I realized that Kinkade was a brilliant subject for the manifesto; my group heartily agreed. Instead of taking a standard either anti- or pro- stance on the guy, we decided to create two fictional opposing groups, the Philosophers of Light and the Anti-Kinkade Krusaders, based off of real-life cheerleaders and haters of Kinkade. Because, why bother depicting one fundamentalist's p.o.v. when two is twice the hilarity? Obviously, here we were aiming for satire, where the other groups sought earnestness. Then, for the form, the gimmick was we'd essentially make a fake manifesto. Channeling our old friend Philip K. Dick, the manifesto was to be a mashup of different forms: advertising, 'zine, war propaganda. You name it, our piece probably parodies (or shamelessly steals) it. PoMo briolage is the medium is the message, ya dig?

After many long days and nights of meticulous labor, we finally finished the damn thing. But like Shelley's Frankenstein after wakening the monster, we suddenly got scared. Would anybody in class understand the humor? Would they "get it?" Were we completely fucking insane? These questions sank my previous confidence, and nobody felt good about the presentation. But we went ahead anyway. And it's a good thing we did: Our class loved it. We spent the whole time discussing the life and times of Thom Kinkade; the nature of art in the 21st century; and the fact that Kinkade in many ways is a personage so radical, in terms of traditional art practices, that he makes Tristan Tzara look like Bob Ross. And everyone lived happily ever after. Case closed.

Or is it? Today, I decided to re-open the archive and do another Frankenstein. I think this manifesto deserves to be shown. Maybe nobody here will think its any good, probably nobody will care (hooray for apathy!), but it's high time I did something, er, "original" for once. Maybe I should just let the work speak for itself now. So, I hope y'all liked the non-story (can't stop cribbing my man, PKDick), and congrats on reaching the endgame. Here's your prize: Link to the Kinkade Manifesto.

One final thing. During the making of the manifesto, I was troubled by one burning question: Why would people buy this stuff? I think now I can venture an answer, with the help of Dick. In Ubik, we're presented with a reality in constant entropy. This crisis of perpetual decline is the central drama of the story, but it is a fake crisis that really dramatizes the diverse ecosystems around us. In them, all order moves to disorder, and vice versa. For some people, the only adequate response to this is producing control to regulate it. Kinkade's art is one such technology of control.

Kinkade's work amounts to a nostalgic fantasy for order, stability, and control in a time that never existed, in a fake, fairy tale world. In other words, a simulacrum of a simulacrum of a simulacrum--you get the idea. This is just my hypothesis, and I mean no offense. But I do see how picturesque landscapes of static joy and warmth can be comforting, in view of all the injustice and conflict and confusion around us. All the same, I urge people (not you, other people): Relax. Chaos and diversity won't go away, it's not the end of the world, and no amount of Winterland Cottage portraits will change that.

Let's honor the memory of Wilson by taking his ultimate principle seriously. "I DON'T BELIEVE ANYTHING," indeed. I'm with you there, bro. It's probably not outrageous to say now that Kinkade's work is a narrow reality tunnel leading to an Oz of belief stacked upon belief. Thanks, Thom, but I'd choose cognitive diversity over that anyday.

P.S. Don't hate me if you're a Kinkade collector, or if your dead grandmother lives in a Kinkade Glowed grave, or whatever. This is just my reading. Besides, my girlfriend has 3 Kinkade portraits back at home. Also, owning Kinkade prints for ironic value is 100% legit. Hooray for camp, I say. P.P.S. Thom is visiting the Kinkade Gallery at Monroeville Mall tomorrow, time TBA. Since I'm going to be in town in the afternoon, I might just give him a copy if I see him there. Rest assured, all ensuing hilarity/tragedy will be documented.

My Own Private TAZ

3/22/07, posted minutes before Metaprogramming class...

I had reality flutter in my English class the other day. The class was discussing the seemingly dire situation of political and social change. We agreed that today we seem to be in a cul-de-sac in relation to the State with a capital S, that attempts made at reforming the system either by way of identity politics or more conventional means usually end in the advancement of the system at the exclusion of some marginal population in terms of citizenship and political agency.

Hoping to brighten the mood, my professor told us to consider the possibilities of "floundering." Sure, most political projects and experiments don't end quite well. But that doesn't mean they always end in failure, at least completely, or that we should become apolitical altogether since every project seems programmed to repeat a cycle of subversion and reification of power.

While talking about the representation of post-post liberation women ("girl power!") in last year's Aussie horror hit, The Descent, the issue of "floundering" was brought up as a corrective, or "reperative reading," for our mostly negative claims that the women explorers "got the shaft" for their attempts to remake sex by remaking gender (going spelunking, reclaiming the cave as a new home, expressing same-sex desire, however frustrated, without the physical presence of a man, doing manly things, etc.) ultimately end in an apocalyptic bloodbath with flesh-eating mountain folk.

To flounder, as we know, means to struggle. It doesn't spell closure. The women gain agency but (spoiler) die in the cave principally due to the dictates of the horror genre. But their actions still matter. And I don't think I've seen a more problematically feminist movie since Marie Antoinette.

