Re: nettime Philippe Aigrain's book Common Cause - just out
Patrice looks intersting but I had to hunt around the url seems to be: http://grit-transversales.org/article.php3?id_article=61 not http://grit-transversales.org/article.php3?id_article=3D61 take care Martin # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Introducing Daria: An autonomous software artist
This may be of interest to those involved with new media, generative art, autonomous systems, and/or matrix-style paranoia. Daria is an autonomous software artist that creates art for users in real-time on her site. As an autonomous entity, she is responsible for her own bills (hosting, hardware, etc.) and employs me to make enhancements to her. You can donate to her via the paypal links on the site. Also on the site is information on how she was created and future plans for Daria. http://daria.muxspace.com/ Comments and criticism welcome to me or her. Brian -- brian lee dae yung biomimetic art and research mux space . com This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Bill Gates and other communists article by RMS
This is a Followup of CNET interview with Bill Gates http://news.com.com/Gates+taking+a+seat+in+your+den/2008-1041_3-5514121.html?tag=nl Bill Gates and other communists === February 15, 2005, 3:55 AM PT By Richard Stallman http://tinyurl.com/5ouyy When CNET News.com asked Bill Gates about software patents, he shifted the subject to intellectual property, blurring the issue with various other laws. Then he said anyone who won't give blanket support to all these laws is a communist. Since I'm not a communist but I have criticized software patents, I got to thinking this might be aimed at me. When someone uses the term intellectual property, typically he's either confused himself, or trying to confuse you. The term is used to lump together copyright law, patent law and various other laws, whose requirements and effects are entirely different. Why is Mr. Gates lumping these issues together? Let's study the differences he has chosen to obscure. Software developers are not up in arms against copyright law, because the developer of a program holds the copyright on the program; as long as the programmers wrote the code themselves, no one else has a copyright on their code. There is no danger that strangers could have a valid case of copyright infringement against them. Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism. Patents are a different story. Software patents don't cover programs or code; they cover ideas (methods, techniques, features, algorithms, etc.). Developing a large program entails combining thousands of ideas, and even if a few of them are new, the rest needs must have come from other software the developer has seen. If each of these ideas could be patented by someone, every large program would likely infringe hundreds of patents. Developing a large program means laying oneself open to hundreds of potential lawsuits. Software patents are menaces to software developers, and to the users, who can also be sued. A few fortunate software developers avoid most of the danger. These are the megacorporations, which typically have thousands of patents each, and cross-license with each other. This gives them an advantage over smaller rivals not in a position to do likewise. That's why it is generally the megacorporations that lobby for software patents. Today's Microsoft is a megacorporation with thousands of patents. Microsoft said in court that the main competition for MS Windows is Linux, meaning the free software GNU/Linux operating system. Leaked internal documents say that Microsoft aims to use software patents to stop the development of GNU/Linux. When Mr. Gates started hyping his solution to the problem of spam, I suspected this was a plan to use patents to grab control of the Net. Sure enough, in 2004 Microsoft asked the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to approve a mail protocol that Microsoft was trying to patent. The license policy for the protocol was designed to forbid free software entirely. No program supporting this mail protocol could be released as free software--not under the GNU GPL (General Public License), or the MPL (Mozilla Public License), or the Apache license, or either of the BSD licenses, or any other. The IETF rejected Microsoft's protocol, but Microsoft said it would try to convince major ISPs to use it anyway. Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the U.S. Department of Defense. Slashdoted at: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/15/2331208from=rss # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Book Review of Books Mostly Liked
