Read moreIn 2005, a few years before Blomkamp made his feature directing debut with District 9, he was shooting a Nike commercial in San Diego when his exec producer suggested they pop down to Tijuana for the night. So they set off in a rental car and hit the main tourist drag, Avenida Revolución, at dusk, bought a couple of beers in brown paper bags, and started strolling down the street. Suddenly, two Federales (Mexican police) pulled up onto the curb. “They got out of the car, threw me onto the hood, cuffed me, took my passport, did the same to my friend and threw us into the back of the car,” Blomkamp says. “They weren’t speaking to us; they just started driving us out of the city.”
His exec producer, who was carrying petty cash from their commercial shoot, began rolling up bills and shoving them through the grate that separated the backseat from the front. “When we’d reached some critical mass — $900 or something — they let us out of the car,” Blomkamp says. It was dark, they had no idea where they were, and they had at least a two-hour trek ahead of them. “We were walking through these totally impoverished, insane areas with feral dogs and crying babies and people making fires, and on the horizon I could see the floodlights from the U.S. shining into Mexico, and there were multiple Black Hawks flying the perimeter, and it was like science fiction on Earth,” he says. “Nothing has changed, but now you’re on the other side of the border.” His goal with Elysium, he says, was to put all of us there.
Quotes
Read moreWhat Warner meant when he called the Taj a “Burner bar” was that it operated, in part, according to a barter system. One of the standing rules at the guesthouse was that any expat could exchange information for booze. In a war zone where so many different agencies, companies, and contractors passed like wary ships in the night, one of the biggest problems was that no one could coordinate knowledge. No one, that is, except maybe a bartender. Under the banner of “Beer for Data,” Warner had turned the Taj into a major clearinghouse for information in Jalalabad. It accumulated by the terabyte on his hard drives: construction plans, hydrology surveys, health-clinic locations, election polling sites, names of farmers, number of trees on their farms, number of acres. What Warner collected he then passed on to the United Nations, the Pentagon, and anyone else who asked for it.
Warner let on that there was a lot more to tell, and that he was making a trip into the field a couple days later. But he offered no invitation, and I went to bed, leaving him at his laptop.
And that was how I met Dr. Dave: a former U.S. Army drill instructor, self-avowed “hippie doctor,” PhD neuroscientist, technotopian idealist, dedicated Burner, dabbler in psychedelics, insatiable meddler, and (weirdest of all) defense contractor. Unlike the guys who had come to the war mainly for the hazard pay, Warner seemed genuinely bent on something far grander—redeeming the debacle of Afghanistan through the gospel of open information.
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Using various pots of money, Warner had built dozens of these solar-powered computer labs around the province. Some, like this one, didn’t have an Internet connection—at least not yet—and were, in Warner’s mind, just stepping stones to the computer literacy that would one day make these kids potential sources of crowdsourced information. Other computer labs, closer to town, had Internet pumped in from the antennae and satellite dishes on the roof of the Taj. In those labs, Warner and his team were teaching Afghans how to use OpenStreetMap, a Web-based platform that allows users to add fine-grained local information to existing satellite maps. (As a result, the OpenStreetMap page for Jalalabad is exquisite.)
Warner was doing it on the cheap—no security details, no armored vehicles—stretching his DARPA funding and his own bank account fairly far. “For the price of two expat security contractors,” he boasted, “I can put Internet to 50,000 students.”…
I was just beginning to get used to his way of talking, which alternated between turgid military jargon and gonzo flights of fancy. (“I’m dismantling the Death Star,” he told me later, “to build solar ovens for the Ewoks.”) Ultimately, what he wanted to do was help the Department of Defense and all its scattered parts—a hulking war apparatus he derisively called “The Machine”—help itself. “I’ve foolishly created my own counterinsurgency,” he said.
Read more“There are many exciting things you could do that are illegal or not allowed by regulation,” Page said. “And that’s good, we don’t want to change the world. But maybe we can set aside a part of the world.” He likened this potential free-experimentation zone to Burning Man and said that we need “some safe places where we can try things and not have to deploy to the entire world.”
Knowledge itself … turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put differently, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the world.