The reality flutter happened when prof. buttressed this ambiguously optimistic reading by introducing the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). All of a sudden my ears perked up and flashes of floatation tanks, LSD, and Wiki-mania flooded my brain. I had always wondered about this concept, probably due to the silly-sounding acronym, but as of yet, Metaprogramming hadn't gotten around to explaining it in-depth.

Prof. stated that the TAZ is a negotiation of the State without a conventional confrontation. There's no demand for redress. In fact, the law is nowhere to be found. Like the spelunking trip gone horribly wrong in Descent, the TAZ is an exploration, of sorts.

In a TAZ, people don't complain even if the State sucks. There's definitely an awareness of power, but it's significantly removed. Dispute happens, conversation happens, State-talk happens, but the State is not the big ol' grandaddy of control to be obsessed over 24/7. It is not the alpha and the omega. The TAZ, accordingly, is deeply related to anarchism: It's a place in the absence of government.

T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism is Hakim Bey's formulation of a "private Utopia." (Admittedly, when I heard this, an image of mobius floated up in my mind, and I recalled everyone's initial anxiety about using the Wiki medium. Seems so silly now.) It's an undiscovered place. It's a liberating antidote to Foucault's argument that there's no space outside power, that we're always caught within systems of regulation. With the TAZ, there's slippage in that framework, there are spaces of movement, opportunities to experiment and fuck shit up.

The TAZ, my prof' explained further, to my joy, is a seemingly mapped space that is unmapped. (Again, summoning up the wiki.) It can be a supra/sub-national zone, but it is deliberately unspecified. The key thing is that the TAZ is TEMPORARY. It is not culturally ingrained. Therefore, a cathedral cannot be a TAZ. A mobilized political group (Marxist, Democrat, Republican, Feminist) is not a TAZ either.

This bit about un-ingrainedness brought me back to a really random post I put on Ceridwen's wiki some time ago. She was talking about feeling bad for spending so much time unproductively, a common cause for needless self-flagellation nowadays. Armed with knowledge I gained from a prior class, as is commonly the case for me, I swooped in and blindly attempted to enlighten her, namedropping the biggest and brightest proponent of inactivity and laziness I know, Michel de Certeau.

The TAZ fits in quite nicely with de Certeau's account of the "tactic." The tactic is any practice that eludes control. It's like the wiki (if mobius didn't require x number of posts weekly) in contrast to ANGEL. A better example is absenteeism, or watching Youtube at work. Tactics are ephemeral responses to oppressive systems that serve the needs of the individual at one moment. In all likelihood, the practices of a TAZ are tactics, whether people are aware or not.

Okay, so why should we care about the TAZ? For starters, it's probably in some ways more revolutionary than doing politics in the conventional sense. Doing a politics of espionage or anarchism on the job also isn't ingrained or normalizing. No compulsion to enlist in any one group, whatsoever. Compare this with conventional politics in our democratic society. You've got to be part of a party, and voting during elections is seen as the end-all, be-all key to freedom and change. But if that's the case, why am I going to be targeted for ridicule by my peers if I don't vote? What's the fundamental differences between Democrat and Republican? And why is it that the more things "change" in the political sphere, they more they seem to stay the same elsewhere?

The Xanga, back in my heyday, was a TAZ par excellence. My friends and I would go crazy with the medium, unafraid of any consequences. Our posts were thoughtful, sometimes angsty, sometimes hilarious. We'd post-bomb other Xangas. Call that "poetic terrorism." I used to write entries during my classes on my laptop, ignoring the drone of my Anthro prof. to work on my own stuff and sometimes imagine myself living elsewhere, not in Shitsville (no offense), PA. It began to be the space for an imagined community. We could communicate on this medium in a way that would be impossible in real-life, partly because we lived in different parts of the country, but partly because there's something ineffably different and cool about writing in digital text and sharing it freely with others.

Eventually, the Xanga-as-TAZ ended, of course. Such is the nature of a TAZ. Just like a cool band that sells out and sucks once it gets mainstreamed, the TAZ has a limited lifespan, pre-programmed to give out someday by its nature. In my TAZ, what the members did wasn't terribly political. Okay, so maybe it wasn't a TAZ par excellence. And sometimes we acted like unproductive jerks, nevermind Certeau's tactics. Still, it made a community undefined by space or place where rules were not laid out yet.

Right now, I think the Wiki is such a TAZ. Blogs, too. They are not exclusionary things, nor inherently normalizing. Variation exists, but the medium itself is free-form. There may come a time when that changes, but for now, the possibilites seem pretty open. Here's hoping for a good run.

Drug Panic

I never realized it before, but the images in www.hightimes.com etc. really do sexualize and objectify the cannabis plant. While I was reading the article by mobius I had the following thought: Is the plant gendered male or female, and how is the viewer's gaze gendered? I know that there are female and male plants, but both are pretty phallic in the pictures I've looked at (tall, hairy and spire-like, covered in white THC...).

Speaking of drugs, I enjoyed mobius's talk on psychedelics and info-tech a good deal, but the discussion about professionals such as engineers benefiting from the use of drugs in the proper "set/setting" got me wondering why our society outlaws drugs when there's evidence out there that shows drugs have a productive effect on people in the right context.

