English 473
Office Hours: Thursday, 3:15-4:15, Center for the Study of Altered Consciousness, 501 Carpenter & Friday, 11-1, Center for Sustainability (Porter Road)
There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another....There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. Gilles Deleuze, Society of Control
This course will focus student attention on the tools, practices and assumptions of the contemporary security state as it seeks to govern the constantly proliferating information commons in the Wars on Terror(isms) and Drugs. Students will collaboratively investigate and creatively alter discourses of filesharing, hacking, biometrics and identification, data mining, surveillence and Temporary Autonomous Zones. As a course in rhetoric (the science of attention), the seminar will offer theories and practices for navigating and altering contemporary rhetorical ecologies featuring internet telephony, rfid systems and multimedia technical composition in the open source commons and its constantly differentiating subcultures. Participants will help compose global open source standards for emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and biotelemetrics.
As practice in the inhabitation of temporary autonomous zones, students will compose for wiki three times per week, working with texts, images and sound. Students will compose a collaborative as well as individual final project analogous to a 15-20 page research paper.
Cached Syllabus - In case the current one is down
Blog Pile - Student Blogs are created here, where they are banged upon, composed. dreamed, intertwingled three times weekly.
A Primer on the History of Programming Languages
Bey, Hakim Temporary Autonomous Zones and Ontological Anarchy
Burrroughs, William S. The Electronic Revolution
Clastres, Pierre. Society Against the State
Dick, Philip K. Ubik
Doyle, Richard. The Transgenic Involution
Department of Homeland Security, National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace
Lessig, Free Culture
The Political Economy of Open Source Software
Wilson, Robert Anton Cosmic Trigger (Volume 1)
Entropy Growing a Surveillence-Free Peer to Peer Network Inside the Internet
Bittorrent - You'll Need This or another Bittorrent client to download the Lessig torrent
Hope So Many MP3s of digital culture, so little time]
http://www.archive.org/details/e-dv166_sf_01_pavlosky_001.mpg
Ubuntu - Linux For Human Beings