Book Review of Books Mostly Liked This is written in a more traditional style, in the hopes of greater distribution, and readership, and in the hopes it will be of greater use. I already reviewed Bunt's Islam in the Digital Age for RCCS and will send that out in the future, when it's published online. Islam in the Digital Age and a number of other books have given me a greater interest in the Quran itself. I can highly recommend: Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, John Wansbrough; forward, translations, and expanded notes by Andrew Rippin, Prometheus, 2004, original edition Oxford 1977. For me, raised with a greater knowledge of biblical exegesis, the Quran has remained somewhat impenetrable in terms of hermeneutics. This book goes a long way towards remedying that; it describes the various tropes and interpretive modes available in enormous detail. Wansbrough begins with retribution, sign, exile, and covenant, analyzes the concept of prophethood, indicates how narratology and textual archaeology tend to fail, presents a wide variety of exegetic principles, and so forth. The work is both older and difficult - the original has sections in Arabic, Hebrew, German, Greek, and Latin (at least) left untranslated, but Rippin's addenda help a great deal. I feel I can work with this book, move out to a greater understanding of the scaffolding, if not the interiority, of Islam, and for an atheist, this is the best I can hope for. On the other end of the spectrum, which closes the ring through Avicenna and Averroes, look at Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, the translation by Shlomo Pines, with an introductory essay (quite long) by Leo Strauss, University of Chicago Press, 1963, still in print. Note the name Leo Strauss - the same beloved of neocons in the US (see the BBC's Powers of Nightmare). Strauss was an expert in Maimonides, and it is oddly to Maimonides one might turn for an analysis of current US political rhetoric rhetorical tendency. For Maimonides writes for the 'perplexed' - those who are already knowledgeable in Biblical exegesis, but who want to explore the deeper meaning of the words, especially in light of Arabic and Greek philosophy. The work is two-tiered, which Strauss' essay, How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed, brings out - there is exoteric and esoteric knowledge, and it is not necessary for everyone to understand everything in depth. Out of this comes Bush, eventually, without the grace, the knowledge, the problematized liberalism, that seems to characterize Strauss' thought. And the Guide is interesting itself; it begins with a terrific analysis of the attributes of God, and moves on from there. Most highly recommended. Dover has an earlier translation, but it's more difficult to read, and without the introduction, of course. (The translator also has an introduction, The Philosophic Sources of The Guide of the Perplexed, which indicates the tremendous cross-fertilization among Arabic, Greek, and Jewish sources at the time.) My ignorance of Strauss (and of political philosophy in general) led me to The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss: Essays and Lectures by Leo Strauss, Selected and Introduced by Thomas L. Pangle, Chicago 1989, currently in print. Here you'll find The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Rationalism; Relativism; An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism; Exoteric Teaching; The Dialog between Reason and Revelation; and a number of other essays. The essay on Heidegger, who Strauss considers a master, is itself a revelation; his interstitial scholarship reminds me of Jane Gallop. Strauss thought, if anything, is complex, and this is an excellent introduction. We need to return to the sources at this point, not of theodicy, but at the least, to those who struggled with materials that Bush and cohorts, bin Laden and cohorts, have simplified and bent out of all recognition (the two engaged in a violent dance of slaughter and retribution etc. etc.). Strauss leads to Karl Kraus, by virtue of politics and the crisis of rationalism. I've read Kraus for years, on and off, and he now slides into the descriptions of the work of Elfriede Jelinek, which I've mentioned before. I've read three of her four novels in print in English from Serpent's Tail, and am in the middle of the fourth (Lust, translated Michael Hulse, 1992). Although I'm probably the last to argue for a 'national literature,' there are moments among Kraus/Jelinek that resonate strongly. It's Wonderful Wonderful Times, Serpent's Tail, translated Hulse, 1990, that has given me nightmares and an interiority as if the writing were inscribed just on the outer edge of a scar among twins, or what happens in the 50s in Vienna. This is the strongest fiction I have read in a long long time, and I hesitate to call it fiction; whatever it is, it is something else along the lines of philosophical psychology without the
nettime Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit
[http://www.jelks.nu/misc/articles/bs.html, courtesy of a pointer on cryptome http://cryptome.org/ --mod(tbyfield)] On Bullshit Harry Frankfurt Princeton University One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not, or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept. Any suggestion about what conditions are logically both necessary and sufficient for the constitution of bullshit is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely -- simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning. For another, the phenomenon itself is so vast and amorphous that no crisp and perspicuous analysis of its concept can avoid being procrustean. Nonetheless it should be possible to say something helpful, even though it is not likely to be decisive. Even the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked. So far as I am aware, very little work has been done on this subject. I have not undertaken a survey of the literature, partly because I do not know how to go about it. To be sure, there is one quite obvious place to look -- the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED has an entry for bullshit in the supplementary volumes, and it also has entries for various pertinent uses of the word bull and for some related terms. I shall consider some of these entries in due course. I have not consulted dictionaries in languages other than English, because I do not know the words for bullshit or bull in any other language. Another worthwhile source is the title essay in The Prevalence of Humbug by Max Black. I am uncertain just how close in meaning the word humbug is to the word bullshit. Of course, the words are not freely and fully interchangeable; it is clear that they are used differently. But the difference appears on the whole to have more to do with considerations of gentility, and certain other rhetorical parameters, than with the strictly literal modes of significance that concern me most. It is more polite, as well as less intense, to say Humbug! than to say Bullshit! For the sake of this discussion, I shall assume that there is no other important difference between the two, Black suggests a number of synonyms for humbug, including the following: balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, imposture, and quackery. This list of quaint equivalents is not very helpful. But Black also confronts the problem of establishing the nature of humbug more directly, and he offers the following formal definition: Humbug: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes. A very similar formulation might plausibly be offered as enunciating the essential characteristics of bullshit. As a preliminary to developing an independent account of those characteristics, I will comment on the various elements of Black's definition. Deceptive misrepresentation: This may sound pleonastic. No doubt what Black has in mind is that humbug is necessarily designed or intended to deceive, that its misrepresentation is not merely inadvertent. In other words, it is deliberate misrepresentation. Now if, as a matter of conceptual necessity, an intention to deceive is an invariable feature of humbug, then the property of being humbug depends at least in part upon the perpetrator's state of mind. It cannot be identical, accordingly, with any properties -- either inherent or relational -- belonging just to the utterance by which the humbug is perpetrated. In this respect, the property of being humbug is similar to that of being a lie, which is identical neither with the falsity nor with any of the other properties of the statement the liar makes, but which
nettime fwd: shivers of sharing, sunday 20th feb, RFH
... passed to me by an acquaintance... could be an interesting way to share your (obviously one hundred percent public domain) stuff with others. you can forward far and wide apparently, although i've no idea what will happen if a hundred frenzied filesharers turn up at the RFH mid-sunday. hmmm... better go down there and have a look... cheers, j - snip SHIVERS ~ of ~ SHARING www.shiversofsharing.org SUNDAY 20-FEB 2004floor 5.5 RFH LONDON S.O.SS.O.SS.O.SS.O.S WHAT? - People meeting to share their media -- music, film, text, images, by any means available. We shiver with the pleasures of sharing. Bring your stuff and give it to others. Turn up empty handed and leave with a diskful. Bring a treasured something to digitise. Or just come for the chat and see what's going on. WHERE? -- SoS happens in public spaces. The venue for next weekend's SoS is the mezzanine above the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/ streetmap.dll?G2M?X=530795Y=1802 19A=YZ=1 Nearest tubes: Waterloo, Bank. WHEN? - SoS London takes place every second week, or thereabouts. This one is on Sunday 20th Feb at 12.30pm-ish. INFO Any of the following are useful; DVDs, CDs, hard disks, flash drives, portable removable media of all kinds. Firewire cable, USB2 cable, fast ethernet cable. Laptops, especially equipped with 802.11*G* wireless. DVD Writers, CD writers. Indelible marker pens. CD sleeves. CD cases. But none of this is necessary. SOS is generous, loves you, and will be happy to burn you a DVD containing enough media to last a fortnight. Just bring some love. For more info, turn up Sunday. (The shiversofsharing.org domain is not yet live, wait.) - S.O.SS.O.SS.O.SS.O.S # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Russian artists and curators need support