A while ago I read an article/interview entitled \"The Rhetoric of Drugs\" in which Derrida discusses drug addiction and Western society's propensity to classify drugs as bad and unnatural. To paraphrase Derrida horribly, drugs have a Ubik-like effect on our notion of authenticity. The drug breaks down the real/not real divide. They provide "unreal" experiences, akin to movies and literature as we've discussed, but the difference is that the drug offers a politically unsanctioned truth, one that is private and not shared. Whereas we accept movies and lit. as acceptable to the extent that they convey a kind of unreal truth in a discourse that can be shared amongst people. Drugs, by contrast, are simulacra -- fake experiences of a fake truth -- insofar as they are wholly privatized and cannot adequately be conveyed to others.

Derrida goes on to say that the drug user is hard to assimilate into machines of control. There's a subsequent stigmatization of the drug user as irrational, unproductive, and unassimilable, in part because of the belief that drug use interrupts labor--drugs are too pleasurable, therefore they reduce the value of work as less laborious and more like leisure. Drugs are disruptive also in the sense that civil society is grounded in a division between nature and law which the drug threatens because the drug can be natural (cannabis) and transform a natural body into a super-natural body (ex - steroid use in sports).

Essentially, drugs disrupt divisions like private/public, labor/leisure, real/unreal, but I'm not sure that's the only reason for its prohibition. I need more background in the history of the illegality of drugs before I can get a better sense of the war against drugs.

Ceridwen: I attempted to read Of Grammatology a looong time ago, before I had much interest in philosophy beyond Foucault and a few other staples among hipster pseudo-intellectuals. Needles to say, without any background whatsoever in philosophy, it was an unpleasant experience. I'm planning on reading it some day, though. My friend has a marked up/annotated copy and a bunch of class notes on it (he took a course on Derrida here three years ago) that I'll borrow at some point. For now, I think I'm content with having read a few of his notable interviews and some excerpts, along with my semi-embarrassing and utterly cred-killing Reading Derrida and Intro to Derrida books. Ah, sigh. -Houdini

Film Fest

2/19/07, late-ish (10? 11?)

Society of Control Film Festival

K, I'm itching for a film soiree. This past weekend I watched two movies w/ the GF -- Science of Sleep (Science of Dreams in French) and Stranger Than Fiction. Both are pretty much perfect candidates for a Control Society Movie Fest. And just a few minutes ago pokerfink posted an entry about historical films and action cinema in relation to control, so I think it's time to get the ball rolling on the movie screening event. I've put up a special page where we can dump films, trailers, and synopses of potential movies. This way we can collectively decide on what films we want to screen. Date/Time of movie fest is TBA for now. I think watching A Scanner Darkly is a given at this point, but there are other flicks that deserve consideration (ex-Brazil, Minority Report, They Live, eXistenZ, Alphaville, etc.) for paralleling, developing, and bifurcating the major themes of Metaprogramming.

Okay, a quick thing on embedding video in the wiki. I'm still really new at this, and I'm not sure if the youtube trailer for "They Live" that I've posted above works for everyone. I've used this page as a template for putting video on my wiki. Basically, I cut out the original youtube text and replace it w/ the "embed" URL that's on the video page on Youtube. I'm using Firefox on a Macbook, so I hope this works for everyone. If not, which is likely, let me know. Maybe we can figure something out. And if anybody knows how to embed audio files, please explain how to do that so we can make our wikis dance!

Society of Control Film Festival

Society of Control Film Festival

Revisiting Metaprogramming's Greatest Hits: Remixing Clastres

2/19/07

Hey. So, I'm bored and burned out from the weekend. But since I said I'd respond to the Clastres reading in an earlier post, and b/c everybody has basically deconstructed it to death at this point, I've decided to do something a bit original with my response. I conducted an "experiment" with Clastres text to test one of the tactics of metaprogramming, the remix, and see if certain discourses of control society, particularly the ones aligned w/ institutional power, can be repurposed for one's own ends.

Society Against the State has been criticized for implicit sexism and over-emphasizing the role of leisure in Western society (See: BookWorm and BigYellowPeep). Since my view of the text more or less reflects these two points, I decided to "remix" the original text for fun and attempt to "correct" its original faults using a cut-up generator. The literary technique of the cut-up has its origins in the dada art movement at the turn of the 20th century, but in the sixties it was identified with Beat writer William S. Burroughs who would literally cut up various texts, like newspapers, poetry, medical documents, and splice them together creating experimental novels like Nova Express and Soft Machine out of the often weird and semi-coherent results.

Instead of just jumbling up Clastres' original text, which would produce amusing results but probably still maintain the male bias and leisure aspect which have been questioned by fellow metaprogrammers, I decided to toss some other writings into the mix to make things interesting.

I included excerpts/quotations from the contemporary-ish work of Judith Butler, a radical post-structural feminist and queer theorist, along with bits of the 18th cent work of founding feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft as an antidote to Clastres limited account of women. Although these texts were produced by Western writers working within the frame of Western society, I still think their inclusion effects a disruption of the masculinism in Clastres analysis, which might be useful and if nothing else possibly funny.