Alvin Toffler (via inthenoosphere)
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I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person’s life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.
Andrei Tarkovsky (via gylleneungdom)
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Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.
William S. Burroughs, Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (via inthenoosphere)
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Read moreMuch of the time, the towering Georgian and Victorian terraced houses of Belgravia now have only servants living in them – their masters and mistresses are drifting around the world, from yacht to schloss to Park Avenue apartment, in search of pleasure or tax avoidance. Drive round the area at night, and it’s often only the lights in the attics and the basements – the servants’ quarters – that are on.
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The 20th-century culture of housewives doing everything for themselves – armed with an avalanche of labour-saving devices – was a brief blip in British history when servants went out of fashion. From the Middle Ages until the First World War, whole armies of traditional servants were employed in this country. One of the reasons the castles and country houses of Britain were so huge was that they were designed to accommodate a vast staff. When Sudeley Castle was built in 1442, there were two big courtyards: one for Lord Sudeley and his family; the other just for his servants.
For the next half a millennium or so, domestic servants were run of the mill, not just for peers of the realm, but also for the lower middle classes. In 1851 there were 115,000 women between 15 and 20 living in London and the suburbs; 40,000 of them were in service.
Read moreMohammed graduated from North Carolina A&T State University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. It’s not clear whether Mohammed was interested in designing a better vacuum or had ulterior motives. He might have intended to use the plans to conceal secret information or trick his jailers.
In Graham Greene’s spy thriller “Our Man in Havana,” a vacuum salesman in Cuba agrees to work for MI6, the British spy service. He dupes the British into believing his vacuum designs are military installations. The AP was unable to determine whether Mohammed ever read the famous novel.
It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist. The secret CIA prison in Romania was shuttered in early 2006 and Mohammed was transferred later that year to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base prison, where he remains. It’s unlikely he was able to take his appliance plans to Cuba.
Mohammed’s military lawyer, Jason Wright, said he was prohibited from discussing his client’s interest in vacuums.
“It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger,” Wright said.
But Wright added that he often discussed “modern technological innovations” and the “scientific wonders” of the Quran with Mohammed. He called Mohammed “exceptionally intelligent.”
“If he had access to educational programs in Guantanamo Bay, such as distance learning programs, I am confident that in addition to furthering his Islamic studies, he could obtain a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and very likely patent inventions,” Wright said.
The CIA won’t discuss the Mohammed’s vacuum plans, either. The AP asked the CIA for copies of the vacuum designs or any government records about them under the Freedom of Information Act.
The CIA responded in a letter to the AP that the records, “should they exist,” would be considered operational files of the CIA — among its most highly classified category of government files — and therefore exempt from ever being released to the public.
Read moreThink, for example, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London, or of Edward Snowden, the Prism whistleblower currently in his Hong Kong hotel. Both are now in exceptional spaces, holes in the continuum of globalised digital space. These strange anomalies are perhaps the only escapes from the ever-present digital backdoor, the only respite from the colonisation of earth by digital culture.
Read moreA study Toma conducted this year found that admiring one’s own Facebook profile has palpable self-affirming effects, and that people naturally gravitate to Facebook for a boost when their ego has been knocked. Her unwitting participants were asked to carry out a public speaking task, only to receive crushingly negative feedback. Half of the subjects were allowed to peruse their own Facebook profiles before receiving the feedback, and this group turned out to be way less defensive than the others. Instead of accusing their evaluator, for example, of incompetence, they said: “Yeah, there’s some truth to this feedback. Maybe there are things I can do to improve my performance.”
Toma asked yet more participants to give the same speech, only this time she gave them either neutral or terrible reviews. They were then presented with a choice of five (fake) further studies to take part in – one involving logging on to Facebook, and four decoys. “We were excited to find,” she says, “that when participants’ egos were threatened, they chose Facebook at twice the rate than the others” – evidence of what she calls “an unconscious mechanism to decide to repair feelings of self worth. This is why people spend more time on Facebook after a hard day or something bad happening – because it reassures you that you’re connected, that you have interesting activities and hobbies, photographs, etc.”
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 