Read moreI think people need to seriously consider quitting [these] services and moving to ones which are located within Europe. But also the government needs to insist that legal rights and privacy rights should be applied to non-US citizens. After all, European governments respect the rights of US citizens. Why shouldn’t they do the same?
Quotes
Read moreOn May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because “they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent”, and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government.
In the three weeks since he arrived, he has been ensconced in a hotel room. “I’ve left the room maybe a total of three times during my entire stay,” he said. It is a plush hotel and, what with eating meals in his room too, he has run up big bills.
He is deeply worried about being spied on. He lines the door of his hotel room with pillows to prevent eavesdropping. He puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords to prevent any hidden cameras from detecting them.
Read moreCoilhouse Magazine couldn’t have existed without the global network we all built together online, and the kinship that sprang up from it. More generally, I’d say that many of the best friends and most cherished collaborators I have made, across multiple mediums, are thanks to BBSs and later on, social networking sites like Livejournal, Twitter, Tumblr. Every day, no matter where I am in the world, I can interface with authors, fashion photographers, editors, musicians, and filmmakers… all thousands of miles away. With a good pair of headphones and an Apogee One, I can (and have) recorded full-length film scores on my laptop in the midst of traveling internationally. I’m about to email this interview to you while I’m at ten-thousand feet in an airplane. I have cherished loved ones that I’ve never met face to face, and it’s a non-issue, because we’ve found ways to share our art. This world, and my subsequent work, is largely post-geographical, and I find that miraculous.
The brutality and low acting skills are unfortunate… But as a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art.
Andrei Tarkovsky on Terminator
(i still find this the Oddest Thing)
Read moreCyberfeminism takes as an axiomatic principle that, though technology is inherently neutral, the entire process of technological development, design, and engineering is influenced by society and culture and, thus, in part by normative forces such as patriarchy. While eco-feminists propose to fight fire with water, countering tech with nature, cyberfeminists champion fighting fire with fire.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (via volumexii)
Read more
Read moreUsing the theoretical idioms of ‘smooth and striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus Continuum, London) and ‘the event’ (Badiou, 2005, Being and Event Continum, London), this paper will position parkour as an alternate way of theorising the city as an arena for capitalist versus subversive practices. Moving away from the idea of smooth space incorporating a ‘war machine’, the Badiouian event is a more appropriate lens through which to theorise parkour and its participants’ relationship with the city, in that it embraces a serene ethos of urban rediscovery.
Weizman goes on to interview a commander of the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade. The commander describes his forces as acting “like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner.”
This is how the troops could “adjust the relevant urban space to our needs,” he explains, and not the other way around.
Indeed, the commander thus exhorted his troops as follows: “There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to moving along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”
…
In fact, I’m reminded of a scene toward the end of the recent WWII film Days of Glory in which we see a German soldier blasting his way horizontally through a house, wall by wall, using his bazooka as a blunt instrument of architectural reorganization—"adjusting the relevant space to his needs,“ we might say—and chasing down the French troops without limiting himself to doors or stairways.
In any case, post-battle surveys later revealed that "more than half of the buildings in the old city center of Nablus had routes forced through them, resulting in anywhere from one to eight openings in their walls, floors, or ceilings, which created several haphazard crossroutes"—a heavily armed improvisational navigation of the city.
So why do I mention all this in the context of Die Hard? The majority of that film’s interest, I’d suggest, comes precisely through its depiction of architectural space: John McClane, a New York cop on his Christmas vacation, moves through a Los Angeles high-rise in basically every conceivable way but passing through its doors and hallways.
…
Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects.
His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement within the material structure of the building.
…
What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building’s narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation’s electromagnetically sealed vault.
Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?
Why not personally infest the spaces around you?
…
For example, Weizman outlines what the Israeli Defense Forces call "hot pursuit"—that is, to "break into Palestinian controlled areas, enter neighborhoods and homes in search of suspects, and take suspects into custody for purposes of interrogation and detention.” This becomes a spatially extraordinary proposition when you consider that someone could be kidnapped from the 4th floor of a building by troops who have blasted through the walls and ceilings, coming down into that space from the 5th floor of a neighboring complex—and that the abductors might only have made it that far in the first place after moving through the walls of other structures nearby, blasting upward through underground infrastructure, leaping terrace-to-terrace between buildings, and more.
…
If Jason Bourne’s actions make visible the infrastructure-rich, borderless world of the EU, then John McClane shows us a new type of architectural space altogether—one that we might call, channeling topology, Nakatomi space, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of non-architectural means. In all three cases, though—with Bond, Bourne, and McClane—it is Hollywood action films that reveal to us something very important about how cities can be known, used, and navigated: these films are filled with the improvisational crossroutes that constitute Eyal Weizman’s “Lethal Theory.”
…
On the other hand, as Weizman points out, this is not a new approach to built space at all:
“In fact, although celebrated now as radically new, many of the procedures and processes described above have been part and parcel of urban operations throughout history. The defenders of the Paris Commune, much like those of the Kasbah of Algiers, Hue, Beirut, Jenin, and Nablus, navigated the city in small, loosely coordinated groups moving through openings and connections between homes, basements, and courtyards using alternative routes, secret passageways, and trapdoors.”
This is all just part of “a ghostlike military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean.”
Treated as an architectural premise, Die Hard becomes an exhilarating catalog of unorthodox movements through space.
http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/nakatomi-space.html
space and time and fictional realities
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot – although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he’s a hippy scrounger, and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. (They’re still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who’ve gone global to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites.
…
Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”
“No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning – it’s logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing’s off.”
“But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God’s sake! I’m not even sure they are sentient – I mean, they’re what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?”Manfred’s finger jabs out: “That’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Lobsters – ” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You’re serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?”
“It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they aren’t treated as people, it’s quite possible that other uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of ‘em’s thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years’ time?”
Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. “How much is this worth?” she asks plaintively.
“Oh, quite a few million, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass. “Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining complex?”
“They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you’ll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group – one that won’t be a minority for much longer!”
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Read more
Read moreWe live in a networked world, but the paint on the ceiling and the wooden bar furniture seem unchanged, and the beer would still be more or less recognisable to a neolithic brewer.
On the other hand, the pub now has an app. It’s in the iOS store. It has beer launches, too, and while tweeting from it I was noticed by a local bookstore and invited to drop in for a flash signing. Verily, things sometimes do change – this would never have happened in 1998.
We are, in fact, living through the earlier moments of “Accelerando”, because that part of the novel the story “Lobsters” – was set in the predictable near-future. But “Accelerando” as a whole doesn’t seem to be coming true, and a good thing too. In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we’re a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it’s a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they’re dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster.
The logic of exponential progress at a tempo rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it for humanity. It’s also a false apprehension based on the assumption that the current state of affairs will persist indefinitely. We’ve had these exponentiating progress spikes in the past; they generally turn out to be a sigmoid curve, and the rate of exponentially increasing progress suddenly flips upside-down, converging slowly with a plateau.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 