Organisers of an art exhibition Beware religion!, Moscow, face the prosecution under the pressure of religious fanatics and politicians. Please find bellow the story and letter of support. More information: http://www.geocities.com/aakovalev/religia-en.htm Send your reactions to Anna Alchuk (participant): [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit the web-site: http://www.livejournal.com/community/beware_religion/656.html?thread=3D40= 0 Orthodox Bulldozer 26.04.2004 Konstantin Akinsha, Artnews.Com http://www.gif.ru/eng/news/orthodox-bulldozer/ Artists whose works deal with religious themes are reviled by the Russian Orthodox Church, while the vandals who destroy their works are hailed as martyrs In January a gang of vandals wearing camouflage gear invaded the S.P.A.S. Gallery in St. Petersburg and splattered paint and ink over an exhibition of Oleg Yanushevsky's constructions, called Contemporary Icons. Yanushevsky's ironic message-that President George W. Bush, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other political and pop-culture celebrities were the modern equivalents of holy figures-was considered an insult to the Russian Orthodox Church and to the sensibilities of believers. Although the works were destroyed and the gallery seriously damaged, the St. Petersburg prosecutor refused even to investigate the vandalism. Vandals sprayed Vermin and Scum, you are devils over works by Alisa Zrazhevskaya and Alexander Dorokhov at the Sakharov Museum. COURTESY SAKHAROV MUSEUM AND PUBLIC CENTER, MOSCOW A similar incident in Moscow, a year earlier, had more serious consequences. In January 2003, a gang of Russian Orthodox activists destroyed an exhibition in the Sakharov Museum and Public Center called Caution! Religion. Last December two Sakharov Museum officials and three of the exhibition organizers were charged by the state prosecutor with inciting religious hatred. They face prison terms of up to five years. The vandals, meanwhile, were hailed by church officials as heroes and martyrs, and all criminal charges against them were dismissed. These alarming events in the art world have taken place against a background of rising nationalism and Orthodox assertiveness. The Russian Orthodox Church has acquired enormous political clout in recent years, and few politicians will risk offending it. The Sakharov Museum exhibition was subjected to a vituperative media campaign, and the matter was almost immediately taken up in the Duma, where nationalist deputies vied with each other to denounce the sacrilegious artists and laud the vandals. In February 2003, the Duma passed a decree stating that the 1999 exhibition's purpose had been to incite religious hatred and to i= nsult the feelings of believers and the Orthodox Church. The state prosecutor was ordered to take action against the organizers, with 265 of 267 deputies present approving the measure. Sergei Yushenkov, leader of the Liberal Russia party and one of the two who voted against the measure, mounted the podium and stated sadly, We are witnessing the origin of a totalitarian state led by the Orthodox Church. (Yushenkov was murdered in Moscow a few weeks later. Four men were convicted of his murder in March.) In April 2003, the Duma voted to toughen the law against inciting religious hatred by adding prison terms of up to five years for offenders. This was a direct reaction to the Sakharov Museum show. The law was invoked for the first time against Ter-Oganyan. It has never been used against anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups, which operate undisturbed. It's a tragic situation, Elena Bonner told ARTnews in a telepho= ne interview from Boston, where she lives part of the time. Bonner, the widow of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and famous dissident Andrei Sakharov, is chair of the Sakharov Center, which was founded to educate Russians about their totalitarian past. The events around the exhibition discredit the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the fatwah condemning Salman Rushdie to death discredited Islam, she said. Bonner pointed out that the vandals had come to the museum prepared to be offended, with axes, hammers, and cans of spray paint in their pockets. The organizers of Caution! Religion say that they wanted to attract attention to the new role of religious institutions in Russian life. In his speech at the show's opening, curator Arutyun Zulumyan, who i= s now in hiding, called for a careful and respectful treatment of religion, but he also warned of the danger of religious fundamentalism, both Muslim and Russian Orthodox, and of the identification of the state with religion. The 40 participants included artists from the United States, Japan, and Cuba, as well as Russia. One of the works was Russian-born American artist Alexander Kosolapov's image of Christ on a Coca-Cola advertisement along with the words Coca-Cola. This is my blood. The face of Christ was obliterated. As the owner of the artwork, I'm= upset, Kosolapov told ARTnews in a phone interview. As