As for the leisure part, I added bits of the writings of Karl Marx. Why? I felt that the inclusion of Marx would throw a kind of figurative wrench into Clastres praise for leisure, since much leisure activity remains outside the realm of the proletariat and can be seen as a class-specific pleasure for the bourgeoisie.

Society Against the State Remixed v.1

I made a specific page for the results here: State Against the State Remixed v1. I think it'd be fun to see what others do with the text. To make a cut-up, all one has to do is follow the link to the cut-up generator I've provided above, then toss in whatever. I just copied and pasted bits of text I found from the Internet.

Post-Ubik Blues: Real Vs. Unreal

2/18/07, 4pm-ish

PKD biographical comic by R. Crumb.

Is the distinction between the real and the unreal ever stable?

Dick's book constantly pokes fun at the notion of objective reality. The pseudo worlds of the precogs (multiple futures), the anti-precogs (paranoia-driven propaganda), the half-lifers (regressive reality), are consistently shown as entwined in and constitutive of the reality of the "normals."

There are so many examples in the book where a stable division between real/unreal, false/true, breaks down. Runcinter's Prudence business deals in preserving the supposedly enclosed and independent reality of regular people, yet it relies on the advice of the living dead who are frozen in half-life and represent the space of the unreal; the Ubik ads beginning of each chapter violate the diegetic, "real" world of the narrative (are we reading a novel or a product advertisement?); Chip's half-life visage invades Runciter's real-life world, and vice versa.

Can we ever truly ascertain the real? Is the designation of the "real" totally arbitrary? Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep pursues the question of the real. The book's theory: The real is fake. For example, the enslaved fake beings of the world, the replicants, are ultimately rendered as more caring, empathetic, animal-like, and downright human, than their human masters, who tend to mimic machines.

In Dick's case it would seem that the fake and real co-exist. There cannot be one without the other. And the binary is loaded: The real is hyper-valued, while the fake is devalued. If nothing else, Dick's work has made me more suspicious of claims to realness and truth. Yet they do have the added effect of making me nostalgic for conceptions of reality which unproblematically demarcate the fake and the real...

"Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself."

2/12/07

Hey, all. I'm coming out of my wiki hibernation (finally!), but only momentarily; Philip K. Dick's mindfuck novel, Ubik, is so compulsively readable that I've decided to finish it tonight. That said, this post will be short and sweet. I realize I'm behind with the class assignments; I'll do them later, promise. For now, I just want to share a few bits of news pertaining to topics from class.

So yesterday, whilst discussing music sampling, a buddy of mine brought up Pittsburgh DJ/remixer, Girl Talk. It made me recall a recent article I read in Harper's, \"The Ecstasy of Influence\", in which scifi novelist Jonathan Lethem defends sampling as an age-old artistic technique. Interestingly, coinciding with a theme of Metaprogramming, he cites the "commons" as a key element of our society:

I'm intrigued by the concept of the "commons." The word's origins and historical development definitely bear investigation. I see "commons" namechecked in copyright (-left) debates all the time, in popular tech-oriented blogs like Boingboing.net, and in copyright law genealogies like Free Culture. So I decided to do the English major thing and perform a quick OED background check on the word. This is what I found: Long ago Commons referred to the common people and community; then a body of free citizens; later it was associated with an aspect of the English parliament; and finally it signified eating among others at a "common table." I wonder how relevant the "commons" is to "debates" of copyright and sampling, and to the society of control in general.

In other news: File-sharing has no effect on music sales. Suck it, RIAA. Maybe we should all celebrate by illegally downloading music (buying the CDs afterward, of course). Okay, file this next news item under random. Found on suicidegirls.com: Scientists discover cause of assholes: genes! Gee, thanks, science.

Hmm. Further proof there's no discourse without a piggybackin' bureaucracy?

Farewell for now. P.S. Is anyone else taking the practice GRE via Kaplan later this month? I heard the security at testing centers can be pretty crazy. Like, cameras and bag searches are the norm. I guess I won't be surprised if I get tagged, too. Peace out.

yo la tengo

1/31/07

The RFID prompt has been stirring up some controversy on the class wiki lately! The big deal (not "debate") has to do with the idea of implanting chips in "deviants" -- sex offenders, criminals, and the like. Personally, tracking human beings for the purpose of maintaining the "safety" of society strikes me as a deeply suspect proposition. Exactly whose interests would be served in such a situation, and what would the social and political climate in such a world be like? Echan spells out the dangers of tagging people:

For my part, I've been trying to think of alternative uses of RFID tech that do not involve the pernicious practice of monitoring fellow human beings. (Provisional Idiot's idea of using RFID to "authenticate" identities with a system like Facebook is appealing, I'll admit. (For a sci-fi representation of this very novel concept, I suggest reading Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that you can download for free online; it imagines a social system based on reputation forming around a tech similar to RFID))

A fellow wiki user whose name I can't recall telepathically stole my somewhat creative idea of tagging animals then setting them free in the wild and then tracking and representing their paths visually somehow, creating a cool spider-web graph of various kinds of life. My second idea helps those of us who struggle with clutter and disorganization. RFID could be used for tagging one's possessions in lieu of keeping an orderly personal space. I could leave piles of books and papers all over the place and find what I want easily so long as I tag them and organize the tags in a kind of library I can search through, Google-style. I really wish I had such a system right now, actually.

Have to go. I'll post more RFID ideas as I think of them.

Privacy and Anonymity v. Publicity

1/30/07

Echan is right; the uproar over privacy in the debate seems odd – if you look at it from one perspective. But all one needs to do is shift the focus a bit to, say, the position and interests of a person whose daily life is more visible, policed, and monitored by others, and therefore constrained, in order to think about the implications of emerging tech that threaten to collapse the already feeble and fluid division of privacy and anonymity v. publicity.

Take, for instance, the case of a homosexual-identified individual who lives in a homophobic environment. If this person’s sexuality becomes broadcast to the hostile social order, can you not imagine the negative consequences of losing the former privacy? Surveillance technology opens “closets.” For some, the information and agency is empancipatory; for others, such as those with non-normative sexualities, a new environment of hyper-publicity may spell psychic and social death.

Discourses are networked. Infotech is discourse that interacts and develops within a grid of other discourses – capitalism, sexual identity, class, race, democracy, etc. While some forms of tech may provide nothing but benefits to a white straight person or model citizen, they may be exploited for the purposes of oppressing others. I appreciate this post because all the optimism in our course thus far has failed to account for the fact that discourse proliferation always involves power relations, and that the emergence of new technologies, especially ones that store personal data in databases and authenticate identities, may not be liberatory for everyone involved. To take a pessimistic stance on it, it may simply polarize or further stratify society via pre-existing discursive-political networks.

In response to Echan's comment that “the Government watching my every move does sort of freak me out, but I'm never really doing anything that anybody would care to watch,” I can only say that, again, doing this discourse gimmick, discourse is dynamic, never fixed, always changing. Therefore, our positions or roles within discourse are subject to change. So what seems “normal” and socially acceptable in our present historical moment may change radically within our lifetime.

What does a scanner see?

1/28/07

Everyone here has been mum about A Scanner Darkly. Why is that? You’d think a class called “Metaprogramming” would get the frothing PKD fanboys to come out of the woodwork and clamor for a screening, pronto. Anyway, the movie is pretty great. I watched it twice in theaters and Linklater does not disappoint. For those who read the book, the film is basically a straightforward adaptation of everything in it, except in trippy visual form, with some neat rotoscoping and a shortened story.

This isn’t really the time or the place to get into a detailed synopsis of the plot. This guy gives a good description of it. Wikipedia has a summary. Just watch out for spoilers at the halfway mark.

Ideally, those unfamiliar with the Philip K. Dick should get a hold of his entire oeuvre and furiously read all his books several times over. (Not that I have.) Failing that, the three best things he’s written (in my humble opinion) which everyone should read at least once are A Scanner Darkly, Three Stigmata, and Valis, and they all take about an afternoon or so of sustained reading to finish, so they’re a good place to start.

Some people I know expressed concern about the acting, but I had no problem with the actors. Keanu was brilliantly cast as the burn-out paranoiac protagonist, probably some sort of meta-joke on Linklater’s part, a riff on his previous cinematic roles where he played the inarticulate action hero. The other players are great, too. I think Mobes mentioned that Robert Downey Jr. did a good job. There were good performances all around.

My only problem (quibble, really) has to do with the appearance of the body suits which allow the narcs to conceal their identities. As great as the rotoscoping and other animation looked, these things stuck out, and not in a good way. They were like mashed-up illustrations from a bad children’s book, and when the characters wearing them would move, their movement was robotic and stiff. It was as if you were watching characters from a video game cut-scene. Here’s an image, though the crappy quality is kind of hard to gauge taken out of the movie’s context:

We should screen the movie ASAP. I'm with Mobes when he says it’s all about control society. The surveillance technologies Dick imagined back in the 70’s and our addiction to them seem weirdly prescient now, in the wake of Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

As an alternative to A Scanner Darkly, Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian masterpiece Brazil parallels the themes of the class nicely: Control, burearacy, terrorism, and technology figure pretty prominently. Okay, that's it. I’m out.

RFID: "Mark of the Beast?"

1/26/07

I’m all for "An Internet of Things" and the further networking of life. Yet, I’m also a perpetual skeptic-paranoiac, so I can’t turn off my mental alarm about this RFID technology.

Since the last class (1/25), we’ve gotten a pretty positive account of the stuff. Along with Mobius’ lectures, the links on the syllabus outline the pros about what it can do to enhance databases and consumer/user mobility. There are lots of places online, like here and here, describing its seemingly limitless benefits, too.

Alas, ever-curious, I’m interested in knowing about the not-so-good effects and implications associated with using such tech. Especially after listening to Mobius’s story about a RFID developer suggesting tagging immigrants to keep them under surveillance, I got to thinking that maybe it’s in everyone's interest to seek out other viewpoints on the issue.