Re: nettime Introducing Daria: An autonomous software artist
What makes Daria a she? Does it have something to do with all the collaged naked female breasts in her art works? Could we say that her governing algorithm is gendered? dsw This may be of interest to those involved with new media, generative art, autonomous systems, and/or matrix-style paranoia. Daria is an autonomous software artist that creates art for users in real-time on her site. As an autonomous entity, she is responsible for her own bills (hosting, hardware, etc.) and employs me to make enhancements to her. You can donate to her via the paypal links on the site. Also on the site is information on how she was created and future plans for Daria. http://daria.muxspace.com/ Comments and criticism welcome to me or her. Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Introducing Daria: An autonomous software artist
Dan: Thanks for replying to my post. I've taken the liberty to CC-ing the list, as I think this discussion raises interesting points. It's a good question why Daria is a she? The short answer is that it follows a long line of precedence of men naming and referring to their machines as female. To a certain extent, this female-biased gender association is less apparent in computers (particularly large networks), in which computers are named for cities, stars, mountains, or people. It is possible though, that the moment we anthropomorphize the computer, we associate a gender, but I don'thave data one way or the other to back up such a claim. Software on the computer is a different story. For an autonomous software system that by design is to be anthropomorphized, it seemed prudent to impart a gender to the system. Hence, I chose to follow the precedence I was familiar with. With regards to the work she creates, the female form has often been used and interpreted within works of art, far more often than the male body. It makes sense to maintain this convention, considering the point/concept of the work (creating and releasing Daria) is to explore the possibilities of autonomous systems interacting with humans and integrating into their society, as opposed to the gender bias of her work. I'm not suggesting that it isn't a valid question, because it is. However, I think that the first issue needs to be raised (can autonomous systems integrate into human society? can we consider autonomous software agents as artists?) prior to questioning the validity of their work. If not, then we have already accepted the software as being a valid artist without going through the process of debate. Where I veer from convention is by creating a solid delineation between Daria and me. Other artists create machines that create art and the question has been raised whether it is the machine or the creator that creates the art? The resounding answer has been that it is ultimately the creator of the machine that creates the art. But what if that isn't the case? I think it raises a number of important questions about identity, ownership, and society that will become increasingly more important as fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology continue to advance. Regards, Brian Quoting Dan S. Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED]: What makes Daria a she? Does it have something to do with all the collaged naked female breasts in her art works? Could we say that her governing algorithm is gendered? dsw This may be of interest to those involved with new media, generative art, autonomous systems, and/or matrix-style paranoia. ... -- brian lee dae yung biomimetic art and research mux space . com This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Reducing military spending
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16robots.html?pagewanted= 1ei=5094en=527b7e950d00d351hpex=1108616400partner=homepage Pentagon says that an average soldier's upkeep, training, and retirement costs about $4 million. That's tax-payers money. If the soldier is replaced by a robot, that would cost only $230K per piece. And the cost of maintenance, of course, shich hopefully would be less than $4M. Although one never knows with new and untested technology. And where are they going to make them? In China? On the other hand, present declared enemy, already operates with army of cheaper force that are easy and quick to train, and that do not need retirement, since they die before that time: suicide bombers. They have disadvantages - since they are not re-usable, like US Marines - but overall they come at much cheaper price tag. To beat the army of robots, maybe Al Qaeda responds by cloning the most succesful, most zealous, most pliable suicide bombers? ivo # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