On spychips.com I found some interesting stories about the ways in which this technology can be deployed by corporate powers to track the buying patterns of consumer demographics. One write-up from August 9, 2006 mentions that tech developers provided the American Eagle corporation with a video representation showing how to use RFID to install tracking devices in clothing and buying cards. Here’s a description for those too lazy to click:

It’s freaky shit. Fortunately, the video is dated, and apparently nothing came of the proposal. The thought of AE utilizing this tech for the purpose of getting into the brains of potential buyers just grosses me out. I should mention this: I did a background check on spychips. The group is a crazy-looking technophobic bunch who claim RFID will basically usher in a new era of Orwellian surveillance.

I don’t buy that argument for a minute. As a blogger elsewhere once said, “RFID is a reality, it won’t go away … Fighting it is like fighting gasoline and saying we should go back to coal.” Still, I appreciate any naysayer’s dissent from the collective romanticism this new tech is enjoying. I guess I side with BookWorm and others who can’t help but cringe at the idea due to privacy issues.

I’m 100% positive I want to learn (about) the tech, though. Among the more worrisome aspects of RFID is the possibility of corporations or institutions using it and tracking people without disclosure. Like Mobius said, we need to get fluent in the language, learn the alphabet of the discourse. Otherwise, we’ll be at the mercy of the new scribal society emerging around this infotech. That’s what truly bothers me.

Death of Author/ity?

1/24/07

Postscript on Societies of Control by Deleuze

Summary of DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Adorno and Horkheimer

Spurred by Ceridwen and V.'s conversation on authorship, I've been struggling to attempt to answer what I see as the two basic questions underlying their argument: What does it mean to "kill off" the individual author of a text as the authority of its meaning, in the context of metaprogramming in societies of control? What then happens to the categories of readership and authorship?

After much thinking and brow furrowing, I have reached a (tentative) conclusion: The main effect of de-authorizing the author is the breakdown of binaries that structure our conceptions of information production and consumption. Without the privileged position of the author as support, the opposition of individual author (or artist) in relation to readership (or mass society) collapse together; the division between readership and authorship, if one existed in the era of printed text, dissolve. The breakdown of such binaries means authority is now up for grabs; let the meaning-making free-for-all begin!

Under Foucault’s premise that the author is a fiction, or rather a socially produced function, readership becomes an activity of meaning production and revaluation. Going against the Frankfurt School's model of readership, based in Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of the culture industry, the reader is no longer figured as an automaton, passively consuming whatever meaning is bound in a text. Once meaning/authority is removed from the site of the person who authored the work, the reader gains special agency as a kind of knowledge producer. In effect, reading and information reception become more active, productive processes.

This agency is enhanced in the context of metaprogramming because in this space the reader has the power to change text directly. In other words, the reader is the author; the two roles are inseperable. Back in the heyday of printed text, the reader derived meaning from a given text through his or her reception of it. Yet, since the text itself was not materially changed in this process, the author had a cover. The materiality of a book, poem, or whatever, established a kind of boundary that positioned the author as producer and reader as consumer, even if reception proved that binary false.

The wiki changes the game dramatically. It elicits Ceridwen's powerful question: What then of individuality? One way to approach this new realm of de-centered authorship and readership is through DJ Spooky’s argument about the aesthetic of the remix (check this out for a quick summary of his killer book, Rhythm Science, which describes remixing in greater detail). In the 21st century’s info-saturated wikified world, participation in our social reality requires a creative engagement with what DJ Spooky calls the “multiplex self,” our currently fragmented and pluralistic sense of consciousness that is wired into information technologies. The remix is the primary practice of the multiplex self. It hijacks text and produces meanings for the user as well as for the future appropriation by others. It also is a form of resistance to control machines that attempt to attach meaning or author/ity to a single source. In short, it is a reformulation of Mobius' motto for the class: “The REMIX is the wiki is the medium is the message.”

To build on this idea of the remix, we should note philosopher Gilles Deleuze's notion of the "dividual." In Deleuze's view, late late capitalism in postmodern society has fragmented the individual. This fragmentation occurs because the continuation of high-tech cybernetic society is contingent upon systems of perpetual control. Control (W. S. Burroughs' term) circulates power within markets managed by capitalist entities, and in the process individuals are continuously shifted between consumer roles, treated like packets of living information rather than people with emotions, needs, and agencies. Resistance to this corporate takeover of human life, according to Spooky and others, depends on sampling, DJing, and appropriating information that control uses to position us as passive consumers.

This topic bears more discussion. Alas, time flies, and class starts soon. So long for now.

Digital Proposal

1/22/07

The Wiki debate rages on! Yesterday, Mobius asked us to respond to the Digital Proposal, which is all about the wiki. Here's my take on it.

My first impression of the digital proposal itself is that it's thorough: There's a ton of information and links. Both things help make a convincing case for implementing the wiki in comp classes. The case being, as I understand it, that the wiki prepares us for changing media landscapes, changing literacy skills, multiplying collaborative e-workspaces, etc.

So far, so good. But then a few things in it struck me as odd or insufficiently substantiated. Thank God we have BookWorm, otherwise I'd have to outline all my main criticisms. In a nutshell, my confusions are 1) how does the wiki wipe out plagiarism (couldn't it make things worse?) 2) is a wireless campus feasible 3) what's the advantage of the wiki over a stable webpage for an e-portfolio? Apart from that, I'm down for the proposal, all the way.

I was thinking about navigating the wiki and making connections with other users. Prompted by the writing of loadstool, the question of collaboration on the wiki seems especially interesting:

I see where the user's coming from. To me, the medium feels like a more fluid and public version of a blog, and not much more. But I'm chalking that up to my unfamiliarity with the medium. If you've been paying attention, you'll see that mobius has been converting text on some users' pages into links. Is this an attempt at shifting our attention away from blathering about ethics or whatnot toward examining (and practicing) navigation and attention concentration? It seems like a good move on his part. I'm intrigued. I'll try it out myself and record the results later. Peace out, wikinions.

Fear of a Wiki Planet: Ethics of Wikis

1/20-21/07

This weekend I've been learning more tricks of the wiki trade, as well as pondering class discussion, so I've decided to do another post. Before I go into it, though, I want to give a shout-out to Ceridwen for linking to Phaedrus and upping the helpful post on setting up the wiki. You rule!

On that note, kudos to moops for creating those nifty "Back" and "Home" buttons for the wiki. I like them so much I decided to steal them for my own use. Much apreesh. No doubt others will follow suit, too.

Hopefully the remaining 2/3's of the class are familiar with getting started on a wiki. If anybody needs additional support, feel free to drop me a line. Even though I'm still in the novice stage of wiki priesthood, I'd be glad to try to help out with anything. FYI, here's a quick tip: Use Style Help. The page explains adding links, quotes, bold text, and all manner of stylistics to your posts. I wish I knew about that feature before doing my first entry!

Moving on. As I was reflecting on my first post, thinking about Mobius's remarks in class, I realized that my opinions were a tad premature and reactionary. At the same time, I do think my hesitancy is somewhat valid. Every new medium has been met with panic -- fair enough. Historically, such panic has hindered the development of writing, cinema, radio, and so on. From our vantage point, everyone's fears back then were, for the most part, proven counterproductive. And in the information age, one would imagine that the constant influx of discourses should induce a kind of complacency with emerging forms. Alas, that's not the case for Houdini! (Seriously, I'm an English major. It's my job to be critical; blind faith won't fly)

Rather than continue analyzing the state of the wiki, by myself, and beat a dead horse using my former points (which, though crude, still reflect a relevant question people should ask about the form: Is there a new freedom emerging here that's truly separate from old-fashioned or new forms of control (ex. self/external censorship)?), I'd like to pursue the discussion of wiki ethics prompted by another peer, Peepx1.

Peep makes a good point. Theoretically, if somebody wanted to be a major dick, he/she could go crazy and delete everyone's work for the hell of it. Since we save stuff, though, the problem would be remedied simply by reposting. This tactic works in our situation by virtue of sheer numbers. A malicious user would be unable to bring down the entire class because forty-some users versus one user puts the odds in our favor.

By the same token, what happens in Wiki communities when the individual user posts something controversial, countering the status quo? In theory, if the content were rejected by everyone, couldn't the user fall prey to the group's mass-deleting, Wikipedia-style, until a "consensus" regarding the information is worked out? The "problem" could solve itself, again, by sheer numbers. But the one vs. many scenario is not likely to play out in the individual's favor.

To put my point into perspective, consider the following hypothetical. A pro-choice user discusses the abortion debate in her latest entry. She belongs to, say, a gaming community where such topics rarely surface. However, she addresses her position on women's reproduction rights with regard to digital media, so it's appropriate commentary in her mind. Yet, a significant number of other users, who either disagree with her views or disagree with the fact that she's bringing real-life politics into video game discourse, decide to "edit" her post, extracting the information which is explicitly polarizing or political.

There's a name for this predicament: Tyranny of the majority. This issue relates to my earlier question of freedom. The medium of the wiki, in my view, is free only to the extent that the users accept what each other say, or that their values are somewhat similar. In other words, it is free insofar as there's an established understanding of what is considered valid or invalid speech. Peep's question about a code of conduct on the wiki seems to gestures toward this idea, a need for a Wiki ethics.

If the form is to be "radically democratic," as Mobius has suggested, this quality is by no means inherent. We cannot rely on an artificial machine of discourse for a stable and productive mode of politics and self-organization, as enticing as it may seem. Instead, we should start thinking about how we can apply a human element to this new form. Perhaps it would entail laying down a set of values or guidelines that secure everyone's agency and right to speech in the event of voicing potentially damaging dissent.

Of course, in the context of this supervised class, my concerns about the safety of the individual wiki user in relation to the other users run the risk of seeming over-the-top. Obviously, it's unlikely that my worst case scenario hypothetical will occur here. Regardless, if we want to do something productive with the wiki, and transform it into a form of agency that can generate and maximize meaningful connections over a long span of time, it strikes me that the most urgent and pressing issue at the moment is considering the formation of a possible wiki ethics, if only to allow us to individually go beyond the margins of conventional pen-and-paper, top-down discourse that characterized life pre-infoquake.

Wiki ethics, as a set of statements securing the rights of the wiki user, can also extend to other wiki (sub)cultures, and prevent chaos or the disempowerment of the individual. Then again, before I make any premature rose-tinted conclusions, I can already perceive obstacles to this plan. To what extent can ethics transform into a machine of control? To what extent is the wiki, in its currently formless state, guaranteeing free thought and play? It's possible that ethics might be the last thing "we" want. I dunno.

At this point I want to open up my discussion to others. What do you guys think about the notion of wiki ethics? Would it be a help or a hinderance? Is my ranting nothing but useless discourse? Should we stop beating a dead horse already and learn to love the bomb?

Alright, fellow wikiheads. Peace out.

Is the Wiki an Escapologist's Nightmare?

1/17/07

So tonight I struggled to say some things about Harry Houdini, my role model, because nearly everyone explained the origin of their wiki alias already. But thanks to writer's block, instead I've listed some first impressions and concerns about our class wiki. (Joy!) And, along with that, just for shits and giggles, I have included some thoughts about information tech. and the "proliferating discourses" of our so-called society of control.

I'll get this out of the way immediately: I've never used a wiki before. I'm not a technophobe; I just spend more time "browsing" info than formulating my own. Two years ago I had a Xanga (back when they were cool!). Even so, it's been a while since I've written in a digital medium. This is a disclaimer of sorts, a way of saying "reader beware," in case I do anything wrong in the process of writing.

Of course, I could urge you to fix any such mistakes by editing my work--this is a wiki! But I have misgivings about that, to segue into my first concern about the course: The outside manipulation of text. Don't think that's code for a personal dislike or fear of other people. I enjoy collaboration, and I love the idea of open source philosophy, especially manifested in print/textual cultures. But there's a world of difference between the writing of two consenting participants, in a face-to-face encounter, versus the writing of anonymous contributors, unidentifiable other than by pseudonym, in a virtual space.

My account of the wiki's writing space may seem negative. But I'm not against it; on the contrary, I'm unused to the form, and I think it is full of potential. But I wonder if the space of the wiki is truly conducive to greater productivity, quality, and collaboration, as some people say. Is it empowering to the individual writer when his/her work is susceptible to change on somebody else's whim? Especially when the writer is unable to respond to another's revisions? I wonder if we witnessed a drawback to the current state of the wiki with the mysterious hackers who sabotaged the syllabus on the ENGL473 page. Obviously, such freedom is subject to abuse; then again, the counterpoint is that one needs only to make multiple copies of his work. Fair enough, but one is still facing textual subversion by another agent when the text is out there, endlessly manipulable for others.

A second issue builds on that first point: When the text is public and manipulable, does that not lead a writer to inhibit his own work? One could argue that my concern is inconsequential because all text is public; Michael Warner says every text is beholden to a public (a readership), because discourse by nature is networked, relational, and gains meaning for readers only in view of other texts. I agree with that statement. My thing is, when I cannot in any sense "own" my text, or leave it in a finished form, for a public's dissemination, my degree of freedom as a writer seems narrowed. My range of subject matter is necessarily diminished because others will take it, manipulate it, dispose of it. It is true that no text is a property, no author has a monopoly on the meaning of his/her text. Literary critics have pointed out that textual meaning can be reclaimed by readers, and revalued or devalued or changed altogether in the process of reception. All the same, with the wiki, we are not dealing with the "static," stable text of a novel or a film, in any way shape or form. On the one hand the form seems radically democratizing for that reason but on the other hand disempowering, increasing the risk of digital Panopticism and creative stagnation on the part of the individual writer. (Perhaps, then, we should let go of the individual writer...)

The last concern deals with attention. Like I said earlier, I'm an information browser. I fiend the stuff. I spend more time on message boards and social networking sites and blogs than I'd ever want to admit. Sometimes I feel a bit silly about this addiction. You see, there are people in the world out there. Suffering, death, oppression. Big ol' global capitalism, to touch the tip of the iceberg. Therefore, the question becomes: Do I want to increasingly devote my attention in furthering virtual publics, and obtaining and circulating info with the wiki, in lieu of maintaining interest in the off-line material world? I suppose this issue might be peculiar to my circumstances. As an internet addict the notion of attention strikes me as a political one, because when one's time spent in the virtual surpasses time spent in everday life, I dunno, call me old-fashioned, but it seems counterproductive at this stage. There's a lot of living and fighting going on outside, whereas for the most part in the wiki (internet textual forms, p2p sharing, etc.) I see not much more than a lot of white middle-class people gathering to exchange info and music and so on, sustaining one particular lifestyle and set of social practices at the expense of alternative possibilities. If this is in fact true (I believe it is), with time it could change as other groups gain access. Who knows.

Okay, that last thought was pretty negative. Sue me. Misgivings are hardly ever rational anyway. Okay, my girlfriend is angry that I've devoted so much attention to this wiki instead of her (see, living proof of the ethical dilemma this medium poses!). I'll continue this later. Or not. Maybe "you" will.

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5  License.